Letter to the Editor: Proposed Garden Road Development Would Do Irreparable Damage to Neighbors and the Environment

The following letter was written by Scarsdale residents Richard Cantor on 9/11/25. 

The significance of this date, 9/11, does not escape me.

Nor does the significance of the decision Planning Board members must make concerning whether to approve or disapprove the proposed development of the property at 80 Garden Road.

A few days ago, on September 6th the front page of the NY Post had a very poignant picture of a NYC Firefighter in full turnout gear sitting on a curb after the collapse of the World Trade Center towers with his head bowed, covering his face with a one of his hands.

The headline read: “The number of first responders with 9/11 linked cancers skyrockets to nearly 50,000”. In other words, the long-term loss of life is far in excess of the original 2,977 people killed during the initial attack. The damage continues to accumulate.

That article serves as a metaphor for the long-term devastation many developers have been permitted to do to our community and to the environment – damage which aggregates well beyond the immediate impact of their clear cutting of trees and assaults on the soil.

There are overwhelming reasons why the project as proposed to develop 80 Garden Road should be disapproved, and I will let others testify as to what those reasons are. Trusting that the Planning Board is sincerely committed to balancing the conflicting demands for reasonable development against the overriding need to provide adequate protection for our community and the environment, I would like to suggest workable criteria to evaluate when a project is reasonable and when it represents egregious levels damage.

My recommendation is very straightforward and workable. Let the same profit motivation developers seek be balanced by an equivalent dollar amount of rehabilitation developers are required to pay into a fund created by the Village to compensate for the damage they do. Easily accessible criteria already exist on line to evaluate the financial value of various trees, the financial value of fertile soil, and the financial value of animal habitats. All that has to be done is to put these criteria to use.

Taking the 80 Garden Road proposal as an example, and to keep the mental math simple enough to do in one’s head, let’s say the developer wants to cut down 200 trees and that the financial value of the average tree on that property is appraised at $5,000. Then for the tree removal portion of the plan the developer would be required to contribute $5,000 x 200 trees or $1,000,000 dollars into the fund, which the Village could use to rehabilitate the environment, to compensate neighbors for damages to their properties and to ensure against aggregate damages in the future. If the trees were appraised with a different value, the required contribution to the fund could be adjusted accordingly. To that amount the value of damage to the soil and natural habitats would have to be added.

In this way developers’ motivations for profits would be tempered by the requirement that they invest to mitigate the damages their developments inflict on our community, and the Planning Board would have a consistent and unimpeachable methodology for evaluating proposed projects. No longer would developers be able to seek as much profit as possible regardless of the consequences and then abandon others to absorb the costs of mitigating the damage they do. Their self-interests would be self-limiting and they would be motivated to temper their projects to much more sustainable scopes. This would accrue benefits to all current and future Scarsdale residents while still permitting reasonable projects to be approved, such methodology would clarify and simplify the review process, and before anyone raises knee jerk objections without careful consideration, let me offer that the various environmentally oriented organizations in Scarsdale would be delighted to assist the Planning Board in implementing this groundbreaking idea.

In the meantime, since the proposed project for 80 Garden Road would inflict irreparable damage on neighboring properties and the environment writ large, it should be soundly rejected.

Thank you for your consideration,

Richard Cantor
Innes Road
Scarsdale, NY