04/18/1994 Meeting Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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126 Regular Council Meeting 4/18/94 Page Four Mayor Rinker said under these circumstances, yes. Mr. Russo said that will allow him to significantly reduce the comments he was going to make this evening, but he still has plenty he wants to say. Mr. Russo said he wanted to begin by reviewing with everyone what has happened to this point, so we all understand how we got here tonight and why we are here tonight. Mr. Russo said this all started on March 22 when we, the residents, sent a letter to the 1Vlayor and asked him to meet with us because we had heard that he was going to shut down the intersection completely with the exception of northbound traffic on S.O.M. That shocked a lot of us because it posed tremendous hardships, safety concerns, and a lot of problems to us and we had had no opportunity to talk to the administration about that before the administration made that decision. The Mayor was kind enough to meet with us. We held our first meeting on March 26. At the March 26 meeting, everybody that was involved with this project was there. At that point we presented two options. We indicated the residents would be satisfied either by allowing north and south traffic on S.O.M. or by allowing northbound traffic on S.O.M. and westbound traffic on Highland so that we had two ways out. A second meeting occurred on March 28. At that point, the Mayor indicated to us that of the two plans we presented, he and the administration and his experts felt that the Highland Road plan was the safer of the two and the least expensive of the two. At that point, we were told by Mr. Calabrese it was going to cost $37,000 more to implement this. We immediately questioned that. Mr. Ferrante asked Mr. Russo to address his comments to Council, not the audience. He said we are the ones making the decision. Mr. Russo said we were told by the Mayor that there would be a special meeting of Council to consider this legislation. He picked the date, Apri110; and told us that Council l would vote on the legislation at that meeting, but that he would not recommend to Council that they pass the legislation. So 150 people came out to tell you how we feel. We asked you to support us and vote for this legislation because it is important to us. Three things happened at that meeting that shocked all of us: 1) The Mayor reneged on his promise to bring the legislation up for a vote at that meeting. There was no vote taken at that meeting. 2) Mr. Basile said he conducted a telephone poll and four out of every five people in our ward told him they did not want this plan changed at all. 3) All of a sudden there was a flip-flop on why the Mayor was opposed to the project. He originally told us he was opposed to it because he did not want to spend the money, but everybody that came to the Council meeting a week ago Sunday heard him say it was no longer a money issue, it now was a safety issue. Tonight it is a money issue, but they have found the money that we told them to find when we first met with the members of Council.