Dear Members of the Nassau County Industrial Development Agency Board:
I have written to you several times about this application, in cogent and persuasive detail.
My fellow residents by the hundreds have signed letters to you and a petition. The fact that Gesher persists on your agenda is a mystery.
This application puts the NCIDA in unison with the developer against all the relevant studies of geography and hydrology, against the residents’ understanding of our own community, and against the rest of the knowledgeable world’s awareness that development today has to have a very different definition than it used to.
There are two overriding facts: 1. Great Neck is a peninsula, and 2. Our peninsula (as well as our country) faces a looming fresh drinking water crisis.
Are there other relevant issues? Of course. Traffic backs up full blocks at the lights on the feeder roads of our peninsula. Is this important? Yes. Our parks, our schools, our fire departments, are they increasingly burdened by poor decision-making from elected officials playing politics? Yes.
But geography and fresh drinking water are at the top of the list.
The mayor of our Village of Great Neck lectures the few residents who suffer his public meetings. He says our mass movement to prevent this unwarranted tax benefit undermines him.
The mayor, Pedram Bral, presumes to say we are in his way. He has also called for a Republican “bloodbath.” I am a lifelong registered Democrat married for a half century to a lifelong registered Republican and my husband and I both recognize our community and our world need new thinking.
Below are some of my previous letters to you in light of the fact that you are a board of members old and new. One of my letters (The Secrets Hidden in Our Tax Bills) was carried in the Great Neck News and then lifted to social media via the primary chat rooms here.
I would like to be able to thank you, but first you have to do something worthy of my gratitude. There is too much to lose here.
Rebecca Rosenblatt Gilliar
Great Neck
