By The TimesLedger
In the Academy Award-winning movie “Traffic,” a policeman from the streets of Tijuana helps the DEA bring down a powerful Mexican drug lord. In return for risking his life, he asks only one favor of the DEA. He wants a Little League ballfield built so the poor families of Tijuana can know the simple joy of sitting in the bleachers and cheering as their children play baseball. It is a pleasure, he assumes, that the families in the states must take for granted.
Not in College Point. Although College Point is Boom Town, USA, the Little League, the soccer club and the Midget football league here have not a place to call home for four long years. Once again this spring the College Point Little League is homeless. The children will chase pop flies and grounders on borrowed, run down fields. Some College Point children will complete their entire Little League experience without ever knowing the thrill of stepping out onto a real field.
Last year the city announced that millions of dollars had been set aside to restore the College Point ballfields that were padlocked by the city when it was discovered that the “clean fill” that had been dumped there was less than clean. Officials now say the work will be completed by June 2002. So far, the restoration has been proceeding with glacial speed. The mounds of dirt have been removed. What is left is nothing more than a big mud hole. Not a single blade of grass. No sign that any contractor or agency is in any hurry to get this project finished.
Someday children and adults will again play baseball, softball, soccer and football on these fields from early morning to late at night. But the question is when?
There is no reason for this very important project to take four years or even two years to complete. Since the sports complex was shut down, two large shopping centers have been built on nearby 20th Avenue. When the city was looking for a place for the Mets minor league team to play, a stadium and ballfield were built on the St. John's University campus in two months. The permanent stadium for this franchise was built in Coney Island in far less than a year. The same is true for the new sports complex being built for the Staten Island Yankees. When a project is given priority, it gets done almost over night. College Point is not a priority.
Although a number of city and state officials, including City Councilman Mike Abel (R-Bayside) and state Assemblywoman Nettie Mayersohn (D-Fresh Meadows ) fought hard to get the funding for the sports complex in College Point, they have let the city bureaucracy put this project on the backburner. How can the families of College Point be so unimportant?
Hate crimes
We want to join state Assemblyman Brian McLaughlin (D-Flushing) in expressing condemnation of two violent assaults outside nightclubs on Bell Boulevard in Bayside. Both incidents appear to be bias crimes. But we do not agree that these assaults are proof of the need for the state's Hate Crime law. In fact, they may prove just how difficult this law is to enforce.
In the first incident, in February a black man was beaten and robbed by three to four whites outside the Byzantio Bar and Grill. In the second, in March, a Hispanic man stabbed three men at the Voodoo Lounge after they allegedly taunted him for being at the club with a white woman.
If they are convicted of robbery in the first degree, the men who beat and robbed the man outside the Byzantio Bar and Grill are looking at long years in a state prison. The state can punish these men severely without having to prove that they had bias in their hearts before they robbed their victim.
