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Faulty meters. Loss of business. Employee safety concerns. Financial hardships for nonprofit organizations and those seeking medical treatment.
And, the general feeling of being unfairly targeted and “taxed” through the town’s paid parking program in Bay Shore, which now extends to the business district’s back parking lots behind Main Street.
Those complaints and more were made publicly by Bay Shore and Brightwaters Village business and community leaders, who packed Tuesday’s Islip Town Board meeting to speak up.
The grievances took nearly two hours to air in Town Hall.
Some speakers from Bay Shore also took exception to a recent developments in Town Hall that saw the board unable to get enough votes to fund a similar metering program for Islip’s business district — putting plans for more meters across the town on hold.
(Meters will still be implemented at the Islip Hamlet train station.)
When it was over, Supervisor Angie Carpenter assured those who spoke their minds about the meters that “what you said is not falling on deaf ears; we are listening and we care.”
Carpenter, as well as Councilwoman Trish Bergin Weichbrodt and Councilman Steven Flotteron, each reminded those attendance that the metering in downtown Bay Shore was always intended to be a pilot program, and a fluid program with room for tweaks and improvements.
“We’ll have to figure it out over time,” Flotteron said.
For her part, Bergin Weichbrodt said she “thinks it’s time a change was made.”
“I’m going to ask that my fellow board members join me in sitting down, and making significant changes to this, or flat-out pulling the program,” she said to applause.
Below are the words of three speakers on Tuesday.
NIKKI THOMPSON
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DONNA PERICONI
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RICHARD CAPUTI
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