City: Decision to Close Playschools is Final

Addabbo, Parents, Still Pushing for Answers

By Conor Greene

Worried that time is running out as the summer quickly approaches, a group of parents and young students showed up at last week’s community board meeting to seek help in their fight to keep city run playschools, including Dry Harbor in Glendale, open.

However, while the parents said they were relieved to hear that the Parks Department, which runs the playschools, has finally agreed to meet with state Senator Joseph Addabbo (D-Howard Beach) about possible solutions, a Parks spokeswoman said Wednesday that the decision has been finalized.

“These five Parks programs in Queens, serving a total of approximately 75 children, are permanently discontinued and will not be reopened,” said the spokeswoman. “The services are duplicated by other facilities in the same area, and parents affected by the measure have the option of enrolling their children at these public and private high-quality centers.” She didn’t say how much will be saved.

Last week Community Board 5 member Brian Dooley, who is also president of the Glendale Property Owners Association, asked his fellow residents to join the effort to save the program, which provides an educational program for children ages three and four in a building at the Dry Harbor Playground, and other locations across the city.

“We all need to group together as a community to try to keep this school open,” said Dooley, who attended the program as youngster. “It was a great place to go when I was a kid, and it’s still a great place to go. It’s hitting us at a hard time.”

After Dooley spoke, several parents – joined by several dozen children who attend the program – stressed that the program is invaluable.

“It’s a wonderful program and it’s an important program,” said Charles Suffel, who has been leading the charge to gain the support of elected officials and convince Parks to reverse course. “This is about education, about kids having a place to go that’s safe, clean and progressive.”

Suffel said the parents have tried to work with Parks officials, to no avail. “We’re trying to find a middle ground with Parks,” he told the audience at last week’s CB 5 meeting. “We’ve asked for options, but we’ve gotten none. We don’t want to be the crazy people on the steps [of City Hall], but what more can we do? They won’t talk to us about how to keep it open.”

Tara Norvez has had six children attend the school, which costs $1,300 for a four-day week and is slated to close this summer, but fears her youngest child won’t have that same chance. “I really feel like the middle class in this city is really getting squeezed out,” she said. “This program has been doing more with less for 30 years... This is an academic program that surpasses Universal Pre-K in many areas” and costs roughly half as much as private programs, she added.

One of the Norvez children to graduate, Aiden, spoke about the impact it had on him nine years ago. “One of the things [our teacher] taught us is that we have to stand up when we see something wrong,” he said. “We know closing Dry Harbor is wrong. It would be a real shame if next year’s kids were deprived of this opportunity.”

Addabbo said Wednesday that his initial meeting with Parks has been postponed, but he plans to continue the fight to keep the school open at Dry Harbor in some form, despite Parks’ latest statement on the decision.

“It is still my intention to have a meeting just to go over what the options are for the parents, possibly under a different structure if we’ve exhausted all the possibilities for Dry Harbor Playschool as we know it,” he said. “I’m working on this meeting so parents are afforded the opportunity to know what their options are for the preschool as it exists now or in the future under a different form.”

Push for Upgrades Along Rail Corridors Gains Steam

By Conor Greene

An effort to increase the quality of life for residents living along rail corridors is gaining momentum, as civic associations from throughout the area are banding together to address the issue.

Neighbors Mary Parisen and Mary Arnold recently devised a plan entitled Glendale Clean and Green, which aims to address issues relating to the railroad yards and corridors that cut through the area. After presenting their plan to Community Board 5, the women found that other nearby communities are suffering the same types of problems.

To address these issues, which range from emissions coming from idling locomotives, along to noise and safety concerns, a group called Civics United for Railroad Solutions (CURES) was recently formed. It includes various civic groups such as Citizens for a Better Ridgewood, Glendale Property Owners Association, Communities of Maspeth and Elmhurst Together, the Juniper Park Civic Association, Maspeth West End Block Association and Citizens for a Better Ridgewood.

After getting word of the effort out to the public, residents from Glendale and surrounding neighborhoods such as Middle Village began contacting the women to get involved, Parisen reported at last week’s Community Board 5 meeting. “They’re facing the same problems we’re facing in Glendale,” she said, noting that a petition effort is underway to pressure elected officials to taking action.

Arnold said that while there are a host of problems related to rail operations, the main focus continues to be on lowering the harmful emissions that spew from the locomotives. “That’s what all of us are breathing when you have diesel engines idling outside your house,” she said, adding that federal grant money is currently available to pay for the conversion of diesel engines. “It’s hard times, but we’re all breathing this air and it’s a problem,” she said.

Middle Village resident Laura Zimmer, who also lives along the rail corridor, said the problem has gotten much worse in recent years. Locomotives now idle in her residential area for as much as two hours at a time, preventing residents from enjoying backyards or hanging laundry outside. “It’s really disturbing... We’re all suf- fering from this,” she said.

