February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
It had won the backing, it announced, of the Eastchester, N.Y.-based Goodwill Sports Association, Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to building athletic fields. The group, RIGS said, had pledged $10 million to its efforts to build a GAA stadium on the East River island, with the possibility of even more at a later stage.
Joseph Raguso, a consultant who introduced Goodwill to RIGS, told the meeting, which was attended by GAA President Sean Kelly, that the “money is coming.” The money did not come, and RIGS has missed today’s deadline to show that it has the financial ability to begin building on the 25 acres it was allocated in 2003. The GAA-linked group is hoping to get yet another extension from the city of New York.
Goodwill, over the last year, has established a pattern of missed deadlines, with respect to funding, application for environmental permits and submission of engineering plans. School officials have said that a well-intentioned program to build sports facilities for free has been more trouble that it’s worth.
For the Greenburgh school district, the experience “has not been a positive one overall,” Nelson Ronsvalle, its assistant superintendent for business, told the Echo. “Goodwill is an organization with dreams bigger than its experience and its ability to deliver,” he added.
Goodwill Sports was set up to build playing fields around the country in honor of each of the more than 3,000 victims of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.
The idea was to get large-scale funding, but Phyllis Fitzpatrick, its executive director, started out with what seemed to be more manageable projects in her own backyard.
In 2002, Fitzpatrick formed an alliance with her cousin Anthony Adinolfi, owner of Dirtman Enterprises, Inc., a Mahopac company that disposes of construction dirt and rock.
At the time, Adinolfi told the Journal News, a Westchester daily: “It works for everybody. The contractor has to get rid of the material. I get to fill the hole, and the school gets something back.”
But this “fields-for-fill” program eventually had Adinolfi and Fitzpatrick suing each other in the state Supreme Court.
Fitzpatrick did not return calls from the Echo seeking comment.
David McKay Wilson, a senior writer for the Westchester paper, reported last November that “while some districts are getting fields at reduced prices, they are paying for them in delays, contaminated fill, citizen complaints and extensive time commitments by administrators.”
And the issue has brought the districts problems with New York State at a number of levels. The State Comptroller’s office is investigating if districts breached bidding laws with the program and the Department of Education is also looking into whether school districts were allowed to fund facilities in this way.
Meanwhile, the Department of Environmental Conservation has found violations of dumping laws at schools in Greenburgh and Eastchester.
Eastchester, where Goodwill has not been directly involved, is the worst effected by the fields-for-fill idea. And Ronsvalle stressed that his district has gotten one baseball diamond and an almost finished soccer field from Goodwill, although a third project is mired in difficulty.
Fitzpatrick has promised to deal with unfinished projects and other problems in the Valhalla, Greenburgh and Eastchester school districts. She said recently that she was preparing to announce by mid-September a multi-million grant program for schools in the state, funded by a foreign donor.
Although, RIGS officials believed initially that Goodwill would have access to federal money, more recently it’s become clear that the non-profit has been looking to private donors.
As reported last week, the head of RIGS, Monty Maloney, remains confident that Goodwill will in time honor its pledge to RIGS.
For now, the Greenburgh school district is taking a wait-and-see approach to promises of funding. Ronsvalle said: “It’s very vague. It’s something that’s been said for months.”