Hendrickson Pool parking lot gets attention

The Hendrickson pool parking lot is first up on a list of projects this year for Valley Stream’s highway department. Work began two weeks ago to repair some of the worst areas of the parking field.

Village Highway Supervisor Tim Leahy said the time has finally come to fix the aging lot. “We’ve been looking for a state grant to do this for the past five or six years and it hasn’t happened,” he said.

The cost of repaving the entire lot would be about $625,000, according to Village Engineer Tony Cella.

Leahy said that doing the project in full is cost prohibitive, so his highway crews are fixing sections of the lot that are “literally falling apart.” The cost for these repairs will be about $7,000.

Some areas of the parking lot are so bad, Leahy said, that simple pothole repairs won’t suffice. Instead, crews are cutting out the badly damaged sections of asphalt and putting down a new surface. “We go through the whole paving process,” he said, “just in a little square area.”

Several sections of the parking lot have already been repaired, with a few more areas still in need of attention. Leahy said he hopes to have the work wrapped up within the next week. The highway department will also repaint the parking space lines.

Leahy said he put the parking lot at the top of the list for this year’s work so it would be finished before the start of the pool season. Additionally, the annual truck day for pre-school and nursery school children is in less than two weeks and Leahy wanted the lot to be in safe condition for the kids.

Village Clerk Vinny Ang said there have been no claims against Valley Stream for injuries or car damage due to the condition of the parking lot. However, he said, there have been numerous complaints from residents.

“We’re eliminating the main areas that were problematic,” he said. “It’s patchwork, but we can get a few years out of it.”

He said it is inevitable that the entire lot will have to be resurfaced at some point. “Unfortunately, repaving that lot is a huge undertaking and a huge expense,” Ang said. “Even without a grant, the village will still look at paving that lot. It will be part of a future road program.”

Every year the village bonds about $2 million for road and parking lot repairs throughout Valley Stream. Ang said it is hard to commit more than a half-million dollars to a parking lot repair when so many roads need to be fixed.

Cella said that when the 146,000 square foot lot is entirely redone, it will be reconfigured to add more parking. Right now it holds about 410 cars but he said it could hold 450.

Once the parking lot work is finished at Hendrickson, Leahy’s crews will move on to a list of road repairs that should continue through October. He said there are about 15 roads that need shoulder repairs or patchwork.

That work will be in addition to what is completed through the annual road program, in which entire stretches of road are repaved by an outside contractor. Cella selects those streets, and bases his decision on the rating of each road’s condition.

Leahy makes the decisions on which streets are repaired by his crews. “It’s a combination of what we see and resident complaints,” he said, “and then we prioritize it. We try to make everybody happy.”

Trustee Ed Fare said it is beneficial to have the village’s highway department do the small and mid-size jobs. “It’s great that we have such a talented crew that we can get this work done in-house,” he said. The village doesn’t have to go out to bid for each of those jobs, he said, expediting the repair process.

This year, the village highway department will also replace some sidewalks on Roosevelt Avenue near Mill Pond Pond, and on Valley Stream Boulevard adjacent to the Village Green. Some deteriorating concrete sections of road throughout the village are also in line for repair.

Every year, the highway department removes trees which become a hazard. Leahy said if the tree is lifting up the sidewalk, or if roots are going into the sewer, it should be taken down.

A final project is a new monument being built outside of the fire department headquarters on Rockaway Parkway. A new brick wall, for memorial plaques, is close to completion along with a new base for the flag pole, designed by village mason John Barbarino.