Calamity Jean rides again.
Mayor Jean Celender’s ill-conceived TEP project has not even been completed, yet it already has created a monster much larger than the congestion and inconvenience to all the drivers, shoppers and residents who live in and pass through this area.
In the past two weeks, there have been two vehicular accidents on the streets in front of the stores and two acts of overnight vehicular vandalism (July 2 and July 3) – one on a car and the other on a motorcycle – both of which were diagonally parked across from the post office, in close proximity to a non-working village lamppost in front of 8 Welwyn Road.
Our car was one of the vehicles that was vandalized. It was not a “professional” job; after inspection of the damage, we were told that the vandalism was clearly done by amateurs. Maybe someone was “unhappy” that on that night we had the nerve to take away one of the parking spaces on the block that is “reserved” for Shop Delight’s employees. Or maybe someone was “unhappy” that we have openly and repeatedly asked our mayor for proper oversight of the non-resident, illegally parked Shop Delight employees – to no avail. Or maybe the vandalism to our car was just coincidental.
Shop Delight’s conditional use permit prohibits their employees from parking on the streets adjacent to the store. Celender has brazenly ignored the terms of the permit by allowing the employees to usurp as many spaces as they can on Welwyn Road, as close to the store as possible, for as many hours as they wish, without fear of parking tickets to the employees or retribution to the store. Our hypocritical mayor has made it impossible for residents of the area to find parking on our block while Shop Delight is open.
That’s not new news. Everyone already knows that Jean Celender doesn’t care about the residents (e.g. the promise of the resident garage that was most recently breached) unless she can reap some personal gain. However, this time, her lack of concern for residents has given us a concrete reason to hold the mayor and the village responsible for the vandalism to our car.
As of this writing, the village street lamp in front of 8 Welwyn Road has been out of service for over five months. We have personally reported this outage to the village multiple times, asking for it to be repaired, because the street is too dark without it.
However, the non-working lamp is situated in front of a residential building. Therefore, in keeping with the mayor’s modus operandi, this repair garners the lowest possible priority because it would mainly benefit the residents of the area. Yet nothing has been spared by the village in the creation of this mayor’s ill-conceived, million dollar TEP atrocity.
On the night that our car was vandalized, it was parked adjacent to that non-functioning village street lamp in front of 8 Welwyn Road; the situation was the same for the motorcycle vandalized on the following night. Because the area was very dark, the felon(s) could not be seen.
Had the lamppost been repaired in a timely fashion, the vandal(s) would have been easy to spot. For that reason, we believe that the mayor and the village are responsible for vandalism that might have been prevented had there been adequate light on the street.
The recent accidents and vandalism in the Welwyn/Shoreward area since the TEP installation began are just the tip of the iceberg. Unfortunately, there will be more of the same.
For example, the mayor had pictures of bicycles stenciled onto the streets directly in back of the parked cars in front of the stores and directly in front of the post office where the buses turn. No bicyclist who values his life would ever attempt to ride there (or anywhere else in this area). And for this reckless assault on the lives of her constituents, the mayor collected big bucks in grant money.
Jean Celender never responds to letters and emails. For that reason, Jay and Judy Linden spoke out in an open letter to Mayor Celender in the June 28 issue of the Great Neck News, adeptly calling her TEP project “ill-conceived, problematic and out of step with the needs of the community” and “a perfect match to your tenure as mayor.”
In last week’s Great Neck News, Monica Braunfeld’s article asking for mayoral term limits did a praiseworthy job spelling out the best and worst characteristics of public servants, and she didn’t mince words when asking residents how much longer we are expected “to live under this regime of insanity,” with a plea to residents to wake up to “the disastrous impact this mayor has been continuing to impose on GNP.”
Sam Yellis’ article in last week’s Great Neck News shed light on the empty store issue in the village during a symposium which dealt with revitalization planning. He wrote an impassioned plea to reimagine a village “where we can cross Middle Neck Road, where pedestrians’ lives matter, where people are a priority, not cars, where bicycles and bicyclists are respected…” Jean Celender was not in attendance at the symposium.
Where is the knight in shining armor who is ready and able to slay this dragon next March? We need you! Imagine our community if we had a mayor who actually cared. And we need plaza residents to get involved to make it happen.
Remember Ben Franklin’s Revolutionary warning: “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.” The message is still valid today.
It’s time for the Jean Machine Regime to go.
Muriel and Leo Pfeifer
Village of Neck Plaza
(We want our “Great” back!)
