Con Ed Should Tell Us When They Plan to Tear Up Our Roads

November 13, 2020

To the Editor:

Taxpayers pay twice for road repaving unnecessarily…

The average cost of milling and resurfacing a standard 26-foot wide  roadway is approximately $360,000 per mile. This approximation is based off the unit prices from the town of Greenburgh’s most recent project and includes resurfacing to a depth of 1.5” as per Town specifications.

Con Ed is currently involved in a county -wide initiative tearing up roads so they can improve their underground gas pipes. I don’t have problems with this initiative – which is necessary,  but I do object to their failure to provide local governments with a long term forecast of roads that they plan to tear up, install pipes underground and then repave.  Many times they only repave half of a road – the portion they messed up. It looks bad.

Greenburgh is not alone in repaving roads only to find–a year, two years or three years  later–that the road is being torn up. Currently, for example, Con Ed is doing underground work on East Hartsdale Ave., a road that was in terrific condition before they started tearing it up. No potholes on the road. No cracks. After Con Ed completes their work, they will have to repave a recently repaved road a second time. This summer, Con Ed did significant work on Ashford Ave in Ardsley and on surrounding streets. Some of the side streets were repaved by the village within the past two or three years and also were in great condition.

Con Ed probably has a five-year plan of roads where they intend to do underground work. But they don’t share the information with local officials. If they shared that info with every local government, we could avoid repaving those roads that Con Ed plans to tear up a few years later. We could focus on other roads that also need attention. Long term advance notice of planned underground gas and/or electric work by Con Ed would be extremely beneficial to local governments such as ours looking to make capital infrastructure improvements into roads and utilities. If such information was available then perhaps local governments and Con Ed could work together to restore such roadways in a joint effort.

The average taxpayer is double paying for road repaving.

PAUL FEINER

Greenburgh Town Supervisor