Longtime Great Neck resident Elizabeth Allen, who was laid to rest last week, fought to protect the charm and suburban atmosphere of the Great Neck community against overdevelopment and environmental degradation.
Town of North Hempstead Supervisor Judy Bosworth characterized her as a dedicated proponent of what she believed was in the best interest of all Great Neck residents.
As a champion of our beautiful treed landscape, Allen confronted attempts to fell trees needlessly or unreasonably, whether by residents or developers, when that threatened the ecology of our neighborhoods.
She was a plaintiff in a lawsuit against the Village of Kings Point, which initially struck down the village’s attempt to use 5.4 acres of Kings Point Park to create a public works facility. She served on the Great Neck Park District’s open space committee and it was said of her admiringly that the park district could never cut down a tree unless she knew about it.
It is fitting that she will be remembered with the planting of a tree near the fountain on the Village Green, one of her favorite spots, with funds raised through an appeal to the community.
What would be an even greater tribute, however, would be for all concerned citizens to take up her environmental legacy and to prevent unwarranted despoiling of more trees, green grass and scarce open space in the town in which we live, and added pollution and harmful storm runoff to draining into LI Sound.
Foremost is the egregious and unnecessary action of the Board of Education to sacrifice one of the remaining playing fields adjacent to Great Neck North High School for an ill-conceived entitlement project, a paved parking lot for just 2 percent of our students, when the underutilized Parkwood lot is but a few minutes’ walk away on the much less-congested Arrandale Avenue where there are far fewer homes.
Not only is this an unmitigated environmental assault against the common good, it is a costly $652,000 expenditure (before interest payments) that threatens to wreak havoc on orderly traffic flow on the heavily populated streets surrounding the schools (GNNHS and North Middle) at the start and end of the school day.
Just this Jan. 30, there was a horrific accident on Beach Road leading up to the school. A student driver flipped her car over while traveling at excessive speed and needed a massive response by emergency services to extricate her.
We pray that she was not severely injured and are grateful that no one else was involved, but fear that adding 97 more inexperienced drivers (there are already 139 on-school and Beach Road parking spots for students) all rushing get into the proposed lot’s poorly-planned entrance/exit to get to school before the bell rings will put them, children walking to school and other pedestrians in great danger.
How much more warning do we need to understand that we are creating a dangerous traffic situation with this new lot?
Add to these reasons for rethinking the parking lot, is its dubious genesis (there is no historical data or study supporting this “need”) and the opaque process whereby it was selected as the uppermost want on their wish list by a few in-the-know parents who were invited to the decision-making meetings.
Yet neighbors of the project and other school district residents who might have objected had no idea that this far-reaching plan was in the offing.
The Board of Education has never adequately addressed the adoption of this want among the 100 items selected for the 2016 bond proposal in what were described by board public notices as priority projects for capital maintenance and improvement and educational enhancements.
This was the only item of its kind in the bond proposal that could negatively impact unsuspecting neighboring property owners and it was dropped on them without fair and proper notification.
Allen lamented at a Village Board of Trustees meeting last year that she feared our community “had lost its insistence that the general good… be held to higher regard than what may affect” an individual.
Sadly, that is happening here. The school board, by abdicating its oversight responsibility for this proposal and letting it go forward, is ignoring the best interests of the common good in favor of the entitlement and indulgence of a few students by an elitist group of parents.
Barbara Shaw
Great Neck
