No funding for Peconic River bridge — at least not yet

Funding for a footbridge that would connect downtown Riverhead and Riverside won’t be coming in 2015, but town officials said they hope to be able to pay for the project next year. 

Conceptual images of a pedestrian footbridge were posted on Instagram over the weekend (see above), but engineers connected to the project have stated they were just renderings that will ultimately be presented to Southampton Town. The images have since been removed.

The Town of Southampton received $88,875 in state regional economic development grants in late 2013, but that money was for the design of the bridge, which would connect to a 14-acre county park and trail on the south side of the river.

When the state announced its grant recipients in December, the pedestrian bridge wasn’t among them.

“We got initial money two years ago to do the bridge design, which is not actually complete yet, but we actually raced ahead and asked for construction money anyway,” Vince Taldone, president of the Flanders, Riverside and Northampton Community Association, said at Monday’s FRNCA meeting. “They didn’t give us money, which is no surprise, because we didn’t yet have a bridge.”