Feds hunting down lone LaGuardia coyote

From PIX11:

A parking lot for LaGuardia employees was cleared out Wednesday while U.S. Dept. of Agriculture officials hunted for a coyote. This is according to several people who work for the company that runs the parking lot.

PIX11 has been covering the controversy over coyotes living near LaGuardia Airport for the last several years.

In 2016, a family of coyotes was caught and euthanized by government officials who said it was a necessary measure to protect the public. One coyote survived. Today, they were looking for that lone coyote.

The lot is located at the end of Berrian Boulevard. The crux of the argument - wildlife officials say the coyotes pose a danger to people but others say leave the coyote alone.

Dept of Agriculture looking to lift beetle quarantine

From the Queens Chronicle:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Asian Long-Horned Beetle Project reports no new sightings in the borough for the past five years and may recommend next year that the Eastern Queens quarantine be lifted.

That’s the latest word from Joe Gittleman, project manager with the program, during a phone interview from his Long Island office.

First discovered in Brooklyn in 1996, the insect pests spread throughout Queens, beginning in Maspeth in 2003. The beetles destroy trees and the federal government fears they will get upstate and damage New York’s hardwood and maple syrup industries.

The beetles are believed to have come here from Asia in wooden packing crates that were used to ship goods from China. The containers have since been banned.

Gittleman estimates about 16,000 trees have been destroyed in the city due to the beetles.

To help prevent the spread of the bugs, the USDA uses tree climbers to locate holes left by the beetles. Inspections are also made from the ground across the borough’s quarantine area. The inspectors are now concentrating their efforts in communities east of the Van Wyck Expressway.

That will be followed by inspections in Western Queens.

You want flies with that?

From the Queens Chronicle:

The Associated Marketplace, a supermarket at 153-30 89 Ave., just opened on April 4, and there are still “grand opening” banners hanging along the exterior. But one area resident noticed something that was less than welcoming — piles of dead flies along the windowsill.

The manager of the store, Rody Sarita, said Friday that he didn’t know how the flies got wedged on the windowsill between the glass exterior of the store and the back of the internal pharmacy structure, but he said, it made them hard to reach and therefore hard to remove.

But the flies were also located in other spots along the sill where there was no barrier to impede their removal. To that, Sarita said he would have a staffer address the issue. “This one we will clean it out, no problem,” he said. “We know we have to clean the other one out too.”

Sarita was also quick to point out a passing inspection notice by the Department of Agriculture and Markets, dated the day the store opened, which stated that the market is “in substantial compliance in that no critical deficiencies were observed.”

Geoff Palmer, a spokesman for the DAM, said Tuesday that the agency would send an inspector back out to the site soon to check on the cleanliness of conditions there.

Avella wants city to inspect grocery stores

From Douglaston Patch:

State Sen. Tony Avella, D-Bayside, is pushing for the city to be able to inspect supermarkets and farmers’ markets on the grounds that the state does not make evening inspections.

Last month, the senator and state Assemblyman Edward Braunstein, D-Bayside, introduced bills that would grant joint jurisdiction to the city’s Department of Health and the state’s Department of Agriculture over grocery stores and farmers’ markets in the five boroughs.

Avella said he believed the city should be able to grade supermarkets as it does restaurants due to the state’s policy of not sending inspectors out after 5 p.m.

He used the recent example of a Bellerose halal market that has racked up more than $25,000 in violations for unsanitary conditions.

“The fact is that the city has no jurisdiction over supermarkets, which is very strange when you think about it,” he said. “The state has no after-hours inspectors.”

He said his bill would also prevent some restaurants from evading a rating.

“I understand that some city restaurants are trying to reclassify themselves as supermarkets to get out of being graded by the city,” he said. “My legislation doesn’t call for grading supermarkets, but it prevents restaurants from getting out of the grading system and being inspected.

Uninspected poultry sold in supermarkets

From the NY Times:

A Queens slaughterhouse that had been selling thousands of pounds of uninspected poultry to local supermarkets has been enjoined from the practice by a court-approved decree announced Tuesday by federal prosecutors.

Inspectors from the Department of Agriculture discovered that the slaughterhouse, 44th Avenue Halal Poultry Corporation in Corona, which operates under an exemption to federal inspection laws that allows for the sale of uninspected poultry to individuals for at-home consumption, had been selling mass quantities of poultry directly to retailers.

The government filed suit against the company and its president, Hakim Abdul Mazumder, in April.

If Mr. Mazumder violates the decree, he will be subject to a series of escalating fines and the termination of the company’s exemption from the Poultry Products Inspection Act, the federal law that governs the inspections.

I'd totally buy a chicken from there. NOT.

Hillside Avenue market protest

Sorry about the name snafu, Tony.

That's one filthy supermarket!

From the Times Ledger:

Bellerose civic leaders and City Councilman Mark Weprin (D-Oakland Gardens) are calling on a halal meat market in the neighborhood to get its act together after it was cited for more than a dozen violations, including three labeled as “critical” by the state Department of Agriculture and Markets.

Super Halal Meat Fruits & Vegetables Inc., at 253-06 Hillside Ave. in Bellerose, racked up three “critical deficiencies” by the Agriculture Department, including live flies in the meat processing area flying around and landing on meat contact and non-contact surfaces.

The agency also said there were live flies on produce and in a dumpster and a meat fat storage area.

Citing a letter from the agency, the councilman said the market was assessed a $600 penalty, and the agency called the business a “chronic violator,” which means the market will face inspections every 30 days instead of every 60 days.