A news story does not exactly deliver the news.
Take, for example, the reporting several months back on the encounter between a teenager and a young man on the Village Green in the Village of Great Neck that resulted in one of them stabbing the other.
Mayor Kreitzman shed an official tear, saying, “It is most unfortunate that we have these problems….”
The second-story convenience store across from the Green on Middle Neck Road has often been my destination, especially in the evening. I walk there to purchase a peppermint patty or a newspaper.
The young men who hang out there are a handful of regulars, not an ever-changing ever-expanding population. They live here in our community, and during their daylight hours they work hard and earn little. To my blue eye, they are Hispanic.
To me, to my person, they are unfailingly polite. If one of them happens to be exiting the store, he steps aside and holds open the door, so I have no idea what has pushed the idea that these young men are a threat to babies in prams at the midday hour.
These young men sometimes sit across the street on a park bench of an evening. It is true this behavior does not fit the suburb in which we live. I recall the unsuccessful efforts, for years, by parents in these villages to establish a teen center to prevent just such hanging out. We have no public hanging out places here, not even for our children.
I have wondered these past months why that violent event, the stabbing, was viewed with such official indifference. Prejudice, I suppose. After all, if a tow-head, a blond, resorted to peeing on a wall outside the convenience store, as one of these men was rumored to have done, we’d build him a bathroom.
So, we have a problem. While I would not want to be unkind, I have no ability to endow our mayor with the attributes in which he is deficient. When he almost lost re-election this past June in a write-in vote by hundreds of residents, he called the election “interesting,” though it was obviously outrage at his failures. When asked what he thought about a stabbing on the Green, the mayor remarked it “unfortunate,” failing to mention that a resident was harmed.
His thinking is about as deep as the water that accumulates in a shallow basin after a shower, before it evaporates. Our thinking should not follow his.
The mayor’s response to the stabbing is typical of his disinclination to connect with his village and our humanity.
When he wanted to enact a code against boats, he did not seek out, meet with, or alert boat-owning residents on a peninsula surrounded by water and boating, where, for more than half a century, the United States has seen fit to maintain our Merchant Marine Academy.
Instead the mayor sees that fines are levied on boat owners, forcing some to sell their boats and forego maritime recreation.
When the mayor wanted to pass legislation regulating the cords of wood residents store outdoors to burn in their fireplaces, he did not see fit to contact fireplace owners.
When the mayor spared no sweat enacting legislation for height-of-grass limits, he did not contact the elderly residents who most consistently cannot mow their lawns and need our help to do so. Instead of doing the neighborly thing and seeking volunteers (or volunteering himself), he exacted a three-pronged penalty: first, a notice of violation; second, a fine; third, instructions to village employees to mow those dozen lawns and then send a bill.
When Mayor Kreitzman decided to pass legislation for a wholesale re-zoning of Middle Neck Road and Steamboat Road (a developer’s dream), he refused to send a card to all village households about his dramatic redrafting of the essential nature of the village. It was too expensive: He refused to spend $3,500 on postcards while paying consultants whose valuable advice includes a recommendation for block after block of matching awnings.
It is unfortunate that we have a mayor who went out of his way to assure a zoning board approval for a developer to bring a 7-Eleven to Middle Neck Road on a corner just two blocks from the Village Green where the stabbing took place. He may hope we residents do not connect the two, but that hope would be in vain.
Rebecca Gilliar
Great Neck
