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Resolutions

  • GSD Resolution on M14 Service Cuts

    In March, the MTA surprised our local Community Board with a plan to cut 40% of the M14A and M14D stops below 14th Street — 50% of the M14A stops below Delancey Street.

    In the two months since then, Grand Street Democrats engaged diverse community groups, participated in protests, collected petition signatures from our neighbors, spoke out on TV, plastered social media, showed up at community meetings, rallied our local elected officials, and won significant improvements to the MTA’s plan for seniors, students, and people with disabilities.

    In addition to the work of our own District Leaders and members, there is credit to go around:

    • All of our elected officials — from City Council up to Congress — rallied against the MTA’s proposed cuts and supported community members’ demands to restore all local stops to the M14 bus route.
    • Jose Ortiz and the members of The Senior Advocacy Leadership Team (SALT), who started a petition that collected 5000 signatures and organized a successful May Day rally and march for seniors on Grand Street to protest the bus service cuts.
    • Daisy Paez, our next-door-neighbor District Leader, who rallied neighbors on the streets and online, stood up at community meetings, and led the May Day rally on Grand Street.

    There is also still a lot to keep fighting to change:

    • The MTA made no attempt to reach out to the community before announcing its proposed service cuts.
    • The MTA “open house” meetings were designed not to encourage but to stifle community input.
    • Proposed service cuts were based on agenda-driven metrics, not community needs.
    • Our neighborhood is still losing two stops south of Delancey. Those most in need of convenient public transportation have to settle for a compromise victory.
    • While the purported goal of service cuts was to speed up M14 buses, NYC Department of Transportation still has no plan to mitigate traffic on Grand Street, which is the biggest factor in slow bus speeds below Delancey.
    • Our neighbors above Delancey have lost even more local stops on the M14A and M14D bus routes because of the MTA’s misguided approach to transit policy in the East Village and Lower East Side.

    Resolution adopted May 16, 2019

  • Proposed letter to elected officials regarding air quality during L Train shutdown

    At our fall meeting on Thursday, Grand Street Dems will have a chance to approve the following letter to our elected officials urging them to make sure air quality tests are conducted before and during the L Train shutdown to monitor the air quality in neighborhoods like ours that will see a significant increase in diesel bus traffic.

    Read the proposed letter below.

    Update: The letter below was approved by Grand Street Dems at our meeting on 10/4/18. The letter has also been signed by many other neighborhood groups and local officials. The final letter can be viewed here:

    Update 2: In a big victory, the MTA has agreed to monitor air quality all along the bus route during the L Train shutdown. 

  • Grand Street Democrats urges formal review of MTA/DOT mitigation plan for L Train shutdown

    The L Train East River Tunnel requires extensive repairs that will disrupt the commute of thousands of New Yorkers for 18 months or more. These repairs are necessary, and the disruption is unavoidable. However, the current MTA contingency plans fail to adequately address the challenge. For example, with the current plan, non-HOV cars will be forced off Delancey onto smaller streets that already suffer from congestion and unsafe conditions for pedestrians. We urge the MTA to consider several important changes to its plans and approach.

    1. Fully review the impact on residential streets surrounding the 14th Street and Delancey Street corridors, particularly along Grand Street and Clinton Street.
    2. Assign electric buses, not diesel, to the Delancey and 14th Street corridors. The sheer volume of additional bus traffic on these routes as part of the mitigation plan makes diesel a disastrous choice for air quality.
    3. Provide long-overdue access for people with disabilities and elderly to all subway stations undergoing renovation.
    4. Vet mitigation plans through a formal and collaborative environmental review and impact study and commit to getting approval from Community Boards in the affected neighborhoods before work begins.

    We support the lawsuit brought by community groups, individuals, and organizations representing the disabled which would require the MTA and NYC DOT to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act and prepare an environmental impact statement.

    We urge our city council members and state representatives to officially support these efforts to improve the existing L Train contingency plan.

    Resolution adopted May 3, 2018

  • Executive committee authorized to negotiate full slate of delegates with GSD nominees

    At last night’s regular meeting, GSD members initiated the process for determining this year’s slate of judicial delegates and alternates from Assembly District 65. Four members were nominated to join the slate of delegates, and the executive committee was authorized to negotiate the final make-up of the slate with other Democratic District Leaders from AD65.

    The GSD nominees are Ian Rosenberg, Diego Segalini, Hariette Skidelski, and Peter Herb. Since members ranked nominees when voting, these nominees will be considered for the final slate in this order.

    GSD members also approved a resolution to give the executive committee authorized to negotiate a full slate of judicial delegates (5) and alternates (5) with the other Democratic District Leaders from AD 65. The delegates endorsed last night by GSD members will make up AD65 Part A’s contribution to that slate.

  • GSD supports Lower East Side Historic District

    At our regular meeting on February 8, Grand Street Democrats voted to support the designation of an historic district on the lower east side. The proposed district encompasses historically intact buildings south of Delancey Street between Forsyth and Essex Streets (including many of the buildings around the Tenement Museum).

    The area has been defined by the Lower East Side Preservation Initiative, a group of local preservationists who were instrumental in getting parts of the East Village designated as historic districts.

    If you want to support this initiative individually, please add your name to the petition for a lower east side historic district.

    Sign the petition for LES historic district

     
    The text of our letter to the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission is below.

    Meenakshi Srinivasan, Chair
    NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission
    1 Centre Street, 9th Floor
    New York, NY 10007

    Chair Srinivasan,

    Manhattan’s Lower East Side is recognized as America’s iconic immigrant neighborhood with unsurpassed architectural, historical, and cultural significance to our city, state, and nation. Its great variety of age-old tenements, institutional, and commercial buildings not only enrich the streets with architecture based on human scale and beautifully crafted ornament, but have given the community and its residents a cohesive and stable environment with a strongly identifiable sense of history and place.

    The only way to effectively preserve the historic streetscapes of this vital neighborhood is through New York City historic district designation. Therefore, we call upon the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission to landmark, without delay, the historically intact areas of the Lower East Side south of Delancey Street, as proposed by the Lower East Side Preservation Initiative and Friends of the Lower East Side.

    Grand Street Democrats is a local club of active Lower East Side residents. We have a keen interest in honoring the unique history of our neighborhood while preserving the area’s opportunity to continue to grow and thrive. Please let us know if there is anything more we can do to assist the LPC in this matter.

    Regards,
    Jeremy Sherber, President
    Grand Street Democrats