Residents called to protest school bus plans for Riverside
Residents are set to speak out tonight against the Riverhead School District’s proposal to demolish and replace the bus barn at its main campus with a new garage and maintenance facility outside Phillips Avenue School in Riverside.
First built in 1920 as a barn for horses, the current structure has fallen into despair, school officials have said. In March, the school board decided it best to relocate its entire fleet of buses and repair facility.
But the location of the proposed facility has caused concern among some Riverside residents.
“The whole idea of relocating the existing facility to the Phillips Avenue grade school is in our opinion insulting at best,” Vincent Taldone, a member of the Flanders Riverside Northampton Community Association, said in an email he sent to residents on Thursday.
He complained students at Phillips Avenue School will have to look at an unsightly, “giant bus parking lot,” and “our residential neighbors should not be inhaling fumes from a fleet of buses of which only a few vehicles actually serve our community.”
The Flanders Riverside North Hampton Community Association will be joined by members of the Bayview Pines Civic And Taxpayers Association for a public forum to address the issue tonight, Friday, at the Crohan Center at 7:30 pm.
Riverhead Superintendent Nancy Carney is expected to attend.
Ms. Carney has said the plans were designed specifically to prevent buses from traveling through residential areas.
District voters are being asked on May 21, during the school budget vote, to approve two propositions on the ballot to move forward with the new bus plan.
The first will appear as Proposition No. 1 on the ballot, requesting the creation of what officials are calling a Transportation, Maintenance and Athletic Fields Capital Reserve Fund, which can reach $10 million over 10 years.
The reserve fund’s first deposit would come from a sale involving district-owned farmland on Tuthills Lane in Aquebogue. The district acquired 27 acres on the east side of Tuthills Lane in 1965 and is now looking to sell development rights at the land to Suffolk County for agricultural purposes. Officials estimate the sale would be worth more than $1 million dollars.
A second pitch, called Proposition No. 2, asks voters to use the proceeds of the sale to purchase two properties adjacent to Phillips Avenue Elementary School for no more than $480,000 combined.
One property was described by Riverhead schools superintendent Nancy Carney as a 1.4-acre “paper road” that would be purchased for no more than $55,000, and the other is for an adjoining 1.5-acre parcel in what’s called Riverside Enterprise Park — a small industrial park at the site of the old Flanders drive-in theater property. According to the proposition, the second parcel would be purchased for no more than $425,000.
Although district officials don’t plan to build anything on these properties, the district needs them because school buses leaving the facility would need to cross the two properties in order to reach Enterprise Zone Drive, which encircles the industrial park, and then make their way to Route 24, officials said.
