Group Letter to the editor
Most Greenwich residents have a memory tied to the Dorothy Hamill Rink. A first skating lesson. A child’s hockey game on a freezing Saturday morning. A holiday skate with family. Nobody wants to see it go. And nobody is arguing it should stay as-is.
That’s what makes the current debate so frustrating. The question before the RTM on Monday is not whether Greenwich should have a great rink. Of course it should. The question is whether the RTM should approve a $41+ million appropriation for a project whose final costs, full scope, and operational impacts remain genuinely unresolved — and do so in a way that breaks with how this town has always handled major public investments. Because this has become much more than a rink replacement.
What started as a conversation about modernizing an aging facility has grown into a comprehensive redesign of Morlot Park — relocated fields, regraded terrain, retaining walls, new access roads, geothermal infrastructure. Most Greenwich residents have never seen this expanded plan presented publicly.
Here’s the specific ask — and it’s a reasonable one: approve the $2.7 million in architecture and engineering funds already on the table this year and require that construction funding come back to the RTM separately, once the A&E process is complete and real numbers are known. That’s it. That is exactly how Greenwich has handled every other major municipal project. What’s being proposed instead — bundling $38.5 million in construction funding into the same vote, before design is finished — is an unprecedented departure from that norm.
Approving construction funds now removes the RTM from the most critical stage of review, when actual costs, engineering realities, and hard tradeoffs come into focus.
If the true estimate after A&E turns out to be $50 million, or $60 million, the RTM will have already lost its seat at the table.
Nobody is trying to kill this project. Approve the design funding. Do the work. Then come back with real numbers and let the process work the way it’s supposed to.
The rink our Town deserves shouldn’t be defined by rushed decisions and cost overruns nobody saw coming. Get it right — for the Town and for every taxpayer footing the bill.
Respectfully,
Mark Fichtel, RTM District 4
Anne B. Kristoff
Bonny J. Kristoff
Michael F. Kristoff
Robert J. Kristoff
Nan Levy, RTM District 10
Peter Levy, RTM District 10
Jane Sprung
Lucy von Brachel, RTM District 4
David Wold
Bonnie Zeh, RTM District 4