By Bob Harris
On a pleasant Sunday afternoon a couple of weeks ago a large crowd of people gathered in Cunningham Park to protest the problems caused by airplane traffic in Queens. For more than two years a group called Queens Quiet Skies has been pressuring to make our skies quieter and less full of aviation fuel pollution. Their representatives have been attending civic and all other kinds of meetings to raise awareness.
Many Queens legislators came to Cunningham Park last month and told of their concern of the new takeoff patterns from the metropolitan area airports which have planes flying closer to the ground and thus emitting more noise. Students from various schools came to complain of airplane noise, which makes learning hard. People told of being able to smell the aviation fuel as it settles to the ground and covers houses, lawns and cars and affects people’s health and quality of life .
There are now roundtables being set up comprised of residents, airline officials, the Port Authority and the FAA, but it has not yet been decided if one roundtable will address all of the airports or if each one will have its own roundtable.
It seems that one roundtable can address all the problems over our whole area. This column has pointed out in the past that these are not new problems. The large outpouring of people should convince involved officials that solutions should finally be implemented.
On another front, the Queens Civic Congress, the New York City Audubon Society, civic associations and legislators have been fighting a proposal of the city Department of Parks to classify the old Ridgewood Reservoir as a dam and a hazard because it might fill up with water, which could crash through the walls. The reservoir was an actual reservoir serving the city until about 1990. It has three separate compartments.
Happily, the area has turned into a wilderness with all types of wildlife and trees. A few years ago some officials decided that the compartments might somehow fill with water and so roads should be cut into the berms and about 500 trees should be cut down. All this would cost about $6 million and have an impact on the wildlife and the natural area it has become. The Highland Park-Ridgewood Reservoir Alliance wants parts of the reservoir preserved as protected wetlands.
With pressure building to preserve what nature has created, Parks now says it wants to petition the state Department of Environmental Conservation to classify the reservoir as a “low hazard” dam. This seems to be a good solution and one which would save money to be used for things which the community wants.
Kissena Park Civic Association arborist Carsten W. Glaeser has complained that a capital construction project using heavy equipment will compact the soil and damage large old trees. He has raised a red flag about such activities in the past and asked for a Tree and Landscape Protection Plan from Bowne Park in Queens to the Ridgewood Reservoir to Washington Square Park in Manhattan. Sounds reasonable!
Good and Bad News:
We, the average people, pay our taxes and are thankful for the services our levels of government provide us when they do provide needed services. Yet, we middle-class families are cheated because multibillion-dollar corporations pay very little in taxes or pay none. Sometimes they receive federal grants which go back decades and we don’t receive the same tax breaks which low-income workers receive.
Yes, the governments have the right to encourage new industries in the ways they do, but giving the oil companies tax breaks or paying giant farm industries subsidies is bad fiscal policy. Why are we letting giant corporations reincorporate overseas and thus not pay any taxes here?
I sometimes feel like a jerk for paying my taxes.
