Queens Chronicle
Lynn Schulman has run for City Council before. But the Covid-19
pandemic gave her a sense of mission and urgency, and the desire for a
change.
“The coronavirus laid bare all the inequities of city
government,” Schulman told the Chronicle in an interview. “We are going
to need to find new ways to approach all kinds of different issues:
housing, homelessness, public safety.”
Schulman, who is the
Democratic nominee for the 29th District seat held by Karen Koslowitz,
likens Covid on her website to her experiences in the LGBTQ community
AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, “when I saw a generation of my friends and
neighbors die because of the indifference of those in power to those in
my community.”
Healthcare, education and small business advocacy were the themes she stressed the most during the phone chat.
“Queens
was the epicenter of the virus,” said the decades-long activist. “Over
the last 20 years, 10 hospitals in the area have closed, some in this
district. There’s a lack of hospital capacity.” She believes real estate
interests are behind the closures aside from the former hospitals’
economic viability.
“Hospitals closed for a number of reasons,” said the former 10-year employee in the city’s Health + Hospitals system.
She said the problem can be addressed through existing hospitals expanding their capacity.
“Regardless of how it comes out, if we don’t expand capacity, people will die,” she said.
If
Schulman gets elected and has her way, the outgoing mayor’s edict to
eliminate Gifted and Talented programs in city schools will be very
short-lived.
“Kids only get one chance at an education,” she said.
“And no matter what the ZIP code a kid lives in they should have the
same opportunity as anybody else. I am a proponent of having Gifted and
Talented programs in every elementary school. People forget that in the
1980s and ’90s there were kids, including those in underserved
communities who were part of Gifted & Talented programs and classes.
The problem is that the slots were reduced over the years.”
Queens Chronicle
Michael Conigliaro of Rego Park is nothing if not direct when asked
why he sought the Republican nomination in the City Council’s 29th
District.
“I’ve seen a decay in the degree of leadership,”
Conigliaro said in a recent interview. “I’ve seen a decay in the quality
of life. I’ve seen an uptick in crime. I’ve seen business owners
leaving the district either because of high taxes or the result of the
pandemic and not having enough protections for them and their landlords
to help them stay here. I’m seeing our education system being hijacked
by progressive ideologies.
“Basically I want to come in and really just get the district on track.”
Conigliaro, a father of two and a law office manager, also serves on Community Education Council 24.
Two
of his top priorities involve what he does and does not want going onto
a large swath of land by the Queens Criminal Courthouse in Kew Gardens.
“There
is an impending jail looming over our district’s head,” he said.
“That’s a reason for my running — to stop that jail from going up.”
With
the City Council voting to shut down the Rikers Island jail complex and
build smaller lock-ups in Kew Gardens and three other boroughs by
comfortable margins, Conigliaro admits it would take a lot of votes to
turn around to stop it.
“They’re also putting new jails in the
Bronx, Brooklyn [and Manhattan],” he said. “First and foremost, I would
sit down with the representatives of those areas and form a coalition to
show the new mayor that this is just a bad idea, one that no community
wants.”
Given his way, Conigliaro said the money allocated to the
four jails should be redirected to rebuilding and modernizing the Rikers
jail facilities.
On the land dedicated to the new jail, he wants a
hospital to fill some of the gap created by the closure of a number of
hospitals in Queens in the last two decades. And he admitted it would
take time and attention to determine who would build it, who would run
it and, in the case of a city facility, where the money would come from
in a municipality that has massive predicted budget deficits that must
be closed in the next three years.
“No. 1, what I would have to
do, in all honesty, is educate myself, find out where I can get the
money and about what incentives might be available,” he said. “No. 2, I
would need to sit down with [New York City] Health + Hospitals, with
healthcare individuals, people who could guide me on how to better go
about that.”
