On Wednesday night, at the Common Council Public Works and Parks Committee meeting, Bill Huston asked about plans for painting crosswalks and stop lines. Rob Perry, superintendent of the Department of Public Works, told him the budget item for crosswalks had been "defunded." There was money to repair the zebra stripes for existing crosswalks but no money to create crosswalks in new locations.
In the effort to hold the 2019 city budget increase to just 3 percent, while raising the minimum wage for all city employees to $15 an hour and increasing the Youth Department budget by 47 percent, cuts had to made elsewhere. One of those places was the DPW budget, and what was sacrificed, it seems, was more crosswalks.
COPYRIGHT 2019 CAROLE OSTERINK
Hudson is not the only city who has had to find a way to finance and fund complete streets.
ReplyDeleteThe fifth event in the FUTURE HUDSON event series will focus entirely on this question.
WHO ARE THE STREETS FOR?
August 17th at 4pm
Hudson Area Library.
Mike Lydon is a Principal of Street Plans, an award-wining urban planning, design and advocacy firm with offices in New York City & Miami.
He is also the author of “Tactical Urbanism: Short-Term Action, Long-Term Change.” He will share his experiences of helping communities use low-cost and compliant solutions to create safer streets.
And we are very excited to have Emily Flynn, the Director of Health & Wellness for the City of Kingston, coming to share the experience that Kingston has had adopting and implementing their Complete Streets plan.
A Complete Streets policy is a commitment that all future transportation projects will take into account the needs of everyone using the road.
What do we call Complete Streets when there is zero money or will at the DPW to implement it? A joke. A sad one. BILL HUSTON
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