CB6 February meeting summary

February’s full board meeting opened the floor for top-of-mind issues in the area: immigration enforcement, weather conditions and of course, the Court Street redesign.

First up was Council Member Shahana Hanif, who blasted the city and ConEdison for their responses to outages in her district.

“What took place here is a crisis,” Hanif said, of the power outages that left almost 2,000 households without power in the first week of February, as a result of the January snowstorm.
Hanif held a Council oversight hearing on February 27 addressing the city’s response and snow removal.

ICE protests
As protests responding to immigration crackdowns continue, political pressure from Hanif and other councilmembers has ramped up. Hanif described a resolution condemning ICE killings and called on Chuck Schumer, to refuse funding for the Dept. of Homeland Security and ICE.

On the topic of ICE, CB6 Land Use Coordinator Rebecca Kobert encouraged meeting participants to share information about resources directed at supporting movements against immigration enforcement.

“I just want to make sure that we as people who are often in more formalized liaison roles, can really meet this moment,” said Kobert, who mentioned the board office would try to share any information surrounding the topic as best as they could.

Melanie Kruvelis, senior policy director at Council Member Alexa Aviles’s office, told the crowd about a Feb. 27 council meeting Immigration hearing to address a bill requiring the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs develop clear multilingual know-your-rights signage across city-owned properties. Councilwoman Aviles heads the committee.

“We’ll be happy to share outcomes of that hearing, as well as existing know-your-rights information that comes out of our office,” said Kruvelis.

The February meeting didn’t go without remarks on Court Street – Jacqueline Nieschmidt from Hanif’s office informed the crowd about a walkthrough of the corridor that was hosted by Assemblymember Jo Ann Simon’s office with the street’s merchants association.

Nieschmidt said that after the walkthrough, requests were sent to DOT to further study metering and traffic lights along the street.

“So, all of that has been sent to the top – Gounardes was there Dan Goldman’s office was there and Lincoln Restler,” said Nieschmidt.

Andrea Romeo, who owns Painted Swan on Court Street, said a recent merchants association meeting with the DOT addressing the redesign was “cordial and amicable,” unlike previous discussions around the changes.

“I would like to see everybody just look at the other person’s point of view,” said Romeo. “There are people on Court Street that have had businesses for years and years and years and they are suffering.”

Matt Mazzone of Mazzone Ace Hardware told us that an additional meeting would be held with DOT, and that the merchants “are looking forward to hearing what DOT can do to alleviate some of our concerns.”

The next CB6 general board meeting will be on Wednesday, Mar. 11, at 6:30 p.m. at the Van Alen Institute in Gowanus.