City Permit Processes Need to Be Simplified, Especially in the Time of the Coronavirus

City Permit Processes Need to Be Simplified,

Especially in the Time of the Coronavirus

The following letter was sent to the Mayor and forwarded to us by the author for publication.

My wife and I have been Rye residents for decades. We are in our 70s and retired. We have enjoyed playing tennis on the Rye Recreation courts seemingly forever.

This year, as we have every year, we purchased tennis permits for our age group. Rye Rec cancelled our permits, refunded our payment, and now has, without our consent, instituted a complicated system for reserving courts which is difficult for people in our age group to understand, and will probably cost us more than the permit fee to which we had agreed.

My wife, with the invaluable help of Jamie Corradina of Rye Rec, organized a group of women who play tennis there several days per week. Now, with this new computerized system, the court fees will be charged by the court and not to the individual players. That requires someone in the group to pay the court fee and then get reimbursed by the other players. With four to eight players in the group on any given day, four or five times a week, this system complicates their lives unnecessarily. Furthermore, getting reimbursed in these days of Covid-19 is dangerous if cash is exchanged, and difficult to accomplish by electronic means.

I emphasize, this was done without our consent after we agreed to pay and did pay for our tennis permits. We pay substantial real estate taxes in Rye and should be treated with more consideration and respect.