Sunnyside C Of C Hears New Bd 2 District Manager
BY THOMAS COGAN

Debra Markell Kleinert succeeded Dolores Rizzotto as the Board 2 district manager. She came to Board 2 from the Community Assistance Unit in the office of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, where she was Queens director.

The Sunnyside Chamber of Commerce held its first monthly luncheon of 2007, and the first since November, last Tuesday at Dazies Restaurant on Queens Boulevard. Addressing the luncheon attendees was Debra Markell Kleinert, since September the district manager of Community Board 2. Also speaking at some length was Sunnyside Chamber of Commerce President John Vogt, who went over a few plans and dreams for the year to come.

Markell Kleinert succeeded Dolores Rizzotto as the Board 2 district manager. She came to Board 2 from the Community Assistance Unit in the office of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, where she was Queens director, and before that served in the office of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. She said that Rizzotto left behind her "a very well-oiled machine" so far as Board 2's internal functions and liaison with city agencies were concerned. As new district manager she said, she added a little more oil and a little glue. The computer system was brought up-to-date, and a summer volunteer from college was hired as a three-day-perweek employee. There has been training to improve the board's understanding of licensing procedures in the city's agencies. She cited the board's city services committee, headed by Patrick O' Brien, as a body needing to know about licensing, since it is more and more faced with bar and restaurant openings, particularly on Roosevelt Avenue but also on such other thoroughfares as Vernon Boulevard. The committee wants to put a moratorium on these openings, believing that the local area simply has too many bar-and-restaurant establishments. A city moratorium has been issued on street fairs, so the community board is holding the line to those occurring on Greenpoint Avenue, 46th Street and a few other places. A denial was recently issued to a group that wished to have a fair on 61st Street.

Markell Kleinert said that after working for two mayors she is familiar with the administration side of the communications between the mayor's office and the community. After arriving at the community side, she now has some advice for community groups such as the board and the Sunnyside Chamber of Commerce. She said they must stay loud and keep on top of things, never giving the city an excuse to ignore them. The mayor's office, she said, takes community groups very seriously. Pursuant to such advice, Gerry Lederman, former chamber president, said all concerned parties should alert the Department of Environmental Protection that some parts of Sunnyside have a problem of low water pressure. He said he had informed DEA and thus far had received no reaction from the agency, so another notice should be submitted.

The drive to make the Sunnyside Business Improvement District (BID) a reality seems to be making progress, according to Vogt. An interagency group from the city recently held a meeting with the BID's several proponents and questioned them about some local eyesores, such as the vacant lot beside the recently opened Starbucks on Queens Boulevard near 46th Street. The lot is the last space in what was a large gap created when a fire in the late 1990s destroyed a greengrocer on the corner and a Korean restaurant next to it. It's a gap that Starbucks and the T-Mobile store and Curves salon on the corner have not quite managed to close. The bid for the BID will bring Vogt and other interested parties before Community Board 2 at its next meeting, Thursday, February 1. (The SCC president mentioned also that Woodside on the Move has expressed interest in a BID for the 61st Street area.) He looked forward to a time this year when the BID is in effect and he could work on getting new streetlight poles for Queens Boulevard, perhaps by applying for a grant from Cityscapes, a $6 million fund maintained by the Small Business Services department of the city Economic Development Corporation.

He said he was not totally opposed to the Department of Transportation's alterations along Queens Boulevard in recent years, but resents what he sees as the DOT heedless attitude toward the neighborhood. He deplored in particular the cutoff at 40th Street, which used to run under the No. 7 viaduct to both sides of Queens Boulevard. The cutoff is effected by a couple of dozen bollards that stand in a square formation like dwarf sentinels, blocking traffic from one side of the boulevard to the other and also from one part of the parking areas under the viaduct to another. If traffic has to go out of its way now, he said, drivers are discouraged from stopping to go into any local stores. Also, it serves further to separate one side of Queens Boulevard from the other, turning the viaduct into what Vogt called the Great Wall of Sunnyside.