Sunday, June 23, 2013

Eliminating Competition!

During the entirely unnecessary GameOn 365 debacle, which is still underway, Mr Feiner has insisted the only serious offer is from his buddies, GameOn 365. Both Donald Scherer and Irin Israel, who operate the successful House of Sports business in Ardsley, have said numerous times their offer of double the amount GameOn 365 offered for the property at 715 Dobbs Ferry Road is a serious one. Mr Scherer is also on record as saying when it comes to money, he’s always serious, as is their offer. Mr Feiner uses the age-old strategy that if you say something often enough it will eventually become the truth. Yet even though every representative for House of Sports has said the offer is serious, Mr Feiner continues his ploy.

To that end, Mr Feiner has maintained at every opportunity that House of Sports’ offer is strictly about eliminating competition. Every representative from House of Sports emphatically stated it is not about competition. The G10 residents, acting as the conscience that is absent with Mr Feiner and his Town Board, decided to state at numerous meetings that Mr Feiner and his Board have a fiduciary responsibility to the Town and its residents to accept the highest amount of money for the property offered. They said it so often that even Mr Feiner began to use the phrase. And, you already know how that goes. Once Mr Feiner uses it, the Board has carte blanche to jump on board and use it as well. Before you could say collusion, they were in a fiduciary chorus rivaling the TV show Glee! The only noticeable difference is with Glee, their sound system works.

Even if the House of Sports were only looking to purchase the former and still-contaminated Frank’s Nursery property to squash their supposed competitors, so what? House of Sports has offered the Town twice the money for the property, which the Town needs because of Mr Feiner’s guilty verdict judgements, bad business “strategies”, mismanagement, wholesaling the Town to developers and more. Mr Feiner and his Board should abandon the schemes and the charade of “doing the right thing” by trying to finagle a way to gift the property to Game On 365. The Board should genuinely “do the right thing” and sell the 6+ acres to highest offering company, in this case the House of Sports for $3.5M in cash. We’ve lost count how many times the Town has rejected this lucrative offer because Mr Feiner wants the deal to go to GameOn 365. The administration should forget trying to land some mythical deal that once again tips the advantage to a developer friend and not the residents that Mr Feiner swore to represent. 

It has been said by many that the latest iteration of Mr Feiner’s gifting of 715 Dobbs Ferry Road to GameOn 365 through a new RFP is nothing more than another sham in hopes of skirting the finest edge of the law while Mr Feiner again gets his way and does what he’s wanted all along. He has claimed often that the residents of Greenburgh voted for a referendum to approve the use of the property for a sports venue. It was based on a vaguely crafted referendum, for a specific and mostly unethical outcome, that approximately 5k voters out of about 9k voters approved. It is hardly the residents speaking. It is a small, small percentage of the 90k residents who spoke. But since they spoke the way Mr Feiner aimed for, that phrase continues to be bandied about like free candy on Halloween. Mr Hewitt, a principal of GameOn 365 has taken that page from Mr Feiner’s playbook and repeats it at every opportunity. The only major issue with his overused statement is it still isn’t true.

If we adhere to Mr Feiner’s flawed rationale, Mr Robert Bernstein is running against him for the Democratic endorsement to eliminate him as the competition. Or, is there some other devious scheme behind his campaign? It’s no secret that Mr Bernstein and many others have openly disagreed with Mr Feiner’s policies, actions, creation of laws, service cuts, budget numbers, and more. Mr Bernstein had gone to court several times against Mr Feiner and the Town and been both successful and unsuccessful. Mr Bernstein has offered to look into hiring a Town Administrator if elected. We are not here to campaign for Mr Bernstein, but it could put an end to the questionable actions that have happened covertly throughout the Town. Another change we would like is to remove the Town Board from the zoning process and have an independent zoning commission objectively address the zoning for the Town. It would stop the spot-zoning endorsed by Planning Commissioner Thomas Madden and routinely performed to benefit developers by the Board.

In the end, this really isn’t about eliminating the competition. It’s about doing what is best for the private and business residents of the Town. It’s long overdue.

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