The repaving of Jericho Turnpike is in a holding pattern, but the Mineola School District’s project to construct a parking lane for buses at the Jackson Avenue School got a green light from the Mineola Village Board last Wednesday night’s board meeting.
Village of Mineola Mayor Scott Strauss reported that the resurfacing of Jericho, originally slated to begin in September and rescheduled for this month, has been delayed again and the state Department of Transportation has not indicated a starting date.
“The issue seems to be the contractor is backlogged on another project,” Strauss said at the Wednesday night meeting.
Strauss said he had met with state Sen. Jack Martins and consulted with the state DOT, but has not received an answer on when the project will get underway. Jericho is to be resurfaced from the intersection at Herricks Road east to Glen Cove Road. Martins played a key role in asking the DOT to extend a resurfacing project it already had scheduled to resurface Jericho from the Queens County line through New Hyde Park to Herricks Road.
Strauss said he would provide residents updates on the project as he receives them.
Thomas Rini, superintendent of the village Department of Public Works, said the DOT contractor, Tully Construction, was planning to resurface Jericho from Herricks to Glen Cove Road in three segments, progressively milling – grinding down the road surface – on the south side eastbound lanes of the road and repaving it and then repeating the process on the westbound lanes.
Tully had completed preliminary work on repairs needed along Jericho.
“I don’t know what their status is at this point,” Rini said, adding that the company’s contract for the work extends through 2013.
Meanwhile, the village board reviewed and a plan presented by Mineola Superintendent of Schools Michael Nagler for construction of a bus parking lane on Saville Road on west side of the Jackson Avenue School and unanimously approved a permit for it.
The parking lane will enable four of eight buses used at dismissal time to receive departing students on Saville Road instead of forcing them to cross Jackson Avenue at the front of the school where buses formerly parked. The other four buses will park on the east wide of the school along Marcellus Road as they currently do.
“We’ve come up with the least invasive way to get kids safely on buses,” Nagler said.
The $170,000 project was the result of a protracted review of 13 different configurations of solutions – most entailing the construction of bus loops on the school property – to resolve the issue. He said locating the buses on Saville would open up parking on Jackson Avenue for parents who pick up their children at dismissal time.
“As you can imagine, it’s quite a job to get 250 kids safely on buses,” Nagler said.
Under the school district’s reconfiguration plan, all third and fourth graders now attend the Jackson Avenue School. Nagler said students who walk to school will be dismissed before the rest of the 250 students board the buses to leave. He said dismissal time has been changed to 3:30 p.m. to avoid conflicts with buses from nearby Chaminade High School, which dismisses its students one hour earlier.
In response to village Trustee Lawrence Werther’s question on why the project was to be done while school was in session, Nagler said the school board had planned to do it during the summer but couldn’t reach a consensus in time to accomplish it. Nagler said the construction work would take two weeks.
“It seems minimally invasive on the roads,” Werther said.
The other trustees agreed on that and voted in favor the plan with village Deputy Mayor Paul Pereira, who teaches history at Mineola High School, recusing himself.
In other developments:
• Strauss said village engineers are currently vetting bids received from contractors for the work on the $1.7 million Bruce Terrace remediation project. He said he anticipates the board would make a decision on the bid in early November.
“We’re looking to start the project as soon as possible after that,” he said.
Rini said he is currently reviewing the qualifications of the low bidder on the Bruce Terrace flood remediation project, noting that it’s a slow process.
The Town of North Hempstead recently awarded the bid for its $1.1 million part of the project to Tri-State Paving.
Nassau County is also involved in the intermunicipal project to alleviate recurrent flooding during rainstorms on the border of Mineola and Carle Place. The village board approved a contract for Wire to Water as the low bidder on a project to install a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition system to manage the village’s water works. Wire to Water’s $226,435 bid on the project to computerize control will save the village an estimated $350,000 from what is was expected to cost, Rini said. That’s partly due to substitution of wireless technology instead of antennae at some water tank sites, he said.
Rini said Wire to Water has been installing similar systems for Exxon Mobil. While he acknowledged that did not involve water-delivery systems, he said the work was comparable to the work required for the village project. He said the system will be a “hybrid” of radio and Internet-based controls. It will likely be installed in a three-month period starting in December.
• The village board authorized contracts to three contractors for emergency replacement of three collapsing catch basins to: Valente Contracting for $26,000; GGG Construction for $27,500 and Pratt Brothers for $30,835.
“They definitely need replacing. They’ve become a safety issue,” said village Trustee George Durham.
Rini said the DPW is currently in the process of cleaning 150 catch basins throughout the village.
• The village board granted a six-month extension for permits on Polimeni International’s Winston and Churchill apartment complex projects. The extension is intended to keep the board’s conditional approval of the project current while the developer awaits site-plan clearances from the county Planning Commission.
• The village board awarded a contract to plant 75 to 150 Chanticleer pear trees and hedge maple trees to Louis Barbato Landscaping.
