It's Just My Opinion: You’re a mean one Mayor DeGrinchioo.... (WAVE)

It’s Just My Opinion

By Joanne Smith

Joanne SmithMr. Mayor, you have been a naughty, naughty boy this year. Santa is very discouraged by you. There is a bag of coal in his workshop with your name on it, a big bag of coal. You have been in office for 13 months and have done more damage in that short time than the former Mayor David Dinkins did in his entire term. Your distain for our little town, a peaceful seaside enclave, has been made apparent from just a few months of you accepting your role as mayor.

You were invited to attend our annual St. Patrick’s Day parade, the second largest parade in New York, after the Fifth Avenue parade. You didn’t even have the decency to respond to the invitation in a timely manner, you just didn’t show up. Your office, however, responded to the invitation — after the parade — stating that you would not be a part of any non-inclusive parade. They were of course referring to an assumption that the parade committee refused to allow gays to march under their own banner.

However, how or why would the mayor think that without having responded to the invitation in the first place or knowing anything about our town. The truth about our little parade and your nonattendance is that you simply didn’t have the nerve to face our town. Even Bloomie would come and take his lumps and move on. But, you’re no Bloomie.

Your next gift to our town was the demand to include low-income housing into the up and coming Arverne East. This would be great if Rockaway had the resources to support more low income housing. Our roads are still like Swiss cheese, you have made no effort to help us with any sort of health facility, our shores remain unprotected and our transportation system is horrible. Which leads to one of your biggest flip of the fingers to our town, our ferry.

You pretended not to know that there was money set aside to fund it, money which came from the governor. You used numbers from the Economic Development Corporation which were far from accurate to insinuate that our ridership was low. You blatantly ignored our plans to become an inviting tourist attraction by using the ferry as an easy way to get to our shores, allowing the EDC president to announce you didn’t want to encourage economic growth in Rockaway. Then right before our sand ran out of our hourglass, you presented the illusion that you cared and sat with our elected officials in a condescending revisit of the issue. Then you dropped the bomb and let our ferry sail away into the sunset. You ordered the removal of our dock not 24 hours after your bomb. We all watched as it was pulled through the bay without a second glance back.

But one of the nastiest things you’ve done this year to our little slice of heaven was the spiteful late arrival to our shores via a police boat for the 13th anniversary memorial for the crash of the 587. Done purposely or not, your actions did not go unnoticed by both the residents of Rockaway and the families of those who perished on the flight. Your frat boy excuse of having a rough night was painfully self-centered and dimwitted. You placed the bow on Rockaway’s Christmas gift with the new slight of propagating a ferry service for the town of Astoria, who has train stations on every corner and a multitude of bus options. Santa was very upset with that news.

The merry and bright of all you have done to Rockaway is that you aren’t just a one-town hater. You are being very Grinch-like to the city as well. Your initial call to ban horse drawn carriages was very transparent in that you want the stable land to turn over to developers. Developers I hear who funded your progressive campaign and are now owed the ousting of workers, many of whom are immigrants sending their beautiful retired horses to the glue factory.

You’ve instituted gang members as security in our public schools, a fine example of bright futures. You have utterly disregarded Equal Opportunity Employment, by presumably demanding a man of color for your security sergeant. You have a multitude of sins with the issues of your wife’s assistant. You keep council with the likes of Sharpton, a man who has evaded taxes and who knows what else. These were just some of your darkest moments for the city.

By and large though, Mr. Mayor, the naughty/nice dial twirled all the way to downright despicable with your embarrassing and disgusting treatment of our Finest. The big man in red is livid over your disregard for our men in blue. You have all but encouraged rioters, yes rioters, not protesters, to wreak havoc on our city; preventing emergency vehicles from getting through, sanctioning the “alleged” attack on NYPD officers by a Baruch professor and basically causing a free for all on our city streets. You are truly viler than Ebenezer Scrooge and the Grinch rolled into one. You are bending over backwards for a cause that should be settled by new laws. You were hired by all the people to do a job, yet you have no focus outside of your beguiled progressive movement. Santa frowns on mean and that is what you are, you’re a mean one Mister DeGrinchioo... you’ll be seeing horse poop in your stocking for sure.