Several elected officials dropped by the final Mill Basin Civic Association meeting of 2022 on Tuesday, December 13th to apprise roughly 45 residents of recent issues, including state redistricting and an MTA proposal to reroute local bus lines.
The meeting was held at Congregation Beit Hillel of Flatlands on Ralph Avenue. Mill Basin Civic holds meetings nine to 10 months of the year, during which local representatives and police officers are invited to speak about topics pertaining to residents.
One of the primary concerns addressed by the speakers at this meeting was redistricting, which affected the state senator and assembly member.
State Senator Roxanne Persaud currently represents the 19th Senatorial District, but come January 1, 2023, she will no longer represent Mill Basin, Bergen Beach or Marine Park. Instead, the area will be represented by State Senator Kevin Parker.
Her district will be shifting east and will end at Cross Bay Boulevard in Queens, according to Persaud’s staffer Michael Benjamin who spoke at the meeting.
“The truth of the matter is, you can’t have a harder working, more dedicated to her community senator than Senator Roxanne Persaud,” Benjamin said. “[But] sometimes change is good, so let’s have positive feelings about that.”
Assemblywoman Jaime Williams currently represents the 59th Assembly District and will continue to represent Mill Basin in her upcoming term. However, she will lose the neighborhoods of Gerritsen Beach and Marine Park from her district.
“They took away Marine Park and Gerritsen Beach from my district — we have to get that back,” Williams said at the meeting. “That’s what makes our community the community in the southern part of Brooklyn.”
Williams said that she will work alongside Assemblywomen Helene Weinstein (41st District) and Monique Chandler-Waterman (58th District) to make sure the residents of these districts won’t be negatively impacted by the redistricting.
“We’re going to work together in this part of Brooklyn to make sure that our community’s stable and stays the way it was meant to be,” Williams said.
Another topic discussed at the meeting was the Brooklyn Bus Network Redesign plan. In Mill Basin, this MTA bus reroute proposal will affect the B100, which is one of the only forms of public transportation within Mill Basin, aside from the BM1, a Brooklyn-Manhattan express bus, and the B3, which runs through Mill Basin on its Bergen Beach-Bensonhurst route.
If the proposal is passed in 2023, it will remove stops from the B100 line and change part of its route from Quentin Road to Avenue R, with the goal of making the trip faster and more efficient.
This change will result in stops being removed from the front of James Madison High School, which educates nearly 4,000 students. People may also have to walk farther between stops.
“My daughter goes to James Madison and she takes the bus every single day,” Williams said. “We have to see what we can do to make sure that that stays the same.”
The December meeting was also the association’s holiday celebration, for which there were winter wonderland backdrops hung around the temple’s meeting room, silver and blue streamers on the walls and Christmas music playing over a speaker system.
Mill Basin Civic President Paul Curiale said the association is looking for more volunteers. Local resident Bob Spieler shared what he feels the importance of joining the civic association is.
“We’re community-minded,” said Spieler, who founded the Marine Park Pickleball Club. “We’re interested in making the community a better place to live.”
