CSCS: Council of Senior Centers and Services of NYC, Inc.

Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Visits Bay Ridge Community Board

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

By Harold Egeln

Publication & Publisher: Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Eagle photo by Harold Egeln
City Council Speaker Christine Quinn
speaks at the Community Board 10
meeting in Dyker Heights on Monday
evening. Seated behind her are board
Secretary Eleanor Schiano, Vice Chair
Brian Kieran and Chair Joanne Lehu.

DYKER HEIGHTS — City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, a former member of Manhattan Community Board 4, talked about the council’s work in saving essential services at a Community Board 10 meeting on Monday evening.

“The work on the issues you deal with, knowing how that works as a former Board 4 member, is one of the most important things you can do,” said Quinn. She was introduced by Councilman Vincent Gentile (D-Bay Ridge) at the Norwegian Christian Home in Dyker Heights.

“She is our biggest champion, working to get us through the tough times,” said Gentile, also a Democrat, telling of Quinn’s leading the charge to save senior centers from closing, keeping libraries fully operational and restoring community board funding.

Both the state Assembly and Senate are pushing bills through to prevent $25 million in senior center funding from being cut in Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s proposed state budget, which threatens to close 105 city centers, 29 of them in Brooklyn.

When it was mentioned earlier that the Fort Hamilton Library in Bay Ridge was being reopened to the public this coming Monday after a prolonged three-year $3.3 million renovation and expansion project secured by Gentile in Bay Ridge, Quinn told a story about a female student who wrote an essay on libraries.

“Every book she takes from a shelf, she said, is like an airplane that can take her anywhere in the world, and, like a time machine, to any time period in history,” said Quinn.

The Brooklyn Public Library system, in a press release about the reopening of the Fort Hamilton Branch, thanked Quinn and Gentile, along with Borough President Marty Markowitz and the community, for their support.

She told the board members, who serve Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights, and the board’s staff that one of the council’s priorities is supporting community boards. She also talked about how the council is fighting cuts to community boards’ budgets.

“We work to prevent bad cuts from happening,” Quinn said. “Why has the city contract budget grown faster than any other part of the budget? The corporations should do more with less, something like 4 percent less.”

During the Q-and-A portion, Quinn was asked how the council can continue to help ensure that a controversial technique for extracting natural gas called hydro-fracturing (or hydro-fracking) isn’t used. Many critics claim this technique may pollute the city’s drinking water from its upstate reservoirs.

She said that even though the industry says this will lead to a local economic boom, “Nobody in New York knows how to do the drilling [meaning that outside workers will have to be imported].” The council, the Mayor’s Office and Board 10 itself have all opposed the technique.

The board has hosted two presentations on the issue, which was the subject of the recent documentary movie Gasland.