DOT must appoint BQE liaison
Civic honchos push for dedicated staffer to interact with the community
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BY KEVIN DUGGAN
They need to talk.
The city must establish a
public outreach liaison for
the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway’s
repair project,
transit-minded civic leaders
demanded at a recent
meeting.
The Department of
Transportation’s manager
of the roadway’s reconstruction,
Tanvi Pandya,
is focused on the technical
difficulties of the project,
so the agency should add
a dedicated staffer to interact
with the local community,
said the leader
of Community Board 2’s
transportation committee.
“We feel the existing DOT
project manager is rightly
concerned with the engineering
aspects of it and figuring
out the right proposal,
but she’s probably not the
person to be spearheading
the public outreach process.
We need somebody to specifically
focus on that,” said the
committee’s chairwoman
Juliet Cullen-Cheung at the
board’s March 25 executive
meeting.
During the March 21
transportation and public
safety committee meeting,
Cullen-Cheung and her colleagues
said the community
board should take part in the
process to fi nd a better way to
manage the reconstruction
project, given that many different
interest groups have
put forward their alternative
proposals to repair the beleaguered
triple cantilever in
the past months and due to
the issue’s large impact on
the community.
“We were brainstorming
how the community
board could participate in
that process — now that all
these other organizations
are coming out with their
own plans and initiatives —
that allows us to respond to
it,” she said. “Because this
is such a huge enormous
process.”
The agency has been
meeting with several small
groups of residents, businesses,
and politicians since
it fi rst announced its controversial
plan to build a
six-lane highway in the
beloved promenade last
September.
Department brass also
met with the leaders from
community boards 2 and 6
at a closed-door meeting on
March 11, where the agency
reportedly told them that
they were backing off their
controversial promenade
highway plan.
The committee leader
added that the community
board should also appoint
a board member to act as a
liaison for the project.
An intermediary from the
community board could attend
the various meetings
and bring the information
to the board in a more centralized
way, according to
another board member who
supported the idea.
“There are many meetings
about this going on within
the community, I’ve been
to a couple of them myself.
I don’t think we’re going to
stop them. However, I think
to have a single message and
also that the message is correct,
it’s accurate, would be a
very good thing,” said Leonard
Jordan. “This way you
don’t have seven or eight
different small meetings going
on and information gets
passed around and actually
happens in one venue.”
The community board
chairman lauded the idea,
but said that he would have
to consider whether it’s feasible
because it would be challenging
to get someone from
the board, whose members
are all volunteers, to take on
the hefty workload.
“I’m not against it, it’s
just to try to get people to volunteer
to take on roles like
that and given the complexity
as we understand it, that
could be a job. We don’t get
paid for this and so the other
person wouldn’t get paid either,”
said Lenny Singletary.
“I think the idea would be a
wonderful idea, I just want to
see how we take it from concept
to reality, which would
be our process.”
Singletary asked Cullen
Cheung and her fellow
committee members
to pen a letter with their
specific requests which he
will review and send to the
department.
“I would ask that the committee
write a recommendation
of what you would
like to see for this process
and then let me review it
and we submit that to DOT,”
he said.
PUBLIC OUTREACH: Members of Community Board 2’s transportation committee demanded the city to appoint
a dedicated public outreach liasion for the Brooklyn-Queens reconstruction project at a meeting on
March 25. dlandstudio
/WheelsForWishes.org