Assemblyman Townsend is proposing $8 million for a bridge over Rt. 840 to ease access to the New Hartford Business Park.
How about this: NO access to 840 from the NH Business Park, and a scaled down Business Park.
The region is NOT growing, but it is spreading out, and proposals such as this encourage more of the same. The PUBLIC does not need the Business Park, but the developer and certain Town and State Officials do.
What the Public winds up with is another area to police, and provide water, sewer and fire services.
This sort of thing is done because it is easy to do where things are relatively undeveloped. . . and because most town officials want to "grow" their tax bases to make it look like they are accomplishing something. In a sense, they can be excused for this behavior.
There is no excuse for County and State officials, however. They have an obligation to take a broader perspective. While New Hartford might be able to afford to provide the extra services from the extra tax revenue that will be generated, the REGIONAL impact will be that economic activity will be encouraged to abandon older areas where the infrastructure and services are already in place, wasting those investments.
If Assemblyman Townsend and the County really want to help the Region become more economically competitive, then they need to focus on those more difficult actions and investments required to encourage re-development of our older areas -- such as a more sensible North-South Arterial in Utica -- such as a total cleanup of all contaminated areas at Harbor Point.
The greater the geographic area our economic activity is dissipated over, the weaker and less competitive our region becomes.
3 comments:
The Oneida County political cesspool is amazingly pungent. The Utica Democrats foster suburban sprawl by bribing leftover public officials with quarter million dollar buyouts. As the Republicans show their “one hand washes the other” proficiency in terms of bellying up to the public trough as their counterparts are all too willing to fill the trough with pork barrel slop comprised of hard earned tax dollars. It is difficult to imagine how the voters could keep returning these imposters back to public office after all of this fleecing. The voting machines must be rigged!
Bravo to New Hartford for creating a climate that encourages business to remain inside the town. Regionalization is a nice goal for the long term, but you have to ask yourself why the city of Utica cannot make their city attractive for business development in the short term.
We can keep rehashing the greenfield vs. brownfield argument until we are all blue in the face, but at the end of the day the city of Utica is just not getting the job done when it comes to attracting and retaining business. The center of economic activity in the Mohawk Valley has shifted south. At this point I think we all better get used to the idea that Utica is now a suburb of New Hartford.
A city of 59,000 being a suburb of a town of 21,000 does not make sense. Regardless, Anonymous, you make a Very Good Point: Utica needs to do a better job of cleaning up its own act. And the way things are going under the new administration, Utica will simply waste away -- and deservedly so!
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