Bus Service For Middle School

Dear Mayor Bee:

My daughter's family lives in Garden City. Her family pays extremely high property / school taxes for the privilege of living in such a visually beautiful town.

Today I was with her as her three children went off to school.

My oldest grandson is in 7th grade. My daughter lives too close to the middle school for my grandson to qualify for bus service, although the distance from her home to school is a little less than one mile.

Because of the horrendously dangerous intersections he has to cross and the heavy early morning business traffic, my daughter is compelled to drive him to school for his safety and her peace of mind, thus adding more traffic to an already overburden traffic system.

In her words, this is the situation:

"The intersections my son has to cross are extremely dangerous. There have been a few people (students and teachers-one school employee killed) hit by cars while crossing Cherry Valley Ave. My son was almost hit last November when a minivan went right through the crosswalk while the crossing guard had the traffic stopped and the pedestrians had the right of way."

This situation would be unacceptable in any other school district....districts where residents pay far less school and property tax and enjoy the same quality education as Garden City students do.

I believe the only reason more horrific accidents and near misses have not happened, is because most of the parents in my daughter's situation, are driving their kids to school.

The only reason I can determine how the School Board gets away with this is: (1) there are less working Moms in your district so they are available to drive kids to school, (2) the school board does not have adequate representation of Garden City residents with school age children, (3) members of the school board have not witnessed the traffic around the middle school, therefore they can not make an informed decision re busing, and (4) indifference to students safety.

The decision on distance and busing should be made on distance - I will not debate that point; but it ALSO should be made on SAFETY!

As Mayor of Garden City, you should be in the forefront of correcting this situation! You might not be on the board, but your voice should be heard on this important issue. Remember, families with children vote - and young people can vote at 18 - you need their support now and in the future!

Lois Inguanta

Stop Speeders Before It's Too Late

To the Editor:

I read with great interest both Mayor Bee's recent column and the Garden City Police Department's series on safe driving in our community, and applaud them for focusing on (at least in writing) a much too common problem-speeders.

While I'm sure there are many examples of this problem throughout town-and would strongly encourage you to write to the GC News Editor and Major Bee to bring light to your own situation-I'll use our block to illustrate the point: Kilburn Road off of Merillon Avenue.

One of the main speeding offenders are the teenagers in our high school who use Kilburn as a cut-through when they don't want to wait at the red light on Merillon. They are new drivers who apparently don't understand that our street is not a raceway.

But it's not just the teenagers we see whizzing by at high speed. We've also seen Verizon, Federal Express, UPS and U.S. Postal trucks go down our street so fast that it sounds like a freight train going by (of course, that's another problem we'll have to contend with, but we'll just focus on the speeders for now).

Most surprising to us is watching the moms speed by in their mini-vans, apparently in a hurry to get home to their children before the bus drops them off.

We try our best to slow the speeders down. We put bright yellow plastic guys in the street, but it doesn't work (guess they're hard to see at that speed). We jump up and down, waving our arms and screaming "Slow Down!" as the car speeds by. Some do slow down, surprised by the sight of a frantic (and angry) Mom or Dad yelling at them. Others, mostly the teenagers packed to the max in their speeding machines, either laugh or do worse things that I can't put in writing.

Our primary concern is for the children who live on the block. These speeders apparently don't know that we have 16 kids living here (as well as 9 dogs). But I'm sure that these drivers wouldn't want to meet our kids by hitting them as they run out to get a ball in the street.

So, on behalf of our block, I am asking our Village police to come visit us and see the speeders in action. If nothing else, you'll generate a lot of revenue for Garden City with all the speeding tickets you'll give out. With school just reopened and many new drivers behind the wheel, it's time to put an end to this very serious problem before it's too late.

Linda Sorensen

Focus On Big Picture

To the Editor:

Your edition on August 24, included an article on cable competition arriving in Garden City. Verizon will now offer cable service to compete with Cablevision. Choice and competition is clearly a positive for our residents, but the Board of Trustees only seemed concerned about getting the best deal for "the Village". It seems they consider this Village something different than its residents; and more important.

The benefit to our residents is both choice of product and lower prices. Verizon has different packages including lower priced products and it is not unreasonable to expect Cablevision will have to do something in the pricing area to limit its potential loss of customers. The savings to residents could be substantial. Look at what happened when Cablevision started offering telephone service. They had a substantially lower price and Verizon lowered its prices on similar products by $10 per month. If only 20% of Garden City's residents took advantage of lower telephone prices, they saved anywhere between $40,000 and $60,000 per month, over a half million dollars per year.

If our residents only average a savings of $1 per month on cable service that would equate to about $20,000 per month. If it was $5 it would be $100,000 a month, over $1 million annu-ally. Of course we may never know what that is, because the conversation at the Board of Trustees seemed to have focused on whether $16,500 was enough for "the Village" and whether we should get free service to the schools, that we were already getting.

It took ten and a half months to do this deal and some of the Trustees suggested longer would have been better. It should have taken three months, so seven months of savings and choices for residents was wasted. Come up with your own estimated savings and multiply by seven months. Compare what the residents would have saved vs. what "the Village" received. This doesn't include the value of having different packages available.

Maybe all of this was considered, but given the comments by the Board members in your article, it seems they felt the more important issue was what "the Village" would get, not the residents. For full disclosure, I am a former employee of Verizon. That has nothing to do with this letter. I wanted to point out the narrow focus of our Trustees in hopes they can improve their deliberations on issues. Trustees: Bigger pic-ture, please.

Doug Wilder