The reality of term limits hit home in Queens last week when Borough President Claire Shulman delivered her 15th and final State of the Borough address. Despite an occasional donnybrook, M
The reality of term limits hit home in Queens last week when Borough President Claire Shulman delivered her 15th and final State of the Borough address. Despite an occasional donnybrook, Ms. Shulman has been an enormously popular administrator, guiding this borough through a period of unprecedented growth.
We are reminded that Ms. Shulman took office in the wake of the corruption scandal that resulted in the suicide of then-Borough President Donald Manes. As a protégé of Mr. Manes, Ms. Shulman had to rise above the wave of cynicism and distrust that engulfed Borough Hall. While a borough this large will always have problems and controversies, what people will remember most about this administration is the sincerity of Ms. Shulman.
Whether she was meeting with civic organizations upset over the growing number of homeless shelters, drug treatment clinics and other social services or comforting the residents of a block that had just been flooded for the umpteenth time, it was always clear that she cared.
In her address, Ms. Shulman highlighted what is arguably her greatest frustration. Although Queens added 7,000 seats last fall, when Ms. Shulman completes her final term of office, Queens public schools will still be short some 28,000 seats.
The public schools in this borough have not kept pace with population growth. During the last decade, families, especially new Americans, poured into the borough because despite its faults, it remains a great place to raise a family.
Said Ms. Shulman, “New census figures will confirm that we have truly become a multiethnic and multicultural nation. More than 35 percent of us are foreign-born and many thousands more are first-generation Americans … Our job is to give a new generation the opportunities that will enable them to succeed. That is what we are here to talk about today. Public education is our highest priority.”
At the same time, it should be noted that Queens is home to two of the most successful school districts – 25 and 26 – in the city. And remarkably, both districts are home to large numbers of new and first-generation Americans. Ms. Shulman never gave in to the demands and tantrums of those who blamed immigrants for the problems facing Queens.
During the past seven years, Ms. Shulman crossed party lines to form a healthy working relationship with Mayor Giuliani. This has been enormously beneficial to Queens.
Ms. Shulman has already accomplished much and she has planted the seeds for other projects that will come to fruition after she retires. Among those are the development of Queens West, the construction of an Olympic-size indoor pool in Flushing Meadows and the relief of drainage problems in southeast Queens. None of this comes easy. Reaching a consensus in a borough as diverse as Queens takes both the wisdom of Solomon and the patience of Job.
This is not to say that we approve of all that has happened in the Shulman years. The AirTrain is a multibillion-dollar fiasco that will address the problem of getting travelers from Kennedy Airport to Manhattan without crowding the Queens highways. In College Point, thousands of children were deprived of ballfields for more than three years because of a stubborn and unresponsive city bureaucracy. The response to the dangers of Queens Boulevard came too little and too late.
But there is no denying that Ms. Shulman has been a dedicated public servant and that this borough is a better place because of her leadership.
