Recommended Reading, September 14, 2025

Robert Cox

15 Sep 2025 — 6 min read

Aerial photo of site of future Memorial Highway traffic circle (1947)

DUBLIN, IRELAND (September 14, 2025) — Not my most fun weekend. Notre Dame lost in the closing seconds to Texas A&M due to a missed extra point by the Irish. The Giants lost in OT to Dallas after the Cowboys kicker (from Notre Dame) kicked a long field goal to send the game into OT and a shorter one with time running out in the 10 minute extra session. It was cold, rainy and windy here in Ireland. And New Rochelle dropped not one but two Friday Night News Dumps (QRR, City Park). As I read and analyzed this material so you don’t have to, my weekend was pretty much glancing up from my iPhone as I read and typed with football on in the background.

I wrote about the QRR Hearing (New Rochelle Residents Sound Off on Quaker Ridge Road) which was a box-checking exercise. Some people liked idea of the project and others did not. I thought the best questions were about the lack of traffic study data and the worst answer was that all the data was in a 2020 report that was no longer online. I pushed on this and got a copy: Final Design Report for the New Rochelle Quaker Ridge Road Complete Streets Project Now Available. If you care about the QRR project you will want to read all 650+ pages. There is data on a QRR traffic study but no data from a parallel Ward School traffic study which was still ongoing as of October 2020. As it should be done by now I have requested a copy and will post it when I get it.

I also wrote about what was apparently supposed to go unnoticed, that Adam Salgado has cooked up a plan to turn Flowers (City) Park over to a private developer. This ideas seems like pure madness on its face but to drop this in the darkness of a Friday afternoon with zero public engagement is nothing less than a big F-U from Adam to every stakeholder, park user, property owner in the area and is sure to get a negative reception from Larchmont and Mamaroneck just like back in the IKEA days.

New Rochelle Looks to Put Flowers Park Under Control of a Master Developer

And let’s not forget how the week began after my big article on how New Rochelle is going broke due to out-of-control spending by Democrats on City Council (Butcher’s Bill Comes Due for New Rochelle Democrats), followed up last Tuesday by a phony-baloney non-binding “subject to change”, PowerPoint presentation (New Rochelle Fund Balance Q&A Devolves Into Unintelligible Mush) where the public was denied the opportunity to obtain and review that material given to council beforehand in violation of the state Open Meeting Law. I got those missing records and published them (Hidden Audit Presentation Records Released by New Rochelle).

Finally there is the ten-year old LaRocca matter New Rochelle v. La Rocca Heads to Trial After Decade-Long Legal Battle Over Alleged Parkland Misappropriation which has taken on new significance because Salgado’s Flowers Park Plan involves the use of eminence domain in the same area that LaRocca has been disputing for years.

1 Million Views on Facebook 🥳

On August 18, I got a message from Facebook saying they were expanding my reach. I thought at the time this might mean it would take until year end maybe to hit 1,000,000 views a month (they could a month as “last 28 days”).