The cost of waiting - Wallingford Skate park for teens has to wait

As published in the Record Journal Tuesday April 17, 2012, there is a story regarding the proposed Wallingford Skate park

"In April 2008, more than 125 people came out to a meeting to support creating a local skate park. Locations were scouted and designs were drafted, but when the cost was estimated to be more than $250,000, town officials put the brakes on the project."

And the next time it get's revisited it will be $500,000.00 and the excuse then will be it is overall too expensive regardless of the economy.

The original review of the next phase of the Quinnipiac River linear trail was tagged a number of years ago at about $2 million dollars; with all the changes in the regulations and other costs (bridges, use rights, etc.) that cost for the segment ballooned to $6 million and now the grants and funding will only allow for a reduced segment to be built.

That reduced segment is expected to cost $2 Million.

At one point after the dam broke at Community Lake there was a pretty sizeable cost at rebuilding it. A few years later it when up by a factor of nearly eight times. A few years later and DEP rules changes and we couldn’t rebuild a lake of any real size no matter how much we spent.

I realize that in certain situations we need to wait. In 2008 and 2009 certainly. Maybe the same was true in 2010. But last year and this year things ARE better.

Is it 2007? No – things have not returned that far yet.

Is it 1930? No – things never got that bad.

So the bottom line and the point I am trying to make – do you want to pay an extra $12.50 this year (that is the cost on the average for a household in taxes for one year to raise an additional $250.000 in tax revenue in the town of Wallingford this year) to build a park or do you want to spend $25.00 four or five years from now when the cost doubles?

Yes – that is the initial cost to build and then there is the ongoing cost to maintain but that is minimal by comparison.

Increased use of technology in town to reduce costs by way of increased efficiencies could easily offset that ongoing maintenance costs for a good long while.