A newsletter dated Spring 2021 came to my home in the Village of Great Neck from Mayor Pedram Bral in the runup to the June election.
When Bral was first on the ballot in 2015, he campaigned promising to enact term limits. Now the mayor is on the ballot for the fourth time.
Though it gathered no headlines, when Bral was first elected six years ago he discontinued the newsletter that had been a mainstay of village life for at least half a century. The demise of the newsletter ended communication from village hall to village residents. Bral himself told me he did not read the local newspapers and thought the newsletter was a waste of money.
Six years went by, and during this time public meetings of the board of trustees have included habitual adjournments to their private conversations in executive sessions that make a mockery of the Open Meetings Law of New York State. Untethered from a newsletter, the mayor and trustees have drifted further into secrecy and autocracy.
In that 2015 campaign, Bral also promised to roll back his predecessor’s incentive zoning, which allows the board of trustees to accept a sum of money from a developer in exchange for permission to exceed the limits specified by the zoning code, to not merely build but rather to invade. After he was elected mayor, Bral became a proponent of incentive zoning. Some call this a legal bribe.
So what does this newly minted 2021 newsletter do? Well, the design is disturbing and the words are misleading. On the front page, the village logo is reduced to the size of a dime. The typeface throughout is either too faint, too dark, or too big. The dominant color is pale orange with headings in red or black. The pages have no margins (words run tippy top to the very bottom), isolated words SHOUT and sentences bastardize English.
The newsletter proclaims the mayor has purchased a piece of property where he will build a new village hall. It fails to mention that: 1. He paid $800,000 for a lot too small and totally inadequate; 2. The developer who sold it to the mayor has been saddled with it for years.
In 2015 Bral campaigned on a promise to preserve our historic village hall. In 2019, hundreds of residents attended board of trustee meetings to declare they opposed the mayor’s intended expansion of incentive zoning, which included the site for a new village hall on that developer’s property on Middle Neck Road. The mayor purchased it anyway in 2020.
The mayor wasted our money. Our village’s Department of Public Works sits on almost two acres, large enough to comfortably add a village hall. Our DPW is across Middle Neck Road from the property the mayor purchased.
The mayor has a noticeable disinterest in local history, including the fact that our village hall, which has been in desperate need of renovation, was the home of the Baker family for whom Baker Hill Road was named. The Baker farm encompassed 100 acres of our village.
While Bral has been determined to dump the Baker homestead, he was one of a group that approached the Great Neck Park District asking to erect a monument on the Village Green to Cyrus the Great, a Persian ruler. Yearly, Bral has village workers hang banners on the poles along Middle Neck Road to celebrate Nowruz, the New Year of his home country, Iran.
Americans are descended from immigrants, so we have strong kinships elsewhere, but that should not eclipse our allegiance to the history of our new community, where we have settled. This would apply especially to elected officials.
The mayor’s purchase of the developer’s leftover plot of land on Middle Neck Road is astonishing in two ways. First, the mayor agreed to a covenant giving the developer unprecedented control of the property for the next 50 years despite the village’s owning it. Second, the mayor considered no other site. At the same time, the mayor is selling our two acres on East Shore Road to another developer and without a bidding process.
On term limits and incentive zoning, Bral reversed himself effortlessly, but trading away village hall despite a public outcry is a more noticeable betrayal, so he has cast himself as a good guy sacrificing our village hall on Baker Hill for the benefit of the public school district, which wants to buy it. That’s obviously not why he’s doing it.
A mayor with any sense would look at the map that dominates the meeting room at village hall and see the names of the streets, the imprimatur of the long-ago families who founded and bequeathed this village to us. A mayor worthy of the title would not consign local history to a wrecking ball and wipe out the past. He would lead a landmarking endeavor.
But back to the newsletter. One page offers a large color-coded pie. The slices of the pie say 13% of our property taxes go to the village, 61% to the public schools, a recognizable slander of spending on public education.
The newsletter has no information with which we might assess the pie: budgets and populations and tax rates are missing. It omits mention that much of school spending has stringent New York State guidelines, whereas village spending is uninhibited as in, say, an expenditure of $800,000 for an unnecessary purchase. The newsletter pie is a bit of a lie.
As some of us already know, the mayor gives residents stop signs on street corners for the asking, and those new stop signs are heralded in the newsletter. Here’s why.
The alternative is to ask the Nassau County Police Department to monitor the intersections that are notorious, and the police would issue tickets for moving violations that come with points on your license and a hefty fine. But the mayor has heard from friends who don’t want to pay fines. So we still have speeders and the stop signs, blinking, do not make our streets safer.
Previous mayors titled our newsletter The Old Village News, in homage to our century-long sobriquet The Old Village. Bral’s newsletter is The Great Neck Villager, a misnomer. Each resident of all villages in Great Neck is a Great Neck villager.
The other misnomer is calling it a newsletter.
Rebecca Rosenblatt Gilliar
