I’ll be delving into the Mohawk Valley Regional Development Council Report over the next few days but it is worth noting the scope of the challenges faced by the city in hard dollars:
District Wide Sewer Improvements: Amsterdam is faced with a NYSDEC Consent Order to provide adequate sewer plant capacity, separate storm and sanitary sewers, provide emergency power supply to sewer pump stations, and reduce dumping of raw sewage (reduce CSOs) into the Mohawk River. City has complete Inflow/Infiltration study and is pursuing funding to help support storm and sanitary sewer separation work, replace defective sanitary sewer lines, install storm sewers in areas lacking separate storm sewers to reduce ground water contamination and CSO events, and reduce untreated sewage being discharged into the Mohawk River. Estimated Costs: $20.9 million; CFA Request $10.45 million.
District Wide Water Improvements: City of Amsterdam is faced with challenges to the basic reliability of its 120-year old water distribution system, complying with current federal regulations, and ensuring that adequate fire flows are available for fire protection. A challenge to the system’s reliability hinders economic development and prevents expansion of the system underneath the NYS Thruway near Exit 27, which denies the city access to valuable lands for economic development. Estimated Cost: $22.6 million; CFA Request: $11.30 million.
So when the local debate festers and swirls on the utter urgency with which we must tackle water and sewer armed with a custodial budget of $10K ; or the local pundit class swoons at spending hundreds of dollars , demanding instead that we go line-by-line through every expense, no matter how slight, as that will assuredly get us new water and sewer lines; or ultimately, how misplaced our priorities lie in pursuing anything but our sacred infrastructure– you see the utter absurdity when you put the numbers in perspective.
We want a $43.5 million product while paying $10 thousand dollars. We’re only off by 435,000 percent.
Don’t worry folks, we’ll get there — saving penny by penny– because it’s never about addressing the dismal state of local growth; it’s really the best use of time, energy and resources of our political and economic leaders to filling that jar with pennies that counts, and if that means going line-by-line through two and three digit expenses instead of doing the hard work of strategy, marketing and planning around economic development, so be it.
Just keep looking down at the sidewalk for those pennies as the dollars pass you by.
