Chamber gets the scoop on village happenings

The monthly Valley Stream Chamber of Commerce meetings give business owners and employees a chance to network, eat some good local food and, every June, hear what’s going on around the village.

Mayor Ed Fare made his annual address to the Chamber on June 26 at Sip This on Rockaway Avenue and touched on all the major happenings in the village, including renovations to the Valley Stream pool complex, the Community Center and the new courthouse on Rockaway Avenue, which is scheduled to open in early 2014.

He also mentioned two grants that Nassau County Executive Ed Mangano awarded the village including a $50,000 grant for new lights under the Long Island Rail Road trestle. Valley Stream is also one of three villages that will take part in a county-funded study to do transit-orientated development around the railroad tracks and business district. “We’ve been working tirelessly with the county executive to make sure that Valley Stream was one of the communities to receive this,” Fare said.

Changes were also announced to the village’s annual Sept. 11 ceremony, which commemorates the lives lost in the 2001 terrorist attacks. This year, the ceremony will be held in the evening — most likely at 6 p.m. — instead of in the morning. Fare said moving the ceremony back in the day will allow more people to attend.

Cartoon maps coming back to Valley Stream

In 2007, the Chamber brought in Mark Snider from MapToons, a Long Island-based company that makes cartoon maps for communities. The maps are used as an advertising tool for businesses and get mailed to residents throughout the community.

Now, six years later, Snider and MapToons are back to create another map for Valley Stream businesses. He made a presentation at last month’s Chamber meeting and showed business owners some examples of maps he recently created. The maps can now be viewed online on the MapToons’ website and are interactive, which means that a business’ contact information can be reached with the wave of a mouse.

Also, the maps come with shopper discount cards to promote shopping locally. Snider said that MapToons will go business-to-business in Valley Stream in July to start the mapping process and will begin distributing the maps after Thanksgiving. About 25,000 maps will be sent out in all.

Debbi Gyulay, president of the Chamber, said MapToons is good for her organization because it increases membership, which was the result in 2007.