By Madina Toure
The state Republican Committee formally introduced former Congressman Bob Turner as the new chairman of the Queens Republican Party at a rally that attracted roughly 80 people in Forest Hills Thursday night.
At the rally at the American Legion Center, Continental Post #1424 at 107-15 Metropolitan Ave. in Forest Hills, state Committee Chairman Ed Cox officially announced Turner’s appointment.
Earlier in the day Cox had met with state committee members, who wrote a letter Feb. 11 asking him to recognize Turner as the chairman to unify the party, which has been plagued by divisions.
“They said, ‘We need a leader. We need the leader now and our leader is Chairman Bob Turner and they wanted me to come here and recognize him as a leader and that’s what I did,” Cox said. “The Queens party understood that it has to unify itself because the policies of Bill de Blasio have taken the city in the wrong direction, back to the terrible days of the late 1980s and early ‘90s.”
Turner called Republican clubs and district leaders in the borough the “strength of the party” and said the party has identified people who can help tackle issues such as voter registration and fund-raising.
“We have a number of things to do. I want to thank everyone who has helped in this process, and this has not been easy,” Turner told the audience. “As I understand it, Queens has had an intramural feud since around ‘91, I’ve got different dates. That’s a pretty long time, so much so that I doubt everyone can remember what the underlying causes were.”
He said Robert Beltrani and Ed Carroll would serve as co-chairmen of the next reorganization meeting.
Turner, 73, attended Richmond Hill HS and St. John’s University. He served in the U.S. Army in the 1960s and worked as a media executive before he won a special election to fill the seat of former U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner, who represented parts of Brooklyn and Queens, in 2011 — a position he held until 2013 when the seat was eliminated by redistricting.
