If you want the background, look at Post #532, Post #1056, Post #1096, and Post #1120.
Briefly, here’s the story up to now: A former Town Council member left $7M (now $9M) in her will for use in constructing sidewalks in Vienna. There’s a five-year time limit, starting more than two years ago. The executor of that will imposed a limitation — not mentioned anywhere in the will itself — that the money could only be spent literally for the sidewalk, not anything else that you need to build a sidewalk. No “curb and gutter”. The Town’s staff then put a lot of effort into finding the streets where it already had curb and gutter in place, and in effect chose streets for sidewalks based on what concrete had been poured a half-century ago, instead of some objective measure of need. And with that restriction, by my simple calculation, it was obvious that the Town wasn’t even going to be able to spend the interest that trust money would earn in five years, let alone spend the principal on new sidewalks.
In the last Town Council meeting, if you look at the details, turns out, they were just kidding about not paying for curb and gutter. Hence the image above. Of the first five projects for which the Town has approved construction funding under this bequest, and that the Robinson estate trustee has agreed to, sure looks like the trust is paying for curb and gutter for four of them.
The Town voted to approve the construction of those five projects without so much as a comment on the flip-flop. And, apparently, with no change in their planning, despite drawing up those plans based on streets with existing curb and gutter.
In Vienna, decisions just kind of wander around until they stop. And it looks like this is where this one has stopped. It is what it is, and it’s not even all that unusual, in this context. Looking on the bright side, after more than two years, they did manage to get some of the money allocated before the upcoming Town election.
My only due diligence on this, now, is to figure out what happened to the first three streets that the Town approved more than a year ago (Post #1056). People forget about those. They no longer appear on any of the documents, presumably because they’re a done deal. And yet, I can’t seem to find where the Town did a similar funding approval for their construction. (They approved only the money to pay for the engineering work that must be done prior to construction.) The key question is whether the Town will approve the funding, for the first three, in time to get them built within the five-year window. Or does the Town Council think they already did that?
Continue reading Post #1133: Robinson sidewalk bequest, odder and odder.
