By Adam Kramer
Slowly and methodically Queens Borough President Helen Marshall has started to put her stamp on the borough president’s office. With a little more than two weeks on the job as the borough’s leader, Marshall has put together a blueprint of what she hopes to accomplish during her tenure.
At a meeting with many of the borough’s weekly newspapers, Marshall unveiled “The Marshall Plan for Queens,” which touches on many of her campaign promises as well as a some new ideas that she hopes to carry out as borough president.
Like the four other city borough presidents, Marshall’s stewardship kicked into gear with budget cuts levied by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is attempting to lessen the blow of a large deficit. Marshall has been hit with a 15 percent cut to the operational budget and a 25 percent cut to the capital budget.
“With so much construction in the pipeline and going on now,” Marshall said, “we have to keep the construction moving forward.”
She said the borough needs not only economic development, but new school construction, which will provide more seats, and more public hospitals, which are vital for Queens.
In addition to rehashing many of her campaign promises — putting together a task force on education, increasing business involvement in the schools, enhancing neighborhood business districts and improving public transportation — Marshall touched upon enhancing constituency services, pushing for civic participation at Borough Hall and improving policing.
Marshall said Deputy Borough President Karen Koslowitz will take over all constituency services. Koslowitz brings a vast and varied expertise to the job after serving on the City Council for 11 years and before that working as the Queens representative for former City Council leader Andrew Stein, she said.
“We want to make Borough Hall a center for civic participation,” Marshall said.
She wants to give borough residents the opportunity to participate in government and hopes to establish a Queens General Assembly, which will “explore the difficulty different immigrant groups have in adapting” to their new country emotionally and culturally.
One way she hopes to accomplish her plan is to make her office and all of Borough Hall very accessible to Queens residents. She said she plans to set up an information booth in the lobby manned by people with knowledge of Queens and who know different languages.
“This is a municipal building,” Marshall said. “Soon all city agencies will be moving into Borough Hall, and we need to make it a more friendly place.”
Like former Mayors Ed Koch and Rudolph Giuliani, Marshall will look to private funding to help remodel and develop Borough Hall. Both Koch and Giuliani used private money to enhance the look of City Hall, she said.
Listening to one of the biggest cries from Queens citizens, Marshall was quick to put improving public safety throughout the borough on her agenda.
She called for the city to give a fair allotment of police officers to Queens, to bolster community policing and to strengthen police and community relations.
Police precincts throughout Queens are understaffed, Marshall said, and in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, they are spread even thinner. Adding more police staff to the precincts will enable more officers to be out in the borough’s neighborhoods. Marshall said she wants the police to know the community and the community to know the police.
“We need to do whatever we can to bring our police and community together,” Marshall said. “One way to accomplish that would be to improve police precinct community councils.”
Reach reporter Adam Kramer by e-mail at Timesledgr@aol.com or call 229-0300, Ext. 157.
