By Brooke Cunningham
I applaud the Waitsfield Select Board for its attention to spending – or wasting – our tax dollars on the Waitsfield sidewalk extension as reported in The Valley Reporter last week. Credit is due for resisting the urge to spend money just because it is there. While Waitsfield folks frequently lament that we do not feel represented by our officials, as often they do not hear when voters say no to a project, it seems that the select board is on our side with the sidewalk project.
Personally, I think the addition of a sidewalk to that part of town is ridiculous. It would cause lots of additional trauma to the area (think parking at the Wine Shoppe and the VG and months of difficult construction traffic through town); would add to our annual maintenance and tax bills; and we already have a new sidewalk just on the other side of Route 100. For all this disruption, is it so hard for people to cross the street? On top of all that, I believe history would reveal it to be underutilized.
I attended the meeting last night, September 28, about the pocket park. There is no final design for the proposed pocket park yet, but initial estimates start at $75,000 for minimal improvements over what currently exists on this tiny parcel of land. Estimates do not include the inevitable overruns.
What emerged from the voters assembled was this: There is no real gain here, as one speaker noted, no return benefit on this investment. Another speaker pointed out that there will not be one more guest visit because of these improvements. Still another person pointed out that every one of us owns a parcel this size around their house (zoning mandates it) – would you really spend $100K on 0.2 acre of your land? Another community member stated he enjoys the area as is and suggested that one of the other 11 towns eligible for this grant probably needs it more than Waitsfield does.
I realize that a volunteer committee has worked for a long time on this and we should thank them. It was visible that the landscape designer was disappointed that most meeting attendees were in favor of doing nothing. But this park seems an absurd waste of funds when we could hold a volunteer day and make it prettier ourselves. I would show up for that, and I am sure there are others that would too. I did volunteer Mike Kingsbury, who did such a great job fixing the internal issue with the bridge.
We seem to have a successful grant writer in the town office; let’s utilize her skills going after grants that really impact our community. There are grants for small business startups, community assistance, internships for young people. Instead of spending $100K on zero-gain projects or a sidewalk to nowhere, let's buy Valley transportation vehicles to help people get around and employ locals to drive them. How about that as a direction for our grant writer?
Thanks for reading this and for all the feedback. Let’s keep the conversation around all of these things going.
Cunningham lives in Waitsfield.
