With over 30 years of civic experience, Joann Ariola is hoping to take her knowledge to City Hall next year and fight to keep residents in her district from moving out of state in what she called an “exodus.”
“I was raised in this district, I raised my children in this district and now my grandchildren are being raised in this district,” Ariola said in a sitdown interview this week with the Chronicle.
“What I’m seeing is an exodus within the community because they’re not seeing the public safety that they were accustomed to,” she said. “They’re not seeing the quality of life that they were accustomed to, and therefore they’re exiting.”
Ariola, a mother of three sons, does not want to visit her grandchildren in another state, she said.
Ariola is running in November’s City Council race for District 32, one of the most competitive races in the city this year. She is looking to maintain the Republican seat held by Councilman Eric Ulrich (Ozone Park), who is being term-limited out this year and who has endorsed Ariola. Outside of Staten Island, it is the last Republican-held City Council seat.
Ariola is the chairwoman of the Queens Republican Party, the president of the Howard Beach Lindenwood Civic Association and a member of Community Board 10. She founded the Lindenwood Alliance before it merged with the Howard Beach Civic Association.
Her opponent is progressive activist Felicia Singh.
On the doorsteps of constituents, Ariola said, she gives them her three top issues: public safety, quality of life and education of the children.
When asked about her opponent’s claims that she is a one-issue candidate, Ariola said it all begins with public safety.
“If you don’t have public safety, you don’t have anything,” she said. “You will not be able to enjoy your beautiful parks. You will not be able to feel safe when your child is at school or when you’re on your way to work and you get mugged or thrown on a train track.
As the daughter of immigrants, Felicia Singh wants voters to know that she understands the difficulty of navigating New York City’s systems as well as the middle-class struggle.
Her father, who is a Sikh from Punjab, is a taxi driver who lost his medallion during the pandemic and had to file for bankruptcy. Her mother, who is Muslim and from Guyana, is a school bus matron.
“These are the stories that I want to center in City Hall because they’ve been missing due to lack of representation,” said Singh.
Previously an English teacher, she is now running in the City Council race for District 32, in arguably the most competitive race in the city. The seat has been held by Republican incumbent Eric Ulrich (Ozone Park) for the past 12 years and he is backing Singh’s opponent, Queens GOP chairwoman Joann Ariola.
“The best advocate is someone who’s had to navigate the same systems everyday New Yorkers have to,” Singh said in an exclusive sitdown interview with the Chronicle. “We need folks who have the world view of being working class, of being a daughter of immigrants.”
Singh is running on a platform centering education and the environment. She served in the Peace Corps and taught in India, Thailand and China for a cumulative two and a half years. Her teaching experience includes time at schools on Long Island and at Coney Island Preparatory Public Charter School.
As part of her education platform, Singh supports a cap on charter schools, removing mayoral control of schools, free CUNY and SUNY tuition and more investment in the public school system.
“Why can’t I be able to send my child to the local school that’s in my neighborhood? Why are we not fixing that issue?” asked Singh, calling the New York City school system “one of the most segregated in the nation” and adding that the Gifted and Talented program adds to that.
“If you are a student who would love that opportunity to participate in Gifted and Talented, you have to be lucky enough to have it in your school,” said Singh. She calls for investing in the schools in people’s own districts. The conversation, she said, is similar to the law enforcement conversation of “preventing crime versus responding.”
As for law enforcement, Singh proposed reallocating at least one billion dollars from the police budget and putting that toward programs like violence interrupters who intervene in conflicts and B-HEARD, the Behavioral Health Emergency Assistance Response Division, which handles mental health crises.
She said the system in which police are called for violent situations is “not going anywhere” and that her opponent is a one-issue candidate who wants to put police on every corner. She assures that she will expand public safety, but through alternative means.
13 comments:
Boy oh boy these girls need diets ! https://www.nutrisystem.com/
why is that most of these candidates think with anything but their cognitive faculty?
I don't get all of these lazy activist kids of hard working immigrant parents.
"As part of her education platform, Singh supports a cap on charter schools, removing mayoral control of schools, free CUNY and SUNY tuition and more investment in the public school system." She is nuts like most demorats !
Felicia Singh will only hasten the decline of howard beach. She is backed by Amplify Her, a pro development, pro neo-feudalist, pro gentrification group disguised as a woman’s equality group. We should amplify womens voices, but women that will protect not destroy our community. Vote Joann Ariola!
Felicia Singh looks very busty
free CUNY and SUNY tuition and more investment in the public school system.
Communism on display. Free = other people's money.
More investment in the public school system = even higher salaries for teachers.
Soon we - tax payers - will spend 100K/year per pupil.
Now THERE'S a pair of curvy babes... A mi piace l'abbondanza!!😁
Imagine being a DemocRAT and saying you’re not racist but all you pay attention to is the color of peoples skin.
