It is unfortunate that Mr. Wiesenfeld views cost overruns and poor vendor oversight as just business as usual in public construction.
Perhaps during his time in government, mediocrity was felt to be acceptable. It does not mean that we, the public, need to tolerate this.
We can actually expect better and hold our elected officials accountable to promoting superiority, providing careful oversight when a public entity spends our tax dollars. The penalty for poor performance should be removal from office at the ballot box.
It is most important to explain his flawed reasoning that traffic will improve by adding a parking lot. There is currently significant traffic near the corner of Beach and Polo Roads due to students trying to park in the 15 or so spots on the street and the 80 or so in the existing lots.
In fact, if an additional 100-spot lot is built, there will be the same 95 cars plus an additional 100 cars coming down the neighboring streets to park.
There will be double the number of cars approaching from multiple directions, converging on the single entrance to the lot, magnifying, not reducing, the congestion which already exists.
And despite having assigned spots, the students will still speed to get there because they are not racing because they don’t have assigned spots.
Like many, most students arrive with minutes to spare before their first class. Wiesenfeld can mock his neighbors’ opposition to the parking lot, but he is naïve in thinking traffic will improve; it stands to be far worse.
Finally, there was an unfortunate accident on Beach Road on Wednesday, a student’s car flipping over as it rounded the sharp curve on Beach Road.
Thankfully, and amazingly, the driver was not more seriously injured or even killed. It was lucky that there were no children standing at a school bus stop and there was no one walking in the street, all of which are frequently given the lack of sidewalks — they could easily have been killed.
The preliminary assessment by first responders was that this was due to a young adult using a cell phone while going at high speed.
A new lot will double the number of such drivers speeding and texting around the sharp double curves of Beach Road. This lot will actually make such accidents more, not less, likely to happen.
Robert Mendelson
Great Neck
