By The TimesLedger
When the city, faced with a multibillion-dollar deficit, first proposed closing a handful of firehouses, local elected officials, community leaders and union representatives warned that the sky was most certainly about to fall. They assured us that people will die because of increased response times.
The mayor and the department countered that the stations had been carefully selected and could safely be eliminated without risk to life or property. Not surprisingly the union and the communities resisted the closings until the very end. Last week the city announced that Fire Department units responding to emergencies in Long Island City actually arrived on the scene faster in the two months since Engine Co. 261 was closed than during the same two months in 2002 when it was operating.
The unions fired back that the statistics were flawed because they included the arrival of any Fire Department vehicle, including those not equipped to fight fires. The department said that was true in only 4 percent of the cases.
No community will ever willingly give up a firehouse and the union will never agree that a single truck or engine company is redundant or unnecessary. But thus far it appears that the Fire Department has made a reasonable decision.
While its competitors run for bankruptcy protection, JetBlue Airlines continues to be a good news story in southeast Queens. Last week JetBlue broke ground on a 102,000-square-foot facility at Kennedy Airport that will include a 70,000-square-foot hangar capable of holding three Airbus 320 aircraft and a 32,000-square-foot office facility to house the airline's technical support operations. The project will cost an estimated $45 million.
JetBlue expects to hire 200 employees in addition to the employees already working in Queens. The bottom line is that JetBlue will be putting bread on the table in thousands of homes. Remarkable this airline came to life in the middle of a recession at a time when some of the biggest airlines in America were retrenching and cutting their losses.
This kind of investment and growth (it's not a dirty word) does not happen by accident. JetBlue could have chosen to build in any of the cities that it serves. Indeed, JetBlue is building a training center in Orlando, Fla. Our hats are off to Borough Presidents Claire Shulman and Helen Marshall and the Economic Development Corporation for persuading this company to invest in New York.
