CIVIC ASSOCIATION MEETING
VFW Hall – Shad Creek Road – 7:00 PM
March 27, 2014
March 2014 Vol. 27 No. 3
President’s Message
Its official Spring is Here!!- and after this winter with its polar vortexes, not sure if that is actually a real word, we are all looking forward to a big thaw, some warming temperatures, and spring and summer activities!
Our next Civic meeting will be on Thursday, March 27th at 7pm at the VFW Hall and we hope to see you there. At this meeting we will have Parks Administrator Jill Weber and her Parks "planning team" in attendance to present their efforts to date on creating the future conceptual plans for Broad Channel parks. The community has met with and submitted ideas to this group and we are anxious to see the final product. The plans are close to complete but still subject to final input; so show up and put your two cents in on what you would like to see at our parks in the future.
Flood Insurance Reform law-- H.R. 3370, The Homeowner Flood Insurance Affordability Act - has been signed into law by President Obama!!! This is a huge success that in many ways started right here in Broad Channel where our Civic Association led the initial effort to get the word out on the impending threat of the Biggert/Waters Flood Reform Law of 2012. Facing massive premium hikes and disastrous FEMA maps and policies, we were able to drive this discussion thru numerous meetings, hundreds of emails and of course our massive flood insurance rally where so many of our residents and neighbors from Rockaway, Howard Beach, Hamilton Beach and Breezy Point joined us to make our voices heard. While this law is not perfect, it has a number of significant aspects including the reinstatement of the Grandfathering Clause that allows a premium to continue upon the sale of the property which will avoid the previous mandate that the home sold would move immediately to actuarial rates of $12,000 per year. In addition, the law mandates FEMA to strive to keep the insurance premium to a maximum of one percent of the policy - so on a $250,000 policy it would max out at $2500 dollars. Most importantly, it mandates and funds an affordability study which will be the basis for future changes that we will seek when the law is reauthorized in 2017.
We could not have achieved this victory without the tremendous support of our elected officials. Councilman Ulrich, Assemblyman Goldfeder, Senator Addabbo, Congressman Meeks, Senator Schumer and Senator Gillibrand all worked the City, State and Federal levels to help achieve the passage of this bill.
The Build it Back Program continues to stumble along with major problems and with no residents of Broad Channel having received any assistance to date. The former program director, Kathryn Malon, has left the program just as we were making progress in getting her to address a litany of application processing problems. The Mayor has yet to select a replacement and the program is in dire need of Mayoral oversight.
In an effort to attempt to bring some change to this program and address these issues, the Civic Association will testify at NYC Council oversight hearings on this issue on March 24th and will attend a "Taskforce Meeting" that Borough President Melinda Katz is convening on April 15th. In both cases we hope to bring attention to the fact that in the rest of the state, such as Long Island, funding is reaching those in need and yet within the city limits additional bureaucratic hurdles have hampered the ability to see funds released!
The Broad Channel NY Rising committee has concluded our efforts to create a plan to produce a number of projects in Broad Channel in order to make the town more "resilient" in the event of another major storm event in the future. The States NY Rising officials are reviewing the project and then we will present the finished version to town residents at the April 25th Civic meeting. I want to thank the committee members for giving up so much time to attend the numerous meetings and for their enthusiasm and great concepts. I also want to thank Assemblyman Goldfeder and his staff for their support in this state based program.
Councilman Ulrich's Participatory Budget process has reached the voting stage. This is when you as city residents get a say in where your councilman will spend his discretionary funds. Broad Channel has fared very well in this process in the past in large part due to the number of residents who came out and voted on projects that the town will benefit from. This year there are a number of great projects that will get funded thru this process and two of them will directly benefit Broad Channel. The first is audio visual equipment for PS 47 and the second is a re-surfacing of the front basketball court at the West 17th Road to turn it into a hockey rink. The projects need your vote so try to get down to the Civic meeting and vote for both of them.
Thanks to Natalie Grant the town will soon have a website up and running at broadchannelcivic.org. This will be a great venue to disseminate information of significance such as meeting notices, developments with city programs, links to informational sites etc. I want to thank Natalie who has done an outstanding job over the last few years in editing and producing our newsletter and who continues to do so even though she has since moved to Glendale after suffering tremendous damage and loss in Hurricane Sandy. This website will be a great asset to our town as is Natalie!!
Respectfully submitted,
Dan Mundy Jr.
No comments:
Post a Comment