New York City’s transportation department has postponed a routine Zoom meeting on a Queens bike path after a city councilmember’s remarks in opposition to the project at a recent workshop sparked a fracas of name calling, yelling and shoving.
The meeting on a planned 16-mile extension of the Queens Greenway along the waterfront from the entrance to Rikers Island to Fort Totten will be rescheduled for a later date, the transportation department wrote on social media.
“A code of conduct will be developed to ensure decorum and respect for all participants,” the Department of Transportation wrote on X.
The move came after City Councilmember Vickie Paladino, who represents northeast Queens, criticized the project at a community workshop last week. Such events are typically opportunities for residents to discuss projects in small groups. But Paladino erroneously claimed the meeting was “supposed to be a hearing,” according to a video shared with Gothamist that showed the Republican councilmember standing on a chair holding a microphone, flanked by her supporters.
The workshop devolved into chaos just as it began.
“We’ve got a lot of people who do not live in this district, dictating to this district,” Paladino said, as she was drowned out by applause and yelling.
“This is divide and conquer,” she added, instructing people opposed to the project to leave. “They’re going to encroach upon our roads,” she later said.
The episode is just the latest example of the increasingly contentious neighborhood disputes that sometimes arise over street safety projects in New York City. There have been fierce fights over McGuinness Boulevard in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and a proposed dedicated bus lane on Fordham Road in the Bronx.
Paladino was joined by four men, two of whom were captured on video getting in the face of prominent advocate Alex Duncan, who is perhaps best known for running a micromobility subreddit under his online handle “miser.”
“The problem is the way her and her staffers acted,” Duncan told Gothamist. “She had staffers who were acting anonymously, not wearing name tags like everybody else in the room, intimidating and threatening."
Paladino insists the two men who confronted Duncan were not part of her staff.
One man wearing a striped blazer gave a reporter from Streetsblog the middle finger during the meeting. The reporter, Emily Lipstein, identified the man as Paladino’s son, Thomas Paladino Jr. Gothamist previously reported Paladino Jr. was an active user on right-wing social media site Gab.
The proposed greenway extension in northern Queens.
Councilmember Paladino didn’t respond to a question about whether the man was her son.
In one of the videos, Duncan asked the man in the striped blazer if it was appropriate to give a reporter the middle finger. The man replied yes.
“What are you going to do? That's the world we live in. Off you go,” he said, before trying to push Duncan, the video shows.
In a video posted to Facebook that was taken outside the meeting, Councilmember Paladino said “it was bedlam in there.”
“People at certain tables who aren’t even from this district got crazy. The room totally erupted,” she said, adding that some people were trying to shove the project “down our throats.”
“The rules of decorum is that the people of my district have got the right to voice their opinion,” the councilmember told Gothamist in response to the canceled meeting.
“What I've said all along and I will continue to say is this: We have to hear each other out. Nobody is going to come into my district and dictate to my people without giving them a voice,” she said. “What took place the other night was perfectly fine until I said, ‘We don't need that many bike lanes in District 19.’”
Transportation department spokesperson Vin Barone said the project will be a boon for Queens neighborhoods.
“This greenway plan could better connect residents in northeast Queens to the beautiful parks in their neighborhoods through new bike paths and pedestrian spaces, creating welcoming areas for cyclists as well as families in need of safer streets to walk with their children and grandchildren,” he said in a statement. “We will always strive to ensure we’re hosting respectful, inclusive meetings as we develop this historic greenway expansion hand in hand with local residents."
Duncan, the advocate, said a new code of conduct won’t change the quality of discourse.
“Rules of decorum don't matter if you don't have the power to enforce them,” Duncan said.
