Pleasantville Readies Funding for Manville Road Renewal
By Ed Perratore
Pleasantville took another step closer to upgrading the heart of the village, the Manville Road/Memorial Plaza vicinity, with its vote on a $2.6 million bond resolution to pay for renovating that portion of Manville Road.
Changes to that segment of the road are mandated by the state Department of Transportation and partially funded by a $1.5 million federal grant, but the village needed to pay up front for some of the initial design and for the first new traffic lights, curbs and more.
Once the DOT has given final approval to the overall plan for Manville Road, the village can begin submitting expenses to the state for reimbursement. Construction is expected to begin next spring.
Among the most noticeable changes to the intersection will be:
- removal of the intersection’s slip lane, replaced by a right-turn lane on northbound Memorial Plaza;
- removal of the traffic light at Manville Road and Wheeler Avenue; and
- creation of a park-like civic center, with benches and trees, at what today is the north end of the Memorial Plaza parking lot, in spring 2021.
While that parking lot will lose roughly 42 parking spaces, upcoming developments should more than restore that capacity. Pleasantville Lofts, a building now under construction at 70 Memorial Plaza—just south of the post office—will include a three-level parking garage with 150 spaces.
Other upgrades to that street may add further capacity. “We’re working out the final details, but the strategy is to provide angled parking as opposed to parallel parking on the post office side of Memorial Plaza,” said Mayor Peter Scherer at last week’s Village Board meeting, “and possibly, yet to be determined, relocation of bus stops currently used by Bee-Line Bus and also Pace (University) buses.”
What remains an elusive goal, not unusual for a project of this magnitude, is working out a precise cost of the Manville Road part of the renovation. “In very round numbers, we have the total project cost, and have had it, at about $2.3 million,” said Richard D. Williams Jr., a principal engineer for Insite Engineering, Surveying & Landscape Architecture, P.C. But consulting the DOT’s database to price line items such as curbs and signals, and comparing prices with recent local projects, he explained at last week’s meeting, only gets them so close.
“I can’t predict market demand—how many projects are going out to bid that year, how busy contractors are, changes in material pricing that are happening day to day, month to month,” he said. “That’s where estimators come in.”
At this point, he added, the earlier possibility that actual costs for the Manville Road upgrades could cost 20 to 30 percent higher than anticipated now looks overly optimistic—with 30 percent higher looking more like reality. The village, in response, has hired Calgi Construction Company Inc. of White Plains to improve the estimates. This company will not be a bidder on the actual construction.
Should the eventual costs for the Manville Road changes be 30 percent higher than the current $2.3 million estimates, the tab would be almost $3 million for this portion of the project—twice what the federal grant would reimburse. “If we need to end up borrowing more than $2.6 million, an amended bond resolution would be necessary,” said Village Administrator Eric Morrissey.
Also on the agenda for the work session of last week’s meeting were other bond resolutions and budget transfers related to the Manville Road/Memorial Plaza renovation. One roll-call vote transferred $20,000 from the General Fund to pay Wagner Hodgson Landscape Architecture of Hudson, New York, for initial design work on retaining walls and other early-stage work on the portion of the civic center that borders the current Manville Road slip lane. Another vote will transfer another $75,000 from the General Fund for design work on the Manville Road upgrades.
The village also voted to issue $550,000 in serial bonds to fund construction of the civic center, where events such as the weekly Pleasantville Farmers Market will take place. “This project is estimated to cost around $450,000,” said Morrissey. “We’ve asked for an authorization of $550,000 in case we do run into some unforeseen circumstances, but we’re more confident in this pricing because we are going to be using an existing contractor—we have a three-year contract, with unit pricing already locked in.”
For more details on the Manville Road Improvement project, visit www.pleasantville-ny.gov and click on “Projects & Initiatives.”
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