Mineola was filled with advocates of all ages Wednesday night.
A trio of seventh-grade girls stood up to speak to the Mineola Board of Trustees, filled with a combination of nervous laughter and courageous conviction, to ask for improvements to two village parks.
Jillen Powers, Grace Galanga and Erin Flaherty asked the board to consider drawing pickleball lines on the existing Memorial Park tennis courts and renovating the Emory Road Park basketball courts.
“I’m requesting pickleball lines on the Mineola Memorial Park tennis courts,” said Powers, who lives on the northern side of Jericho Turnpike. “It’s far, especially for kids in my neighborhood, on that side of Jericho, to ride their bikes all the way across toward the [existing pickleball courts].”
She said she also requested renovations to Emory’s basketball courts, as the pavement was cracked and the hoops were in bad condition, making it difficult to play and shoot.
Flaherty, one of the three who lives in Williston Park, said she was at the podium with her friends because she enjoyed coming to Mineola to play with them and wanted to see improvements to their parks.
“When I come to hang out with them and my other friends that live in Mineola, we…wish that there were more pickleball spots,” Flaherty said. “Because pickleball got so popular, when there are only spots at Wilson Park, it’s hard to go there every single time if we don’t have a ride. So, it would be easier if there were pickleball courts [at Memorial Park].”
Mayor Paul Pereira thanked the kids for bringing their thoughts to the board and for speaking up.
“We are looking to do some upgrades at every park. When we do those upgrades, it will include filling up the basketball court,” Pereira said. He added that he liked the idea of drawing pickleball lines at Memorial Park but didn’t want to cause overcrowding at the park if too many people started to play there.
“We will look into what it would mean to redraw the lines. That’s something that people do all the time,” Pereira said. “I can’t promise that we’ll do it for this season…but we’ll see what we can do. Your points are noted on both counts.”
After the group of girls sat down, a duo of senior citizens stood up to advocate for speeding prevention measures on Marcellus Road, where they live. Steve Kaufman thanked the board for their attention to the matter and for installing a speed detector on the road since he first raised the issue a few months ago, but said the detector was not working.
The board said they were already aware of the issue and were actively looking to fix it, as well as looking to implement more traffic calming and speed reduction measures in the village overall.
“We have our engineers looking at other alternatives,” Pereira said. “This is just a first step, contacting the third precinct, putting up these speed radars and looking into some kind of traffic calming devices. This is going to be a series of things to see if we can mitigate that ongoing issue.”
His across-the-street neighbor, Patricia Becker, was a bit more critical of the village’s response and the state of speeding on her street. She emphasized her belief in the need for speed bumps or a redirecting of traffic to make the street one-way.
Becker said she’d play in the street when she was a kid. Now, she said she was afraid to even cross it and didn’t think the electronic signage worked because she didn’t believe people cared about it.
“If they don’t care about the stop signs, they’re not going to care about the speed limit,” Becker said. “They obviously don’t care for their neighbors. They don’t care for the community. They care about their car.”
Pereira said that though he agreed speed bumps were effective at slowing people down, they were also incredibly expensive, it was not realistic to put them everywhere and they create issues for snow plows.
“We have 36 miles of road. Everyone would love speed bumps, because everyone thinks that everybody speeds through their block,” Pereira said. “We can’t just put speed bumps everywhere, so we put stop signs, we put traffic lights and things like that.”
Pereira emphasized that the village’s engineers were working to determine the best course of action. He said he wanted to ensure that the village didn’t act too hastily and respond in a way that simply pushed the problem to another neighboring street, which he thought making the road one-way may do, creating the need for additional response.
In the past few months, the board has addressed multiple resident complaints about speeding, including installing a speed radar on Marcellus Road and stop signs at the corner of Coolidge Avenue and Bauer Place.
