Congratulations and well said to Kathleen for her letter to the editor To the editor: Hey, Fulton County you’ve been had! Your county leaders and planners paid $100,000 for a “study” for a proposed bypass route (Fonda Connector) through Fonda, Fultonville & the Town of Mohawk and they plan to spend much, much more. Your taxes are going up, they keep making bad decisions and think you should trust them with even more of your tax dollars. So, just what did you get for the money they’ve already spent on this “study”? You got: Proposals for 11 different roads and bridges that would be so ridiculously expensive that any potential benefit from jobs would be years away from when the tax breaks for the companies expire and they pack up & move on. How much would this road cost per job? You got: A “study” that used existing materials readily available to everyone on the internet. Do they really think people haven’t heard of Google Earth and the USDA National Resource Conservation Service hasn’t studied wetlands, topography & soil types? They could have checked with the Montgomery County Dept. of Planning & Development and gotten this information easily and free. You got: A “study” that tried to justify a need for a new bypass road by pumping up the traffic accident numbers by adding intersections that have nothing to do with the bypass areas. You got: Proposals that would leave many farms covered with concrete, cut in half and out of business. (Yes, everyone, farms are tax paying businesses.) You got: A “study” that cuts the National Kateri Tekakwitha Shrine and historic sites in half & placed one route over an archeological dig, burial ground and cemetery of Caughnawaga Indian village. This is a national historic site that was the childhood home of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha that is visited by thousands of tourists each year. How did they miss this? You got: A “study” that only identified three (yes, 3!) historic sites in the area. What about the historic houses built by the Fonda, Sammons, Starin and other prominent families? What about the documented Indian sites? What about historic cemeteries? What about the historic schools, buildings & businesses? Oops, don’t think they did their homework here! So, you get what you pay for...not always. Why build new roads for new industrial parks when Fulton County can’t even fill the parks it already has? Included in the 2015 Fulton County budget is 1.4 million earmarked for economic development. Your supervisors & planners are cheerleading and spending money like crazy on the Tryon Tech Park folly when the Crossroads Business Park is virtually empty. If you believe that Fulton County can attract enough high tech start-ups to fill more parks you need to get your “believer” fixed. It’s time for the citizens of Fulton County to join the citizens of Montgomery County and insist that their leaders and planners stop trying to build their resumes and stop squandering all our hard earned tax dollars on multi-million dollar roads to nowhere and ill-conceived industrial parks.
Posted on: Thu, 01 Jan 2015 23:57:08 +0000