Letter: Cabin resort project is too much for Gardiner

The Heartwood Project in Gardiner will be on 141 acres with a restaurant, an event barn, swimming pools, event courts, a gym, bocce courts, a 165-car parking lot, 71 luxury cabins and 40 eco cabins, all with full bathrooms. The water system will include two drilled wells with peak water usage of 12,600 gallons per day. This facility will accommodate 166 guests and close to 300 visitors per day. The sewage facility will provide four separate septic systems. Where the water will go after that will probably be in the Wallkill River, sooner or later. Also, the 12,600 gallons of water per day will affect wells near the resort.

Now the problem is — sooner or later this resort can and will affect the Gardiner taxpayers. Another problem is when you ask certain questions about this project you get no answers or you get an, “I don’t know” answer about the water system, about the sewage system, about the roads, who is going to plow the snow in the winter?, are they going to have their own security system, are they going to have their own medical system? Because with hundreds of people per day (the good, the bad and the ugly) you will surely have problems. And, it will also affect the hamlet of Gardiner with all these cars and people. With 200-300 people per day, not counting their families, downtown Gardiner will be like the Port Authority in New York City with people all over the sidewalk, people trying to get to the post office, which should not be where it is now, and the cars and trucks that come around the bend. Someone will get killed or surely get hurt.

The planning of this project should never have gone before any of the boards before it was put on the ballot in November for people to vote on it. Not certain people on the town boards who will surely profit by the Heartwood Project, especially one former leader of the town board, who, in my opinion, is still running Gardiner. If this project goes through, it will be like the T Brothers project from which I have seen Gardiner vehicles going in and out. People of Gardiner, we have to stop this before we have to pay for this big time. That is all for now. There will be more on the subject later. Wake up taxpayers.

Henry V. Tortora
Gardiner