Borough President Oddo joined at Port Richmond High School with NYC SCA and other Staten Island elected officials to celebrate the groundbreaking of the high school’s new Athletic Center.
 
“Principal Greenfield used a phrase: student-athlete. All of us sitting here have a job to build you all as complete people. Part of that is every lesson you will learn on these new athletic fields,” noted Borough President Oddo at the ceremony.
 
Borough Hall allocated $1.848M for the project, which includes the following:


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We are excited to see this project officially underway at Port Richmond High. Go Raiders! 

Borough President James S. Oddo is excited to announce the dates and lineup for his 2019 Summer Sunset Concert Series. All concerts will take place at 7pm, with the exception of August 1st where the concert will begin at 6:30pm. The Thursday night concert schedule is as follows:
 
June 27th—Lemon Creek Park (Seguine Avenue & Johnston Terrace) featuring Grounded 4 Life and Freepass
July 11th—Historic Richmond Town (441 Clarke Ave.) featuring The Black Ties
July 18th—Snug Harbor Cultural Center (1000 Richmond Terrace) featuring Anthony DeRoss and Joan Caddell and the Midnight Choir
July 25th—Conference House Park (298 Satterlee Street) featuring The Resistance
August 1st— United States Coast Guard Appreciation Night at Fort Wadsworth (210 New York Avenue), with a special thank you to our Military service members, featuring 42nd Division Infantry Band. *6:30PM START TIME*
August 8th—Westerleigh Park (Neal Dow Ave. and Maine Ave.) featuring Julia Gargano and JD & the All Stars
August 15th—Silver Lake Park (Forest Ave. at Haven Esplanade) featuring Cause and the Effects
August 22nd—Wolfe’s Pond Park (Cornelia Ave. and Chester Ave.) featuring Whiskey Tango Four and Saints in the City
 
A special concert with headliners Vito Picone and the Elegants and guests will take place on Saturday, August 17th at 7pm at Midland Beach Splaza (Fr. Capodanno Blvd. at Seaview Ave). Additionally, Back to the Beach will take place on Saturday, July 13th and Sunday, July 14th.
 
“We at Borough Hall are excited to offer this free entertainment series to Staten Islanders for another summer, while giving some of our homegrown talent a chance to show off their musical skills,” said Borough President Oddo. “This is a wonderful way for people to enjoy our Borough of Parks and experience some of the homegrown talent Staten Islanders have to offer. Good music should be enjoyed!”
 
The Summer Sunset Concert Series is sponsored by Borough President Oddo and Councilmembers Debi Rose, Steven Matteo, and Joe Borelli.
 
For more information, visit statenislandusa.com/sunset.

Borough President James Oddo has issued the following statement regarding the Bay Street Corridor Re-zoning Plan. As part of the Uniform Land Use Review Process regarding the Re-zoning Plan, Borough President Oddo issued a formal ‘Disapproval With Modifications’ response.

“For five years, Borough Hall has attempted to inject some common sense into the de Blasio Administration’s plan for affordable housing on Staten Island.  Their strategy, which will add thousands of new residents to the North Shore in mid- and hi-rise buildings along the Bay Street Corridor, will provide little in the way of corresponding services. 

“We have tried to make them see this issue through the single most important prism to Staten Islanders: infrastructure and the diminishment of our quality of life when our infrastructure is resoundingly insufficient.  It’s a reality we experience in various ways on a daily basis – because of a void in the farsightedness of past leaders.

“In recent months we have aggressively used social media to express facts, concerns, and realities on the ground, and we even used a good dose of ‘reductio ad absurdum’ to ensure the Administration and the local Council Member did right by this borough. They have come up short, which means we at Borough Hall have missed the mark, and the people of Staten Island, both current and future residents, are worse off for it.

“For all this density and the infrastructure challenges that most certainly will come with it, what are we really getting? Well, we seem to have a commitment to pay off an existing debt to Staten Island -- the Cromwell Center and a new school at the Hungerford site – and projects created long ago by the Bloomberg Administration, which heretofore have remained unfulfilled during the current administration, i.e. waterfront plans.

“Peel back the onion a bit and take away the $92 million for the Cromwell Center, which we were promised anyway; the tens of millions for the Hungerford site, which would have been allocated anyway; the $39 million from FEMA for the esplanade, which was expected anyway; and well, that onion will indeed make you cry.  Cry for the opportunities missed, for the shirking of responsibility by the agencies, for their refusal to do the hard work, for how let down Staten Islanders have been, and for the looming specter that what could have been a transformative moment in our history is now likely to go sideways.

“What you won’t see in this re-zoning announcement is as critically important as what you do see.  You won’t see any genuine effort to stop the already awful traffic and transit reality from getting exponentially worse, let alone being mitigated to some degree.  At this point, why not call in Staten Island’s old ‘friend,’ former NYC DOT Commissioner Janet Sadik Khan, and have her make the entire stretch of Bay Street a pedestrian plaza?  Because with tens of thousands of people added to this corridor as a result of this re-zoning, commuting or traveling by vehicle will certainly be painful, and maybe even pointless.

“What was done today was a repeat of the lack of planning that has plagued Staten Island ever since the opening of the Verrazzano Bridge. Today’s decision makers, just like our counterparts of decades ago, will have the benefit of being long gone when the byproducts of their shortsightedness manifest themselves. 
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“As bitterly disappointed as I am, the harsher arbiter will be time.”

​“Thank you; we need more help,” is the message of a short letter drafted by Borough President James S. Oddo and signed by every other elected official on Staten Island to Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio.
 
The letter, dated January 10, 2017 and addressed to Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio reads in total as follows:
 
“We sincerely thank you for all you have done to help us fight the opioid epidemic plaguing Staten Island.
 
“We desperately need more help.
 
“We are hopeful we can all get in the same room in the near future to figure out how we can do even more.”
 
Ironically, within hours of sending the letter, the Governor sent out a press release announcing a slew of new proposals in his State of the State to combat this epidemic state wide.
 
“I certainly welcome the Governor’s new proposals, and look forward to learning more about them,” said Borough President Oddo. “In fact, they are an indication of how important it is to get in the same room to discuss all our efforts and discuss what more can be done. At our December 2, 2016 meeting I hosted at Borough Hall, my colleagues and I agreed that the crisis is so pervasive and serious that we must be working with the highest reaches of the state and city government to solve it. This letter appealing to the Governor and Mayor for their direct engagement with us asks just for that. Does the request reflect a bit of chutzpah on our part? Perhaps. But the cause is that important and the consequences of inaction too serious.” 
 
Besides Borough President Oddo, the bipartisan group of elected officials signing onto the letter was: District Attorney Michael McMahon, Congressman Dan Donovan, State Senators Andrew Lanza and Diane Savino, Assembly Members Michael Cusick, Matthew Titone, Nicole Malliotakis, and Ron Castorina, and Council Members Steven Matteo, Joe Borelli, and Debi Rose.