\u201cWhile my constituents are bailing out their basements and throwing away ruined belongings, City Hall is taking hundreds of millions of dollars generated by water bills and using it somewhere else,\u201d he added. \u201cThat is unacceptable.\u201d<\/p>\n
Queens Borough President Donovan Richards told the Eagle in a phone call on Monday that he is fully behind the arguments in the lawmaker\u2019s letter, referring to Queens\u2019 recurrent flooding as a \u201cstate of emergency.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cWe need money and we need resources,\u201d Richards said. \u201c[Wong] is not wrong in his assessment of the need to ensure that there’s a comprehensive plan. The bottom line is you have to invest in the infrastructure. It doesn’t matter if it’s Long Island City or Middle Village.\u201d <\/p>\n
Queens\u2019 flooding issues have mostly migrated from the low-lying areas of Southeast Queens \u2013 where billions of dollars have been spent to mitigate the impacts of flooding and severe storms \u2013 to areas of central Queens where infrastructure can\u2019t keep pace with the amount of rain hitting the borough on a weekly basis. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I wake up in the morning, I don’t know where to look,\u201d Richards said. \u201cBefore, it was just automatically Rosedale, it was automatically Far Rockaway. You’re not really seeing those issues there anymore. Now I have Queens Center Mall to contend with.\u201d<\/p>\n
City Hall did not comment on Wong\u2019s letter to the mayor. <\/p>\n
During an unrelated press conference in Queens on Monday, Mamdani said that flooding is <\/p>\n
\u201cone of the foremost priorities for our administration.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cWe have a sewage system that was built for the rainfall of a century ago and that the climate crisis has intensified and increased that rainfall,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is not going to be the case that we are simply going to sit on our hands until the day in which the sewage system is entirely overhauled.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cWe are exploring every single avenue that we have, whether it is from the installation of cloudburst technology to the use of permeable pavement to the question of floodable parks, parks that are actually built to absorb that kind of excess rainfall,\u201d the mayor added.<\/p>\n
In the most recent budget, Mamdani administration allocated $43.2 million to expand the city\u2019s efforts around coastal resiliency in the city with the intention of hiring more workers to maintain city infrastructure. <\/p>\n
The city DEP said the agency was aware of the flooding issues during both of the storms last week and deployed workers at multiple points to assess conditions and respond to specific complaints from residents. <\/p>\n
\u201cDEP is investing in flood prone neighborhoods and building out infrastructure across the city,\u201d a department spokesperson said. \u201cOur capital plan dedicates about $1 billion a year over the next decade to stormwater management projects and mitigation solutions.\u201d <\/p>\n
As of Monday afternoon, weather forecasts call for more rain and scattered thunderstorms in Queens for both Thursday and Friday. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cWhile my constituents are bailing out their basements and throwing away ruined belongings, City Hall is taking hundreds…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":330010,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[9,24,63,122,124,123],"class_list":["post-330009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=330009"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330009\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/330010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=330009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=330009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=330009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}