Absent house numbers discussed at town-school board meeting

by Alice E. Gerard
Grand Island Dispatch, April 4, 2008

From left, Grand Island Town Supervisor Peter McMahon, Grand Island
Board of Education President Richard Little and School Superintendent
Robert Christmann discuss issues that impact both boards during a joint
meeting of the groups Monday. (photo by Larry Austin)

Where is that house number?

When school bus drivers, especially substitutes who are not familiar with a route, can’t find a house number, they risk passing students who are waiting to get on the bus. Sometimes, the students will run after the bus, risking injury if they are not paying attention to traffic.

Grand Island School District Transportation Supervisor Jack Burns told a joint meeting of the town and school boards on Monday that recently a child in Syracuse chased after a school bus that had missed the stop and was struck by a car, suffering two broken arms, two broken legs and a broken pelvis.

“It is difficult for substitute drivers, using a routing sheet,” Burns said. Some people’s mailboxes sport small numbers, which are very difficult to see, or there might be a number on one side of the box and not the other, said Grand Island School Superintendent Robert Christmann. “Even if your house number does exist, if a house 10 houses away doesn’t have a number, all of a sudden, you’re on top of that house and you’ve realized that you’ve gone past it.”

“You (the Town Board) have talked about this before, with emergency vehicles trying to find house numbers,” Christmann said. “I just wanted to bring it to people’s attention.”

Town Supervisor Peter McMahon said that, as an enforcement issue, checking to make sure that house numbers are legible from the road is not an “immediate priority. It would be hard to justify hiring someone to go out to do that.”

McMahon said that information to encourage people to make sure that their house numbers are legible from the road could be put on the town’s Web site. He added that all town services, including the fire department and police agencies, depend on being able to read house numbers.

“We do have a newsletter coming out,” Town Councilwoman Mary Cooke said. “We are getting items for the newsletter from all of our departments. The building inspector and the code enforcement inspector are submitting their usual spring thing about getting building permits and location permits. We could include something about house numbers. That would be a good start.”

“As to why people don’t do it, I can’t answer the question,” McMahon said.

Comprehensive Master Plan Update

According to McMahon, the town’s comprehensive master plan, which was adopted in the 1990s, is being reviewed and revised this year. The section on the town’s business district is almost complete.

“The rest of it should be completed some time this summer. Then we’ll go on to have public hearings, and we’ll go back and make the changes,” he said. “What it involves is the people expressing what you want Grand Island to look like for the next 10 or 15 or 20 years. I don’t think the basic tenets of the original plan have changed much. Most people, if you ask them, will tell you that they like things the way they are. They don’t want Grand Island Boulevard to be like Niagara Falls Boulevard. They don’t want the traffic problems that the Village of Williamsville has on Main Street.”

The process of reviewing and revising the town occurs every five years, McMahon said.

Staley Road-Grand Island Boulevard Roundabout

The proposed roundabout for the corner of Staley Road and Grand Island Boulevard was also mentioned. “If you go there early in the morning, it happens to be the worst intersection on Grand Island, at least as far as traffic is concerned,” McMahon said. “There are a lot of times when you’re done with your Tim Hortons before you get through the traffic light. Then you have to go back and get another one. So there’s about $2.7 million of federal money in the state grant to fix that intersection, and the decision has been made that the way to do that is to install a roundabout. They’re something similar to a traffic circle. It is basically the traffic engineers’ solution to congested intersections. Generally, what happens is that traffic always moves. There are no traffic lights. I don’t think that it will be worse and, most of the time, it will be better (than the current intersection). It’s not scheduled to start construction until 2010.”

DECA State Conference Award Winners

The Town Board issued proclamations, honoring five Grand Island High School students, who won honors at the 2008 DECA Career Conference in Rochester. (See pg. 10) According to the proclamations, DECA is a national organization of more than 400,000 marketing students who compete for various awards and scholarships.

School Board President Richard Little commented that Grand Island students have won first place in the chapter scrapbook category two years in a row. “Everybody in the state got to see the kind of work that last year’s team did. To go back out and do it again, two years in a row, is really pretty exceptional,” Little said. “I just want you to know that this is two years in a row that we’ve come home with a whole lot of prizes.”