The Village of Great Neck Board of Trustees hit a dead end in their regular monthly meeting on Tuesday.
Great Neck Mayor Ralph Kreitzman said he hopes that will be a good thing for 16 of the village’s road, which are in “very, very poor condition” and will be repaired as part of the 2012 roadway engineering project.
“Next year we’re planning on doing 16 dead ends or cul-de-sacs,” Kreitzman said. “We’re doing all the ones that abut Steamboat Road because the county is going to be repaving Steamboat Road as well.”
Trustees approved a proposal during Tuesday’s meeting, which will allow the village engineer to begin to begin this year’s road rehabilitation process.
“We do a multi-year program to rebuild or resurface every one of our roads,” Kreitzman said. “We’re well into it. We’ve been bonding on average between $1 million and one and a half million dollars each year for the purpose of doing that.”
The village has estimated the construction cost of the repairs for its 2012 road plan will be approximately $1.1 million, Kreitzman said.
“We made the decision to allow our engineers to do the engineering and to prepare the bid package,” the mayor said. “We hope to do it early so that we can get a lot of bids and good prices.”
Kreitzman said that the village has been holding off on repairing its 16 cul-de-sacs along Steamboat Road for several years.
“We felt that this year we should get many of our dead ends done and complete,” the mayor said. “They’ll probably not have to be done again, hopefully, in any one of our lifetimes. Then we can go back to the more traveled roads.”
Village of Great Neck Deputy Mayor Mitchell Beckerman said the decision to fix the 16 cul-de-sacs this summer came in conjunction with repairs that Nassau County will be doing this summer to repave all of Steamboat Road.
“That will finish the whole area,” Beckerman said.
Kreitzman said there is currently no timetable in place for the village to begin the road work.
“It takes a period of time, but hopefully it can be done in a month’s time sometime this summer,” Kreitzman said.
This year’s road program will be funded through a bond, which has also been the case in years past, Kreitzman said.
“That’s why we need an estimate,” Kreitzman said. “The village has a Standard and Poor’s AAA Bond rating. That’s the highest bond rating that you can get, higher than the county and the town and all the others.
“By maintaining that, we hope to do it again this year, we’ll get the best interest rate,” the mayor added. We’ve been getting great rates. I think last year it was in the low 2 percent to start, which is great.”
In other business, the trustees chose not to accept an offer from a production company to profile the Village of Great Neck in a television series.
Kreitzman said he was contacted last month by producers of Today in America with Terry Bradshaw, a production company owned by the Pro Football Hall of Fame former Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback.
If the trustees had accepted the proposal, the village would have been profiled as part of Bradshaw’s television show “Insights with Terry – Discovering America’s Hidden Gems.”
“They would pick four municipalities, basically, in the four corners of the country,” Kreitzman said of the show. “It sounded terrific until (the producer) told us that you have to contribute a production fee of $19,800. I said ‘I would of course take it to my board.'”
After a brief discussion, board members decided not to move forward with the proposal because of the cost associated with the project.
“We’re a hidden gem, but not rich enough to afford a TV show,” Kreitzman said.
