I.P. Mayor grows impatient with delays

“I just don’t want to wait, I am tired of being told ‘next month’, I want to move things along,” and with that Island Park Mayor Michael McGinty called an emergency meeting of the village board for Feb. 3.

“We have been working on trees, all the dead and diseased trees around Island Park, and now we need an arborist, we need to our election inspectors in time for the April elections, we were offered a deal on the maintenance contract on the emergency generator for the fire house, and the deal is time sensitive, so this way we can move on the deal, save some money and get the job done, and we need to go over the fine structure of the vehicle and traffic laws recently put into effect, so we called this meeting.”

The Village Board approved the hiring of an arborist to look at village trees and mark those that are sick or have died from exposure to salt water from Hurricane Sandy. Trustee Joseph Annarella explained the village started taking down trees on its own, but recently found out the Federal Office of Emergency Management (FEMA) would pay for the tree removal. So the village stopped working on the trees until the FEMA paperwork was submitted. Now FEMA wants a qualified arborist to check the trees. Annarella said the arborist will be going around counting, checking and marking trees to be cut down and replaced. That information will then be sent to FEMA so the project can be funded.

The village also adopted a new fine schedule for vehicle and traffic violations.