WPU requests road repairs at Queens Borough President's budget hearing

Budget Hearing Testimony 2/20/2013 by

WPU member Joseph Ardizzone read the attached statement at the Queens Borough President's annual budget hearing. When the following passage was read, CB7 Chair Gene Kelty went ballistic, stating that it was inappropriate to bring up his board's role in the neglect of Willets Point over the years:

WPU is appalled that Queens Community Board 7 ("CB7") has not included any funding request for the repair of Willets Point roadways within its formal Budget Priorities and Requests for 2014 – despite CB7 having been clearly informed multiple times of the very obvious and dire need for roadway repairs via oral and written presentations by WPU during every CB7 meeting held between May, 2012 and February, 2013, inclusive. Instead, CB7 chose to prioritize such items as a "Horticultural Design Study" for some historic sites in downtown Flushing. With all due respect to horticultural designers, there should have been a place for desperately needed Willets Point improvements within CB7's 2014 budget priorities.

Perhaps next year, Mr. Kelty and his board will see fit to include new streets for Willets Point among their list of 25 priorities for the following fiscal year.

Motorcycle club left in limbo

From the Times Ledger:

History sure seems to repeat itself for the Queensboro Motorcycle Club.

The biker group was unceremoniously uprooted from its original clubhouse among the old ash heaps of central Queens in 1939 to make way for the creation of Flushing Meadows Corona Park in time for that year’s World’s Fair, according to Bill Goldstein, the club’s president.

The resilient club, which turns 100 this year, was never compensated for its property, Goldstein said, but it pushed on and eventually found a new slice of Queens in Willets Point, where members built a modest clubhouse behind a chain-link fence between two warehouses on 34th Avenue.

The plans for Willets Point leave the bikers in a lurch as they attempt to continue their gatherings, rides and community service activities from a point with an uncertain future. Goldstein said the club pays $4,000 a year in taxes and he asks only that the city tell them what will become of them in coming years.

“We understand that this is an area of contention and that no one wants to breathe a word about it,” he said over sodas in the club’s wood-paneled meeting room. “But we pay $4 grand a year and we get nothing for it. We get no road repair, no sidewalks, no streetlights, there’s no sanitation. This place is an absolute pigsty.”

Or, as club member James Frost put it last week, “it looks like Beirut now.”

Years of unattended potholes and ruts have turned the roads of Willets Point into a minefield for motorcyclists, and earlier this month a member of the club slowly riding to the clubhouse hit a nearby pothole, sustained minor injuries and damaged his bike, according to club members.

The state of disrepair has reached a breaking point, members said, and member Jan Borodo has been compiling a file of the club’s repeated requests for repairs. Borodo has a file with dozens of copies of documents he has sent to Bloomberg’s office, the city Department of Transportation, 311, Community Board 7 and a number of news outlets in hopes of getting basic repairs done — all of which have yielded little or no results.

The group’s members said they do not want to fight the city — they only want to know what lies ahead. Goldstein said the group is willing to take a fair relocation deal or to stay if the city makes improvements.

But the state of limbo is taxing their patience.

Ground gives way under Fodera Foods truck

This is the scene at ~6am this morning. A Fodera Foods truck is stuck at the intersection of 34th Ave and 127th Place. The ground underneath the front tires caved in. More evidence of neglect by the City DOT.