Flushing Meadows Corona Park was the 5th largest park in New York City. It has systematically been de-funded to prime it to be sold off to mega-developers. This is part of a a series of articles we’ll have about the parkland theft by local politicians which will make billionaire Steve Cohen richer.

Let the People Decide

We are officially calling for all local politicians to bring this to a vote by the people. Make this issue a ballot measure, and have real New Yorkers decide what should be done with our park space. As we learn more about the terrible truth how sports betting is designed to impoverish people, we’d like to see what our residents value in their neighborhood. We honestly don’t care about a casino some billionaire wants to build but is too cheap to buy the land for. We’ve had decades to see how that works in Atlantic City when Donald Trump did it.

We have zero faith that local New Yorkers will benefit from this project. But more importantly, we should all stand against giving away public land to make any private individual rich, even if they pay off politicians. If this project is successful, it will enrich even more private billionaires, giving them more power to dismantle more of our democracy.

We have worked closely with many of the local politicians involved with this parkland give-a-way, and we honestly know them to be good people. Some who have put in a massive amount of effort to support our parks. That’s why we’re not trying to call them out by name so they are voted out of office. It’s also why we have faith that with enough of the community waking up to this scam, that good politicians can turn away from the big-money donors, and do what’s right for their constituents. We believe that we’ll see them listen to the people who elected them, and cast off the requests of the out-of-towner billionaires class. Tell Steve Cohen to build the casino on his $16 Billion Greenwich, Connecticut estate and his $21.6M Palm Beach, Florida compound. He’s already got too much land and we’ve got too little.

The best thing that could happen would be for any developer to have wasted the million of dollars they’ve spent on paying-off people to steal the parkland. Since it’s parkland, we demand that the city make it into a park! We know that the high density in both Flushing and Corona could use more green space, especially when city also develops real access to it. We need to not only save Flushing Meadows Corona Park but also sends a clear sign to the every criminal developer of New York: that we’re not long selling ourselves for crumbs.

Better hands

As an organization that has spent decades advocating for better access to our parks, we are incredibly insulted that our message has been so distorted where a developer can buy off politicians by promising to a build a greenway to land that was our city park. We’ve never seen this level of bike-lane bribery before. It’s great that your voices demanding family transportation access have been so loud that now it’s becoming part of grift…we just don’t appreciate kickbacks that cost us the destination we wanted to get to in the first place.

Eastern Queens Greenway is hereby requesting to buy this historic parkland that is currently being considered to be given to Steve Cohen. Although we can not make the financial donations to the city politicians that billionaires could (we’re just a group of neighborhood volunteers) our contribution will done this land into a true public park…again.

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