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March 09, 2011
To the Editor:
Years ago when Mr. Edsall first ran for trustee, I voted for him based his experience as an engineer. I thought, what could be better than having a professional on the board especially in case the village needed to construct a new building or two? He would certainly be a win-win for our little village.
So when this debacle of the DPW building arose I was completely taken by surprise. How could a professional engineer have missed all of these problems? Shouldn’t he have advised the board that this was property that had been used as a dump and it would require some special techniques to proceed?
Since he has lived in Cornwall his entire life, there must have been some question in his mind that perhaps building this type of building on that spot was questionable at best? Surely he must know every fence line and benchmark in this village, from years of surveying and pouring over plans. He must have known some of the history of this particular site. He must have seen the dumping that went on there by the village and others. Was the board aware of this? Did they not care? Did Mr. Edsall or they not see any potential problems here?
Nonetheless, here we are today stuck with a little used, million-dollar building that is deemed unsafe and in need of potentially expensive code upgrades, without any architect’s plans, and no certificate of occupancy and our village employees without a building to work from.
Maybe I'm reaching here but, perhaps these problems could have been avoided had Mr. Edsall used just a little of his expertise as a “licensed professional engineer” in his discussions with the Mayor and the rest of the board. I’m not suggesting that he should have assumed the role of engineer on this project, but rather a cursory look at the “plans”, or a chat with the builders or quick site inspection might have been all that he needed to do to get him to suggest to the Board that they should possibly rethink this and proceed in another direction.
In hindsight we would have all been in Mr. Edsall’s debt had he been a little more diligent.
Bill Clark
Cornwall-on-Hudson
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