What’s the holdup with fixing Wyckoff Avenue? That’s the question members of Community Board 5’s (CB 5) Transit and Public Transportation Committees asked during their meeting Tuesday night in Glendale.
While the board discussed upcoming and ongoing capital projects, one project that has been on CB 5’s radar for several years now is the repaving and reconstruction of Wyckoff Avenue from Flushing to Cooper avenues, including several side streets along the route, which runs through parts of Bushwick and Ridgewood.
“We’d like to get it because of what’s going on in Ridgewood with our friends on the Queens side with housing and everything. We want the area to be fixed up,” said CB 5 Chairperson Vincent Arcuri.
Arcuri said that local elected officials in both Brooklyn and Ridgewood need to get on board with this project in order to get it done because the stretch of road traverses both Brooklyn and Queens.
“No one in [the Department of Transportation], in the Brooklyn borough president’s office, or any local politician is pushing for this project,” Arcuri said. “No one is pushing for it.”
One reason why this project never got off the ground is because, up to this point, there has been no funding for it, he noted.
“There is either no funding or they are waiting for federal funding for this project,” Arcuri added. “I don’t know why it never got funded. We need elected officials on both sides to ask where the funding for this project is.”
According to John Maier, member of the Transit and Public Transportation Committees, the plans for this project were in presented to the committees for review and recommendations several years back.
“We’ve reviewed [the designs] and gave feedback years ago,” Maier said.
This project would be beneficial for both neighborhoods as it would not only repave Wyckoff Avenue and the side streets, but include streetscaping projects that would improve the sidewalks, street lights and other parts of the avenue, as well as replace the water mains and sewer lines along the route.
“In today’s day and age, why would you not want to fix up their neighborhood?” Arcuri told the Ridgewood Times in a phone interview on Wednesday. “If you want to talk economics, this project will help businesses prosper. It will make the whole area better.”
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