Bonanno Blasts One-Party Town Board for Rampant Development

Mt. Pleasant Challengers Blast Incumbents for Rampant Development

Martin Wilbur | The Examiner News | October 17, 2023

Mount Pleasant’s [2023] Democratic ticket went on the offensive last weekend, charging that the current Town Board has allowed rampant overdevelopment that has worsened flooding and traffic and threatens the town’s natural resources....

“Once these resources are gone, we have no recourse,” [Joe] Bonanno said. “At that point, you know what, we’re looking at a real degradation of our quality of life. We’re looking at flooding, alright, we’re looking at congestion. We’re talking about noise and all of this really comes down to democracy. This is a result of uni-party government in Mount Pleasant for the last 30 years.”

The Pocantico Lake project, called the Meadows at Briarcliff, is currently being reviewed by the Planning Board.

In addition to that plan, which is proposed on about 36 acres adjacent to what had been designated a Critical Environmental Area by the state in the early 1990s, other development decisions were criticized by the candidates. Among them were the 153,000-square-foot Amazon warehouse project under construction on Route 9A in Hawthorne that was approved without an Environmental Impact Statement and the proposed three million-square-foot biomedical, retail and residential North 80 proposal on the Grasslands campus near Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla....

Hawthorne resident Don Maldonado said his neighborhood is caught between the Amazon warehouse on 9A and the North 80 proposal near the medical center, which he called “an 80-acre city.” He criticized the town’s secrecy and its failure to bring these critical proposals to the attention of residents. The warehouse was approved in July 2020, but its occupant wasn’t made public ntil the following year.

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