Nassau County Bridge Authority disbands Citizens’ Committee

The Nassau County Bridge Authority has disbanded the Atlantic Beach Bridge Citizens’ Committee, a group of village residents formed in January that aimed to reimagine the bridge’s nearly 70-year-old, 11-lane toll plaza and consider the best way to make use of the authority’s $5 million budget for the project.

The authority is now considering adding E-ZPass technology to the bridge.

“It was time for a modernization,” NCBA executive director Vincent Grasso said of the toll plaza, which has been deteriorating in recent months.

The NCBA initially thought that soliciting community input would be a good place to start, so it contacted Atlantic Beach village officials, and a mix of officials and residents joined the 12-member committee, which met twice, in January and February.

“We got some good input,” Grasso said. “But unfortunately, you know, I’m not sure it was a fully successful experiment.”

Some committee members who offered helpful input had a long history with the bridge, including one member “who actually started here at the bridge, in either the ’70s or ’80s, as a part-time seasonal toll collector,” Grasso said. “So it was really great to have that historical perspective — they could really provide a lot of context.”

The input “was valuable and was incorporated into our thinking” about how to modernize the bridge, Grasso said, and made the NCBA aware of how the bridge is perceived by local residents.

“People like the toll plaza because it kind of acts as a welcoming gate,” Grasso added. “The Atlantic Beach Bridge is really the mom-and-pop shop of government infrastructure, and it is a very local face. People feel very connected to it, and that was something that came out of the meetings that I thought was very important to preserve.”

The NCBA also took the committee’s negative input into consideration.

Though some valuable ideas were shared at the meetings, Grasso said, nearly 30 percent of the discussion time was filled with “re-litigating and debate about the sundry of rumors and conspiracy theories that have circulated around the bridge for 50 years, and that ended up taking up a little bit too much time.” He added, “It wasn’t a real practical way to do it.”

Grasso sent a July 15 email to members about the dissolution of the committee. “It was an experiment in citizen participation,” he wrote, “and while there were some very valuable elements of it, I do not think it worked out as we had hoped, so it will be discontinued at this time.”

NCBA Commissioner James Vilardi, formerly a bridge authority board chairman, seemed surprised by the email. “We have a meeting on Thursday” — July 21 — “so I want to find out more about it,” Vilardi said. “And I guess we’ll find out really what happened (and) what went wrong” with the committee.

He added, “I’m going to try to reconstitute the committee, if in fact it has been disbanded.”
Woodmere resident Asher Matathias, a committee member, said he was disappointed by the NCBA’s decision, and added that during the two meetings the group held, Grasso made him and other members feel heard. The group “was a mirage,” Matathias said. “It was not the oasis that we thought.”

The NCBA is now discussing the installation of E-ZPass technology at the bridge’s toll plaza with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state Thruway Authority and other toll authorities, Grasso said.

From the Citizens’ Committee, the NCBA found that “there is a desire for E-ZPass if there’s going to be a toll,” he said.

The NCBA’s discussions of cashless tolls were accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic, and in October 2021, the authority began a pilot program using license plate readers to automate the toll system, allowing motorists to cross without stopping to pay cash. But the system, Grasso said, was “less cost-effective than we had hoped.”

The license plate reader technology will continued to be used in some form, but the bridge authority wants E-ZPass to be the primary new system because of its convenience, Grasso said.

“Especially because there is such saturation of E-ZPass in the New York metro area — almost everybody has an E-ZPass,” he said, adding that incorporating E-ZPass into the toll plaza’s infrastructure will be the next challenge.