Section: News Analysis

A Pie-in-the-Sky Prospectus for a Glitzy Croton Community Center

Every household in Croton-on-Hudson recently received an enclosure to the monthly yellow village newsletter. Printed on a magenta-colored sheet, it was titled “Community Center Survey to [sic] Residents of the Village of Croton-on-Hudson.” Croton’s population was estimated at 7,862 in 2004, the latest year for which an estimate is available. The Village’s newsletter mailing list has about 3,000 names of Croton “households” on it—although the mailing also goes to businesses whose owners may not live in Croton. This means that while about 3,000 questionnaires were mailed—a number constituting some 38 percent of Croton’s total estimated population—the remaining 62 percent of Croton’s population (excluding infants) may or may not have seen the questionnaire yet they would be prospective users of a community center.

Careful study of this document reveals it to be seriously flawed. First and foremost, Crotonblog has never been aware of a necessity for a broad-based community center, nor have we detected any serious groundswell of agitation on the part of village residents for such a facility. Hunger for a community center (pompously called a “functionality” in the survey) germinated in the minds of Mayor Schmidt and Trustees Brennan and Steinberg, who incorporated it as a prominent plank in the Republican platform in 2005. The community center committee became Mr. Brennan’s responsibility with the defeat of Mr. Steinberg by Ms. Gallelli. The survey at hand, long promised by Mr. Brennan, is the work of a committee that labored for about a year and included the following Croton residents: Marcus Aarons (R), Marie Considine (D), Don Daubney (R), Lori Noel (R), Gary Petit (R), Karen Zevin (D). How the unbalanced composition of the committee was arrived at has never been satisfactorily explained. Crotonblog has to wonder how and why members of the committee were chosen and why certain community groups now active in Croton are not represented.

In Crotonblog’s humble opinion, before a survey questionnaire was circulated, one might have expected that the committee would survey the experience of those other villages in Westchester County with community centers—if any—in an effort to discover such crucial information as the genesis of their community centers, sources of financing (gifts, bequests, taxes, admissions fees, etc.), what facilities its community center offers, the size of the staff needed to operate it, the cost of building and operating its community center, the size of the bite its annual operating costs take out of that community’s budget, and the annual cost per resident of its community center, excluding admission fees and other usage fees. An important item of information would be the proposed admission charge to residents for using each of the services. Admission charges turned out to be one of the sticking points that doomed the skate park after it opened. Such detailed information is absolutely necessary before any public facility is contemplated. Had the village of Croton-on-Hudson made such a study of skate parks and their operating problems, the costly, underused and now-defunct white elephant of a skate park would never have been built.

Instead of gathering and promulgating such information, the committee has created a survey that dangles a host of sugarplum dreams and goodies before Croton’s residents. At the outset, there’s a glaring flaw in the survey’s statistical method. The committee expects the responder to answer on behalf of all other members of the household, a practice that immediately opens the survey to charges of incompleteness. Since not all members of a single household will necessarily be of the same opinion, Crotonblog has to wonder how much validity a one-response-per-household survey can have in representing the opinions of every member of a household.

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