Board District Manager Gary Giordano later credited Parisen and Arnold for doing a “yeoman’s job to bring all this to the attention of the elected officials” and said support on the federal level “will be very important.” He is hopeful officials “can come up with an avenue for fund- ing very quickly” to help alleviate the problems.

With state federal funding in mind, CURES recently sent a letter to officials regarding the MTA’s 2010-2014 capital budget and the state Department of Transportation’s 2010-2015 capital budget. The letter asks the agencies “to effect planning, infrastructure, and equipment upgrades in Queens that will better protect the public health and safety and quality of life in communities that presently are bearing serious environmental burdens.”

The letter argues that the “contract between the LIRR’s gleaming double decker passenger rail cars that pass through our neighborhoods and the degraded condition of the LIRR rail corridor, the rail yards, and the freight transportation in our neighborhoods make it crystal clear that our neighborhoods have been neglected and dumped on for too long.” To remedy this, the group wants “state and federal oversight and money coming in here now to upgrade the freight transportation system and environment in Queens.”

The issues CURES seeks to remedy include “unnecessarily high levels of diesel emissions due to old equipment, idling, lack of traffic capacity and lack of ‘last mile’ access,” exposure of residential areas to waste that is being stored in and transported in open cars instead of sealed intermodal containers, open access for vandals to the LIRR rail corridor in an area that includes hazardous chemicals and the Buckeye Pipeline, and storage and transportation of petroleum gas and other hazardous chemicals, which has led to two emergency evacuations of homes in the past three years.

Regarding the problem described by Zimmer, Giordano said he has had a “much more difficult relationship” with New York and Atlantic Railroad than most of the other agencies he deals with. Trains had been parked outside Christ the King High School until the school sued in federal court. Giordano recently contacted the agency to see about having idling trains moved from the residential area near 69th Place, to no avail. “All I wanted them to do was move the switching operation maybe 200 yards south,” he said.

As long as these issues continue to detract from the health and safety of local residents, Parisen vowed that CURES would push for solutions. “You are going to be hearing a lot more about this organization,” she promised.

Complaints Over PS 113 Expansion

By Conor Greene
The Forum West

GLENDALE – Complaints have been filed with the city Department of Building and School Construction Authority due to alleged after-hours work at site, sometimes as late as 11:30 p.m.

The issue was raised at last Wednesday’s Community Board 5 meeting by Brian Dooley, president of the Glendale Property Owners Association. Dooley submitted to the board a letter from resident Bob Rabold, who says he’s been subjected to “continual after hours work occurring without the proper permits posted.”

In response, the community board submitted a complaint to the city Department of Buildings “just to be careful” and discussed the issue with a project support manager at the School Construction Authority, according to the board’s district manager, Gary Giordano. He was told that the contractor removing asbestos from the property “was recently working nights at times later than the SCA normally allows because he is trying to get the work done and get a pickup from the carting company.”

“That’s not work I think they want to do when school is in session, even at night, so it looks to me like they are trying to get that done over the summer,” said Giordano. “Whether it’s the school year or [summer], once you start getting past 10 p.m. with any kind of construction that people can hear, it infringes on their sleep. To minimize anything after 9 p.m. is important.”

Rabold, who lives across the street from the property, questions whether the contractors,Iannelli Construction, ever received the property after-hours permits from the DOB. “If they did, I’m sure they would be posted,” he wrote. Rabold notes that work continued until after 11:30 p.m. on July 7, at which time he lodged a complaint with 311.

“Regrettably, I understand that contractors hired by individuals try to circumvent the law by taking short cuts, but I cannot understand when a department under jurisdiction of the governing body who passes the law allows their contractors to ignore and disobey the law,” wrote Rebold.

News of the late-night work didn’t sit well with some board members who accuse the SCA of not considering the impact their projects have on the neighborhood. “They came in and sold use a bill of goods that it’s not going to impact the neighbors,” said Kathy Masi. “They’re terrible. They’ve never been good to their word.”

Dooley stressed that he is “absolutely for the project, for alleviating overcrowding in schools, especially that school,” but noted that “there are people living literally twenty-five feet from that site.”

On Tuesday, Marge Feinberg, a Department of Education spokeswoman, said that the SCA “has reached out to the neighbors [and] understands their concerns.” She said that work has, and will continue, to only take place within the hours set by DOB. “They said they have not been working outside what is allowable,” she said.

The project includes an addition to the existing building and asbestos abatement, according to Feinberg. Giordano said that he hasn’t received any recent complaints regarding the other two local school construction projects, PS 49 and PS 128, both in Middle Village.