Dear Friends and Neighbors,
How would you like to retire after a lifetime of hard work and taking care of your family, buy a fixer upper, fix it up, and then settle down in your golden years to the peace and quiet of the Adirondacks? Sounds pretty darn good doesn’t it?
That’s what Pat Powers did. The American dream. Took a dump of a property, made it into a nice retirement home and in the process increased the property value and property taxes paid.
Then the county road out front of his house started to go BOOOM! Mr. Powers said “it sounds like a canon going off in my bedroom.”
It began about 2 years ago. This is when he first started complaining to officials. Trucks cutting across Route 29/19 to Olmstedville Road to the Northway exit at Pottersville would hit the big pot holes out front of Mr. Powers home and BOOOM!
[This morning Mr. Powers sent an email. There was a terrible accident last night resulting in a car turning upside down in his yard. Two passengers were airlifted to Albany Medical. The police are investigating.]
Last week I wrote about the quality of Warren County roads and the need to do a better job. I reported Warren County last year left unspent more than $600,000 of allocated funds for road repair. This is unacceptable.
Source: Warren County Administrator’s office and Warren DPW: http://www.westcottupny.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/County-Admin-Office-Road-Email-2015.pdf
While the county figures out the best way to proceed in the future with road repair the County DPW needs to fix this problem on Olmstedville Road. Not just patch it so it washes out in a few months. Fix it.
I wrote this because complaining privately has not worked. Mr. Powers is ready to pull his hair out. He is sick of the run around. So much for the golden years.
Roads should not go BOOOM. Especially when we have the funds to fix them. It is time to fix Olmstedville Road and put private contractors to work to fix our roads if our county DPW can’t get the job done.
Mark