All I pay attention to is the candidates busts and Felicia Singh is winning that race.
Joann Ariola is a nasty, totally obsolete, party-machine-failed parasite from the Jurassic days of Al Stabile. During Stabile's CRIME WAVE, Ariola incredulously demonstrated to my parents and I that she was the QUINTESSENTIAL, class A narcissist: Arrogant, deceitful, manipulative, greedy, selfish entitled, reductive——AND COMPLETELY AND INSTENSELY incompetent.
When an interview was set up by Stabile's office for me to appear on NBC News in 1997, and the NBC connections didn't align with the city council's time coordinates, it was Joann who botched up everything to the point that the news director canceled my interview about public corruption, altogether. So what did this drunken wench do? When we came to see Big Al Stabile on the next business day, she told me and my parents that we had to leave the office immediately, and we were not welcome there (WHAT???). Ironically, we were not there to see that nasty, ugly, entrenched RePUGlican bitch, so you can imagine our shock and disbelief at this useless schlepper giving my elderly parents their marching orders, and even WORSE that Stabile never reprimanded or fired her exponentially expanding ass-and-ego! My family and I paid an irreparable price because of their total incompetence.
She deserves to be in an Arctic prison with Derelict Dullrich, I mean Eric Ulrich, the 'OTHER' counterfeit, politicallY failed barnacle from Ozone Park who transformed this erstwhile hamlet and southeastern QUEENS County into a FOURTH WORLD slum (with shithead Addabbao's BLESSING)!
In closing, stop glorifying this ancient hag of politically faled worthlessness (but ONE of too may to name in this missive); the DemonRats own and operate this criminally insane/depraved city and state, so if you are stuck living in Little Calcutta, then you better start 'Singh-ing' the praises of the newest (but, really OLDEST), 'do nothing, know nothing' regime of epic government fail, AND extreme corporate obedience (where the ONLY REAL freedom now exists in the corporate boardrooms of OLIGOPOLY). Old boss? Meet the new, purported boss——same as the OLD party-machine-failed boss! Felicia Singh and Eric Adams were already SELECTED to destroy public trust——LONG before the entrenched Board of SELECTIONS, I mean Elections trained their poll workers to enslave themselves into a system that has always DEVALUED honesty itself!
WAKE the F**K UP, Satan's Brainwashed Cattle!
Republican Party hack, Joann Ariola shares her massive ego and sense of entitlement with Bull$hitlary, err, Hillary Clinton: Like Hill-Billy (despite orbiting different 'dwarf' planets of open space), she THINKS that it's 'HER' turn to step into Eric Ulrich's dirty clown shoes because of her 'Useful Idiot' allegiance to a party-machine-failed duopoly system that is fast becoming obsolete to many former voting suckers whose one-sided allegiance to a criminal enterprise is actually worse, and more entrenched than organized crime.
Ariola's background: She was a low level lacky to former City Councilman Alphonse Stabile, and when that cushy gig ended, she foisted herself upon the clueless, heavily padded Bloomberg administration, where she scored herself (like a hooker who fell a few hundred short of her pimp's nightly take of the proceeds), an $80K patronage job where 'lunch-and-a-manicure' was a stressful day for her flat little head of party obedience. And, now, many decades later, Little Miss Wonder-less Woman is donning her blood red cape with her cross-eyed dreams fixed on the brass ring.
Well, it's never going to happen, my little mattress back: So, take your collective city earnings (none of which were ever earned, much less deserved), and fade away into oblivion with the rest of your profoundly failed service to flag and country——and JUST GO AWAY, ALREADY!
Republican Party hack, Joann Ariola shares her massive ego and sense of entitlement with Bull$hitlary, err, Hillary Clinton: Like Hill-Billy (despite orbiting different 'dwarf' planets of open space), she THINKS that it's 'HER' turn to step into Eric Ulrich's dirty clown shoes because of her 'Useful Idiot' allegiance to a party-machine-failed duopoly system that is fast becoming obsolete to many former voting suckers whose one-sided allegiance to a criminal enterprise is actually worse, and more entrenched than organized crime.
Ariola's background: She was a low level lacky to former City Councilman Alphonse Stabile, and when that cushy gig ended, she foisted herself upon the clueless, heavily padded Bloomberg administration, where she scored herself (like a hooker who fell a few hundred short of her pimp's nightly take of the proceeds), an $80K patronage job where 'lunch-and-a-manicure' was a stressful day for her flat little head of party obedience. And, now, many decades later, Little Miss Wonder-less Woman is donning her blood red cape with her cross-eyed dreams fixed on the brass ring.
Well, it's never going to happen, my little mattress back: So, take your collective city earnings (none of which were ever earned, much less deserved), and fade away into oblivion with the rest of your profoundly failed service to flag and country——and JUST GO AWAY, ALREADY!
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