The details of Vickie Paladino’s October 24th actions outlined on Streetsblog are a must-read, but we thought her attacks against the safety of our kids deserved it’s own visual journey. The Eastern Queens community came to discuss options for our children to get to their parkland without injury. Vickie clearly had a different motive. Through photos we hope to document evening to better bring transparency to the problem.

At Alley Pond Environmental center, the DoT held the 3rd of 4 workshops to gather community feedback on potential routes for the Northern Queens Greenway. As normal, there was an introduction and then everyone gathered around maps to discuss potential routes.

Thane Terrill, a local resident interested parks access, summarized the evening:

I was pleasantly surprised when (Vickie Paladino) started the meeting, saying she was open minded, liked bikes, and wanted to obtain as much information as possible and to reach decisions based on civil conversations.

Unfortunately, she soon announced that while she liked bikes, no one used the bike lanes. This started an uproar. Half the room, including myself, had ridden to the meeting using bike lanes and the other half yelled their approval of her statement. She went on to say that everyone should be civil and save their comments for the individual planning sessions that were being held at half a dozen large tables. But, the people who supported her mostly didn’t join the discussions at the tables led by DOT staff members. Instead, they roamed between tables, making critical comments, such as why do you need a bike lane to see the waterfront when there is no waterfront access? What this statement meant was unclear, and no suggestions were made by this group.

I have to say that Ms. Paladino unintentionally rescued the meeting by saying that she was tired of outsiders coming to her community to tell “us” what to do and then left the meeting with her supporters to have a “real community discussion.” What that was, when it would be held, etc. was not specified. I had the impression her statement and marching out of the meeting room was all part of the plan. She could say she tried working with the DOT while not being associated with the planning process. The way her supporters left on cue was a bit too organized to be credible as an organic process.

Fortunately, all the disruptive people roaming between the tables left en masse. The noise in the room dramatically decreased after she stormed out, and I found the DOT discussions productive and exciting.

During the meeting, Vickie said, “Herein lies the biggest concern, taking one neighborhood and intersecting in with another neighborhood makes up for what I consider kind of like a runway if anybody is committing crimes that’s a big concern of mine, they could hop on that.”

This was a surprising claim, since we’ve never heard of organized crime using the local Vanderbilt Motor Parkway as a greenway escape route. Or is this a dog whistle to imply that both criminals and local cyclists are non-white?

Speaking in the third person she says, “Vickie Paladino does not hate bicycles, Vickie Paladino has a problem with everything that’s got a motor, that’s running unregistered, uninsured, and unlicensed.”

(You may remember Vickie’s son, Thomas Paladino, has potentially criminal ghost plates on his Aston Martin.)

It’s unclear if Vickie is speaking against anyone with motorized wheelchairs using the proposed greenway. (The EQGW strongly supports all wheelchairs on bikelanes and greenways, and e-bikes which help seniors.) Or is Vickie speaking against delivery cyclists, a largely non-white immigrant community paid low wages and forced to work in exploitative, dangerous conditions?

Unrelated to the meeting’s flow, Vickie unexpectedly grabs the microphone saying, “We also use our cars here to go back and forth to school and do what we need to do. Bike lanes are not presently being used here.” After the outrage died down, she continues, “Why is it that bikers are the ones making the biggest stink, why is that…because they seem to think they own the streets.”

Uncomfortable with Vickie trying to erase them, multiple neighbors stand up saying they are in her district and bike on these lanes every day. As one person at the meeting put it, “What she was really saying was that no one THAT MATTERS uses the bike lanes.”

It seemed like Vickie’s supporters felt she should be able to interrupt this workshop to have a platform for her violent (and often incorrect) speech without giving anyone else an opportunity to question her even though she was yelling over the actual productive conversations that neighbors were having at their tables. The crowd was respectful to her until she started using hate speech that many people in the room (local cyclists) don’t exist.

Later when she interrupted the community input again, she said “I want everybody that is not actually interested in this to leave now.” About half the room left creating space for productive conversations.

Normally politicians may be given a minute to kick off a session like this, but they don’t keep going back to the microphone whenever they want to grandstand. It appears that Vickie’s team doesn’t understand DoT or Community Board meetings, since they never had basic experience in local politics. That may be why she mislead her people, telling them they could testimony like at a Community Board meeting. Since that’s not how these DoT meeting are run, she claimed she would set up her own “hearing” and only allowing her district members to attend.

After Vickie and her friends stormed out of the meeting, they gathered in the parking lot. Vickie recorded a video for Facebook and Twitter talking about how “activists and lobbyists from outside the district more [sic] interested in bullying than listening to the people who actually live here.”

