AT ISSUE: New Hartford town officials will outline plans, seek public
comment
The long-awaited public meeting to discuss access from
state Route 840 into the New Hartford Business Park is planned for Saturday, and
it’s important that residents attend to hear the options being offered and to
make their views known.
The meeting — delayed for more than a year — has
held up further development in the park. The only current tenant is The Hartford
Insurance Agency. A second prospect — Pat Costello of Costello Eye Physicians
& Surgeons — said last month the delay has caused him to begin looking
elsewhere to build a $3 million, 25,000-square-foot building he hopes to share
with Mohawk Valley Urology. A hotel has also been mentioned.
The public
hearing is required before the Town of New Hartford can submit a final plan to
the state Department of Transportation. DOT officials have said they consider
their work on Route 840 to be completed, and the town would need to play a lead
role in any changes.
Town officials would not release the alternatives in
advance of Saturday’s meeting, but several ideas have been discussed. The
original plan — an interchange off of Route 840 that would include an overpass —
has been determined to be too costly. It’s no longer an option.
That
leaves several alternatives. One would be placement of a stop light on Route 840
to allow access into the park. This idea is not acceptable since it would
further slow traffic on a road that was originally meant to speed traffic from
the Arterial through New Hartford and into Whitestown. Route 840 has become an
alternate commuter route to and from the Whitestown Industrial Park (former
county airport) and Rome, and there already are two stop lights along the way —
one at Clark Mills Road and another at Halsey Road. Any more traffic signals
would turn 840 into a stop-and-go cousin of the North-South Arterial through
West Utica, where the DOT hopes to remove lights in coming years.
A
second option would be a right in, right out access off 840 into the park. Both
entrance and exit ramps would be from the eastbound lane and would not a require
traffic signals. This option has been supported by the DOT and by traffic
studies commissioned by the town planning board. It’s cost-effective, the
studies show, and could someday be incorporated into an overpass should park
development warrant it.
A third alternative seems the most obvious and
practical — extend the road beyond Lowe’s Home Improvement off of Middle
Settlement Road into the nearby park. That would require developer Larry Adler
to acquire a swath of property from the Yager family, which owns Twin Orchards,
contiguous to the park. The glitch there is that bad blood between the two over
a land swap earlier in the development process has hampered negotiation.
A final possibility would be the right in, right out option in
combination with the Lowes road extension. In addition to the current park
entrance off Woods Road, that would provide three entrances into the business
park.
It’s critical that residents attend this important meeting Saturday
so they can hear details and make their views known. This process has been
delayed far too long, and it’s now up to town officials to move it along so park
development can progress.
