Bruce Blakeman has apparently forgotten that Nassau County’s voters elected him county executive, not County Culture Warrior (“Jenner joins Blakeman in trans ban fight,” Williston Times, Mar. 11, 2024).
In his zeal to issue an executive order barring transgender girl and women athletes from participating in girls’ and women’s sports at county facilities, the Williston Times reports that Culture Warrior Blakeman, “when asked to name a single transgender athlete in Nassau County who attempted to play on one of these county-protected school athletic teams, Blakeman could not give a name.
Mr. Blakeman’s crusade about transgender participation in sporting events reminds me of an observation about the late Senator Hubert H. Humphrey made to me by my college friend and former political consultant to Nassau County’s Republican Party, the late Arthur J. Finkelstein. “Hubert’s problem,” Arthur said, “is that he always has solutions for problems that don’t exist.”
County Executive Blakeman would better serve Nassau County by focusing his attention on existing problems which voters elected him to solve.
One such problem is the sad state of county roads, and a good example is First Street in Mineola between Mineola Boulevard and Herricks Road, a heavily traveled main artery to NYU Langone Hospital.
Last summer First Street, between Herricks and Andrews Roads, was unexpectedly and expertly repaved. But from there to Mineola Boulevard, a stretch which passes in front of NYU Langone’s main entrance, is a roadbed whose patches now need patches, and previously filled potholes now have their own potholes.
Whatever taxpayer dollars Culture Warrior Blakeman devoted to bringing Caitlin Jenner’s attendance to his March 18 trans-ban press conference – and whatever legal fees the county will expend on his federal lawsuit against New York State Attorney General Letitia James’s cease-and-desist order that demands he rescind his executive order – would be better directed toward better county road maintenance.
Adam Simms
Mineola