REGIONAL COOPERATION WILL SAVE TIME AND MONEY AND LEAD TO BETTER PLANNING

Last evening, the Yonkers City Council signed off on the settlement of the lawsuit brought last year by the Town of Greenburg and its Villages challenging the environmental studies done in connection with the proposed Ridge Hill Village project. There were no surprises in the Greenburg lawsuit. The issues raised were exactly the issues, most notably traffic mitigation, which Greenburg and the other surrounding communities (as well as many in Yonkers) had been raising for three years. Unfortunately, those issues were largely ignored by those who argued that Yonkers should not concern itself with the impact that Ridge Hill, the largest development in Westchester County history, would have on its neighbors.

The resulting lawsuit led to months of further delay in the construction of Ridge Hill as well as significant costs to the City of Yonkers in legal and other fees. In settling the lawsuit, Greenburg and its villages have secured direct funding from the developer for further traffic mitigation but, more importantly, Yonkers, Greenburg and the developer have agreed to cooperate in the creation of a regional task force to study, plan and lobby for additional traffic mitigation off of the Sprain Brook Parkway. In a nutshell, the settlement does exactly what community activists in Yonkers and Greenburg as well as Councilwoman Dee Barbato and I had advocated from the get go: cooperation to address cross-border concerns and make the project better for all.

In recent years, Southern Westchester has witnessed municipal "border wars" time and again as one community or another planned a major project that would directly and unavoidably impact its neighbors. Proposals to bring IKEA to New Rochelle, new retail to Sanford Boulevard on the Mt. Vernon-Pelham border, the Stew Leonards/ Home Depot development and Ridge Hill itself have all raised similar issues and more than once resulted in litigation. There is a better way.

The Task Force established under the Ridge Hill settlement can serve as a model for cooperative and preemptive regional planning. The simple mechanism of a permanent inter-municipal Task Force which can meet, as needed, to address concerns as projects are planned would do much to nip border disputes in the bud. Such a group would streamline the development process and result in better development in the end. A Task Force need not require any municipality to cede authority or control over its own planning process. Rather it would simply serve as a forum for concerns to be heard and vetted. Likewise, as with the proposed Ridge Hill Task Force, it would allow the municipalities which participate to bring their combined talents and resources to lobby other levels of government, whether in Albany or Washington, for necessary assistance.

In a word, inter-municipal cooperation is just plain common sense.