According to QNS, Paul DiBenedetto, Chairperson of Queens Community Board 11, seemed to echo this sentiment, saying, “You have a bunch of people pointing to different areas and saying where a bike lane should be and where it shouldn’t be. But do they live there?“

Claims of “outside agitators” from people like Vickie and Paul never come with evidence. The DoT invites the public to these meetings, so specifically who are Vickie and Paul saying should not be welcome? Without evidence or definition, we ask if this yet another dog whistle, where the “outside agitators” are ones that don’t look like Vickie’s group (predominantly white and elderly). How else did Vickie know if someone is from the neighborhood, other than looking at their skin color and age to judge for herself if they belong?

Vickie’s statements are (possibly purposefully) unclear, avoiding criticism of xenophobia from other outlets. Last week she questioned expert witness Jackson Chabot, a director at OpenPlans, “Where were you born?“. When lacking a strong argument, it’s easy to throw a personal attack against someone’s ancestry. (This happened in a City Of Yes hearing; Paladino is fighting rental laws in residential areas, like what her household is doing, possibly illegally).

At the meeting Vickie said that, “I get things accomplished by conversation, negotiation, and knowledge”. As said in the Streetsblog article, her actions showed she was the one disrupting the conversation, something she has a long history of:

• Refused to disclose her vaccination status to the City Council during COVID, calling it like “Nazi Germany” (after leading a no-mask conga line during quarantine)
• Removed from the Committee on Mental Health, Disabilities, & Addiction for saying “[p]rogressives may have no problem with child grooming and sexualization“
• In discussing New York University students, saying, “The sad reality is that our schools are producing monsters, and it’s now our job to slay them…And the schools and faculty who sit at the top of this chaos must be razed along with them.”
• Vickie also insulted non-Europeans for their technological inferiority:

In addition to personal statements, Vickie seems to surrounds herself with similarly minded people.

• Thomas Paladino Jr., Vickie’s Chief Strategist (and son) supposedly used the handle @agustus on the social media site Gab to speak about gunning down African American U.S. Representative Maxine Waters. At the greenway meeting, we’ve been told that Thomas started a verbal fight over pronouns on a woman’s name-tag, questioned attendees where they came from, and told people to “f– off“. In this video from the greenway event he admits to flipping off a reporter and then claims he has the power to remove people from the meeting (though it appears he couldn’t).
• Mario Nicoletto was Vickie’s Field Director who supposedly used the slogan 1488, which references “Heil Hitler”. According to the Daily News, Mario also supported Nick Fuentes (white supremacist and incel), called school shooting survivor David Hogg a “crisis actor,” and publicly advocated for calling COVID 19 the “China Virus”at a time that Asian American hate crimes were at a high, especially in Eastern Queens.
• According to Tony Avella (Vickie’s former rival for her seat), Thomas Paladino was a member of the Proud Boys (a violent group that stormed the capital on January 6th) and that Vickie has posed with pictures of its members. An article from Gothamist suggests Vickie may have more direct ties:

We have talked to multiple politicians and administrators who work with Vickie; they say she is often quite nice to them behind closed doors. They often repeat the line that her son runs her social media and that she does not support everything that he writes as her, but then feels committed to holding those views. That is quite hard to believe, since as his boss (and mother), she should be able to control what he says publicly on her behalf. It may be more likely that she believes some of these vile ideas, but pretends to be nice and makes jokes when it’s politically advantageous. A strategy like that would slowly normalize radical viewpoints, as we’ve seen in the past.

After the StreetsBlog article was posted, Warren Schreiber made a comment that seemingly supports Vickie Paladino and claims the original article was not factual. Warren is the President of Queens Civic Congress and the Second Vice Chairperson of Community Board 7. We’d love to hear specifically what Warren thinks is objectively incorrect, instead of just his opinion that he doesn’t like the facts presented.

The final community feedback session for this round was planned for October 29th at 6:00PM via zoom.

The final meeting was postponed so the DoT could generate a code of conduct for future meetings. We applaud this effort, honest community engagement should not be endangered but culture war politics. We look forward to seeing their new rules to curb people like Vickie from hijacking an otherwise productive meeting for her personal political gain.

Going further, the DoT should act like the FDNY and directly perform proven life saving work without allowing unprofessional local politicians or Community Boards to veto the designs of trained engineers. Everyone in the community should be able to comment and share local knowledge about problem areas, but not stop safety work. The very small number of people who go to these meetings has no right to physically harm the people who do not.

Greenway projects can take decades, sometimes generations, to be completed. What we do now will echo in our community for hundreds of years. The record will show that we did our best to improve our community, not rip it down. Will you be remembered for building our community, or for supporting a fleeting culture war?

Found at the greenway meeting was this flyer, apparently from Vickie Paladino’s office, and then altered by a community member.