Mayor’s Message Village of Floral Park: October 16, 2012

Enough Waiting

Once again, the MTA’s Long Island Rail Road has been found to be wasting taxpayer’s money and its workers wasting a lot of time on several routine construction projects on Long Island.  According to the MTA’s own inspector general, who reviewed staircase replacement projects in Great Neck and Deer Park as well as a fence replacement in Manhasset, LIRR workers started their workdays too late, ended their work days too early and wasted too much time in between, a complete “triplification” of waste, mismanagement and inefficiency.

At the Great Neck staircase project, for example, LIRR workers took 115 days over six months logging 5,677 hours of labor costing New Yorkers $261,000 for a project that was budgeted to have taken 10 weeks and about 2500 hours of labor at a cost of under $100,000, which is two and a half times less than what the Great Neck staircase project ended up costing. This is not surprising to our LIRR mainline communities, however, which saw the LIRR’s Third Track mega project spiral out of control from about $400,000 to more than $1.6 billion without even one bulldozer rumbling through our neighborhoods.  MTA Chairman Joseph Lhota should be ashamed that he wants to resurrect the Third Track construction mega project boondoggle, given the MTA’s chronic history of underestimating how much taxpayer money is needed and how long its construction projects will take to complete.

Phil-osophically Speaking: October 16, 2012

It’s Only Fair

It’s been said that the American people want things to be fair. I believe that’s true, which is why fairness has been such a hot topic of debate throughout this presidential campaign. It’s axiomatic that a system of economic incentives inevitably leads to differences among individuals. But they are differences that should be welcomed since the worst form of inequality, as Aristotle noted long ago, is to make that which is inherently unequal, equal.

An aptitude for business and finance is no different than those talents exhibited in music and athletics. The best or most popular will earn great sums of money. The titans of finance are no exception. Starting around the mid-19th century, modernization and industrial growth made products such as oil, steel and later the telephone and the automobile indispensable. Capitalists such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford became fabulously wealthy supplying these products more efficiently and cheaply. This concentration of wealth caused many to fear that the U.S. was developing into a Plutocracy. That these products and inventions immeasurably improved the lives of the ordinary man was little noticed or remarked upon; instead it was the widening gulf between the so-called haves and have-nots that became most conspicuous and decried during the Gilded and Progressive eras.

Editorial: A Fair That Could Change Your Life

Unemployment is a problem across the nation. Need to find a job? Look no further than the Elmont Chamber of Commerce’s 2nd Annual Job Fair on Saturday, Nov. 3 from 1 to 5 p.m. at Elmont Memorial High School (EMHS).

Letter: Heroin Prevention Task Force

(Police Chief Charles Gennario of the Rockville Centre Police Department, is a member of the Nassau County Heroin Prevention Task Force and submitted this letter on behalf of the Task Force.)

Prescription drug abuse in the nation is at an unparalleled height and it’s having a detrimental impact on our society.  Nassau County is no different than the rest of the country and we are seeing ever-increasing abuse in our communities.  It is affecting people of all ages, but is having the greatest impact on our youth.

Editorial: New Deadlines

As noted on the second page of this week’s issue, the new deadline going forward for Floral Park Dispatch/Three Village Times, as of next week’s issue (Oct. 12), will be Wednesday at 10 a.m. for the following week’s paper. This deadline is for all submissions: articles, photos, announcements, letters to the editor, obituaries and calendar items. As always, please consider the deadline on Wednesday morning to be the last-minute deadline, as we prefer to receive submissions earlier rather than later.

Phil-osophically Speaking: October 3, 2012

Grandma Knew

As a tyke I was a walking ad for a detergent commercial. Like many little boys I was a magnet for grime, mud, muck, dust —- you name it. My mother, young, inexperienced and perhaps a touch anxious, would become alarmed when I plowed into unsterile environments only to be reproached by her mother to leave me alone because I needed “to eat 2 pounds of dirt in order to be healthy.” As it turns out Grandma, God rest her soul, may have been onto something.

Today, I smile when I think of this bit of nostalgic lore but I also wonder at the magisterial complexity of life on this planet. That might seem quite a leap, but it’s really only a small step in considering how our species, sometimes in unsearchable ways, has interacted with organisms both visible and invisible that surround and shape what we have become and who we are today.

Turn It Up: September 27, 2012

Testify (Evil Teen) is just what you’ll want to do upon hearing the third studio effort from The Lee Boys. Much like peer Robert Randolph, the Miami-based sextet is an exponent of the sacred steel tradition. With its gospel origins, this genre is anchored by furiously played pedal steel and has evolved to embrace blues, rock and soul. It’s a sound that’s found them opening for a variety of mainstream artists including Buddy Guy, The Black Crowes and The Allman Brothers, whose own Warren Haynes makes a cameo on this collection.

Editorial: The Merging Of Minds… And Communities

To those of you who have been subscribing to Three Village Times, I appreciate your feedback, comments and following of local news in the Elmont, Franklin Square and West Hempstead areas. To the dedicated subscribers to the Floral Park Dispatch, I will push myself to create a fair and balanced approach to news coverage in the area, while keeping a hometown feel that we at Anton Newspapers work so hard to create.

Editorial: Hail The High Holidays

We are in the middle of the High Holidays, two of the most important religious observances in Judaism. Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year just passed and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, (which is also the holiest day of the year for Jewish people), begins at sundown on Tuesday, September 25 and goes until sundown of Wednesday, September 26. Hope surrounds the former with meals including honey and apples (symbolizing a sweet new year) and challah bread (representing the cycle of the year) also being served. With reflection and repentance being at the heart of the latter, a number of sacrifices are made including no eating and drinking with the idea that the state of unease the body feels allows one to empathize with how others feel when they are in discomfort or pain. So to all our neighbors at Temple Sholom and the Bellerose Jewish Center, Shana Tova (a good New Year) and Tsom Kal ([an] easy fast).

– Dave Gil de Rubio

Phil-osophically Speaking: September 20, 2012

In The Land Of Make Believe

It happened on the 11th anniversary of 9-11, and yet some still cling to the absurdity that violence in Libya where Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were murdered in cold blood was the result of a spontaneous action to some crude YouTube video vilifying the Prophet Muhammad and not the work of al-Qaeda or some other affiliate of the same genre.

When we are children we often play in the world of make-believe. This is entirely natural and is even an affirmative way to prepare ourselves for the realities of adulthood. But living in a world of make believe is unprofitable for adults (ask Walter Mitty), and dangerously foolish for statesmen. The facts are the facts. We live in a country of free speech and that being the case some hateful and nasty things are going to be said about Muhammad, the President of the United States, the Pope, the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ. Protesting against those who hatemonger is one thing; but acts of violence are entirely something else. If we are going to adopt an attitude that it’s understandable that the Muslim world (there are now at least 20 Muslim countries where there have been either acts of violence or threats against U.S. Embassies and interests), reacts with homicidal hostility whenever some birdbrain bigot trashes venerated beliefs about the Muslim religion, than we might as well declare open season on Americans.