Letters to the Rockville Centre Herald Editor Oct. 14, 2010

Get rid of extra parking fee

To the Editor:

Five days of our new metered commuter parking has proved that our elected trustees created a horrible situation. No one wants to pay almost $1,000 extra each year for the privilege of parking in the Front Street lot. Each day, about 20 of 96 spots have been filled. Regular early-morning users of the lot are now parking in other lots, causing those lots to fill up and leaving late-morning commuters no choice but to pay the meter charge or find another way to get to the station. The village is penalizing those residents, almost all of whom would not choose to pay an extra $1,000 to live and commute here.

I don’t know who the trustees asked about this parking situation before instituting the meters — certainly not me or other commuters. The obvious and fair decision would be to divide the additional money needed among all parking permits so commuters can all go back to having affordable parking. As a longtime resident, I ask the board to quickly correct this ridiculous

mistake.

Joel A. Slomon

Rockville Centre

Village makes bad parking situation even worse

To the Editor:

The village fathers have done it again with the parking problems. First they took away parking for business owners and gave it to commuters. Now they have taken away even the commuters’ parking by charging for a parking permit plus $4 a day. This isn’t fair to anyone. Who came up with this brilliant idea?

If they really cared and wanted to help with parking, they would have given some spaces back to employees, given the Front Street lot back to St. Agnes and let them put up a gate and rent the parking spots. With the $4 charge per spot (plus the fee for parking permit), if they were to rent every spot five days a week for 50 weeks, they would bring in approximately $96,000. This year they are paying the church $62,750, so there would be $33,250 left over. What would they do with that money? I don’t think it would be used for maintenance of the lot. When I asked what would happen if residents and employees never park there, I was told that the village would open it to anyone from anywhere who wants to park there. It seems to me that this isn’t helping Rockville Centre’s parking problem. It’s only taking parking away again from residents and employees. In other words, they have taken a bad situation and made it worse.

 Joe Schmidt

Liz & Joe Schmidt Photography Inc.

Rockville Centre

Randi can bash Bush — but don’t bash Obama

To the Editor:

Regarding Randi Kreiss’s column “Once again, Stewart and Colbert get it right” (Sept. 23-29): Her comments about Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart say it all.

It was OK for Randi to bash President Bush. But don’t you dare do the same to President Obama as he leads us down the path to socialism and Islam.

She still doesn’t get it!

There’s lots of truth to the saying, “The liberal doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

James Deneen

Rockville Centre