Entire Package of State Aid for Ramapo Used up in One Cost Overrun for St. Lawrence’s Ballpark

February 23, 2011 In the governor’s proposed budget, aid to all municipalities will be cut by about 2%. The Town of Ramapo, which receives the greatest share of state aid of any town in the County, will have its aid package cut by almost $9,000, but that hardly makes any difference because St. Lawrence, Hunter and Friedman have blown the entire amount of state aid in 2011 on one check to Turco Golf for a cost overrun on their ballpark project.

Here are the amounts the different townships will be receiving from New York State in 2011.

　State aid to Ramapo will disappear down the Ramapo Local Development Corp’s rabbit hole. The baseball tax troika (St. Lawrence/Friedman/Hunter) decided at the last Town Board meeting to write a check, signed by the taxpayers, to send an additional $520,063.45 to Turco Golf, one of the contractors working on the ballpark (they’re doing turf for the field). The half million was not budgeted—it’s a cost overrun involving "soil stabilization fabric and underground utility." It’s one of more than a dozen cost overruns for the ballpark that now have run into many millions in additional costs.

What are cost overruns?
Bent Flyvbjerg, First Chair and BT Professor at Oxford University’s Saiid Business School "believes that big public works projects almost always have cost overruns due to strategic misrepresentation—‘that is, lying,’ as he defines the term."

Listed, and charted below are more than a dozen of the recent cost overruns which appear as "change orders" in the Resolutions passed at the Ramapo Town Board meetings. These unplanned expenses are charged to the taxpayers of Ramapo despite the infamous vow of Supervisor St. Lawrence after the referendum vote turned down the entire project. At the time St. Lawrence said: "The stadium will be built with private money. There will be no taxpayer dollars. I got the message." (Told to The Journal News August 25, 2010.) The lie continues to grow.

The 10 overruns for Morano Bros so far have cost the taxpayers an additional $3,431,480.41. The total cost for the work from this single contractor was supposed to be $4.3 million. It’s now $7.7 million and counting. Those numbers look like this:

There’s one small discrepancy. If you total all the cost overruns for Morano and add them to the original contract number, you would actually get a little over a thousand dollars more on the final total. That’s because right after the first three cost overruns of $1.3 million the contractor generously credited back the sum of $1,032 to the good people of Ramapo.

If you find these numbers a little scary, they are only part of this project’s fiscal profile, which has reached a new level of absurdity. Other major contractors like Nikko concrete and the contracts for ironwork and supplies, electrical, paving, and so on will push this project well beyond $30 million. And St. Lawrence doesn’t have investors, so he and Fran Hunter and Daniel Friedman keep backloading the growing debt on the taxpayers with one resolution after another.

Bottom 9 Baseball has announced they have joined the league and are busy posting promises of logoed merchandise of all sorts, and they have even begun to offer tickets. What they haven’t done is pay the $1 million fee for entry into the league. Perhaps the St. Lawrence/Hunter/Friedman troika can figure out how to write that charge as an expense to pass on to the taxpayers at a future Town Board Meeting. After all, it isn’t what you would call an expense to build a "stadium," so why shouldn’t the taxpayers kick in? Oh, the other thing B9B has neglected to do is to lock down their brand. Somebody else owns their name. It seems the only thing the B9B business team does have at this point is a growing reservoir of public animus against this entire project that will certainly corrode whatever base they expect to sell to.

The massive tax funding for this project was defeated with numbers that are not usually reached in local political elections (70% to 30% against) in the kind of election (public referendum) that has not happened here in Ramapo in decades. And yet the debt continues to grow. St. Lawrence is building his stadium on a field of lies that will not support it. "There will be no taxpayer dollars. I got the message." That lie gets exposed in resolution after resolution passed at Town Board meetings. And the original budgeted costs? Those lies are also now showing up in all the resolutions that itemize "cost overruns"—or rather "strategic misrepresentations."

[Read also: Project Grand Slam: the Cost to the Taxpayers so far ]

Michael Castelluccio
Preserve Ramapo
www.PreserveRamapo.org

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