The Village of Plandome is typically considered a quiet neighborhood by those who live there, but residents say lately the area feels more like a “Fast and the Furious” movie.
Residents who live on Woodridge Road and Rockwood Road attended the village’s board of trustees meeting Tuesday to brainstorm ways of curbing speeding, particularly near the field by Village Hall known as the Village Green, where children often play.
“It’s basically a park,” said Carlyn Casey of 30 Brookside Drive. “How many parks in America don’t have stop signs near them?”
Casey wrote a letter last month requesting a second stop sign be placed on Brookside Drive to curb speeding, but the request was denied at the board’s work session last week.
Village of Plandome Deputy Mayor Roy Herbert said that too many stop signs in an intersection confuse motorists’ notion of the right-of-way.
Village of Plandome Mayor M. Lloyd Williams said that based on conversations with county police, stop signs aren’t meant to slow down traffic, but rather protect nearby pedestrians.
“I don’t want traffic slowed down,” Casey replied. “I want it stopped.”
The speed limit on village roads, Williams said, is 30 miles per hour.
One resident in attendance said a car passed her house at approximately 65 miles per hour, and others acknowledged that cars are prone to speeding early in the morning to get to the Manhasset train station.
“I’ve almost been hit a couple of times myself, and it astounds me that people just ignore the speed limits half the time,” Herbert said.
To fix the problem, Williams said, he’d talk to county police, though he added they don’t strongly enforce speeding laws within the village.
One resident said he has parked his car in the middle of the street while children were playing nearby so that motorists would have to slow down just to avoid hitting him.
Ohers suggested that rather than stop signs, the village put up yellow signs imploring motorists to slow down.
“There are a lot of Web sites out there that talk about what you can do to calm traffic, and we’ve been talking about all these things that we can do, but we’ve got to remember that the people speeding are also our neighbors,” Trustee Katie Saville said. “The kids at risk here are our children. It all starts with us.”
The board agreed to hold a meeting with residents and police officials to discuss the issue further. Village Clerk Elizabeth Kaye said the village would announce the meeting via e-mail in her next newsletter.
The board approved the start of a demolition project to level the property at 82 Woodedge Road, on the condition that the real estate developer build a fence around the property and clear it of vermin.
An independent inspection company took a survey of the property and found black mold, Williams said, and the developer thinks it can sell the property at a higher value if the house is demolished and then rebuilt.
The board announced the appointments of Kimberly McConville as the village’s acting prosecutor, Roger Goodwin as the zoning board of appeals’ second alternate, and Elizabeth Blaney and Lynn Sims to the design review board.
Williams said the planning board still had one vacant seat.
Bartels said in his public works report that he had begun compiling a list of all the village’s roads and their conditions for the planning of potential capital projects for the coming year.
Kaye said in her treasurer’s report that the village had used approximately 86 percent of its 2012-13 budget.
