Dear Mayor Bral,
After 10 years in office, you are intending with one swift and unexpected hearing to change your terms of office from 2 years to 4. Your hearing is today. It is a move that deserves much wider attention.
In your 10 years in office, you have accomplished a tiny number of noticeable things:
- When certain residents come to you and request a reduction in fees and fines, they find you amenable. Meanwhile, the rest of us residents pay the tab for your financial favoritism.
- You purchased a small plot of land from a developer who had been unable to unload it for 20 years. That will be the location for a downsizedvillage hall for the largest village on the Great Neck peninsula. The meeting room is on the second floor instead of the main floor in a town whose elderly population is 19%.
- You have the village Department of Public Works hang flags on Middle Neck Road in honor of Nowruz.
- You force out employees who pre-date you and outshine you in knowledge and experience. You want fealty, above all.
In a recent meeting you announced that you come from Iran and therefore no government can tell you what to do. So as a government official in the United State you just equated the autocracy of the Ayatollah to our United States democracy.
In this light, you and four trustees appear to be largely ignorant about representative government and democracy, the concepts and the reality.
After 10 years during which it has become painfully apparent that you do not read, you have decided all of you deserve to remain in office 4 more years instead of 2. And lest the taxpayers forget, your $10,000 a year has earned you $100,000 in addition to your income from your private medical practice.
Your desire to extend power long into the future indicates the time is overdue for the Village of Great Neck to feature in the news in the wider media. Your vote tonight, voting yourselves more time in office, will be the confirmation.
Rebecca Rosenblatt Gilliar
Great Neck
