#NYC resident tells de Blasio feud with Cuomo hurts community

The head of a Queens community board told Mayor de Blasio that his clashes with Governor Cuomo over how to control the coronavirus pandemic hurt local business owners and parents– a day after Hizzoner insisted that their notorious feud was a “moot point.”

“I’m here to say that the miscommunication and lack of coordination between the state and city has had a very negative effect on the residents of my district,” a WNYC listener named Alexa Weitzman said during the radio station’s weekly call-in show with the mayor.

Community Board 6 covers the Rego Park and Forest Hills sections of the borough that are in Gov. Cuomo’s new red zone lockdown order where non-essential businesses and schools are closed at least through next week. 

Just days before Cuomo announced the lockdown, de Blasio had put Rego Park and Forest Hills in two separate categories, with the former classifying as a hotspot with COVID-19 positivity rate of over 3 percent and the latter staying on a watchlist because the rate was just under 2 percent.  

Weitzman said that Forest Hills “has not had a demonstrable increase in coronavirus cases as far as we can tell,” and yet neighborhood businesses have had to shutter– some shortly after reopening– and schools were shut down.

“It’s not New York smart,” Weitzman said, twisting a favorite dictum of Gov. Cuomo to be ‘New York Smart’ during the pandemic.

During his press briefing Thursday de Blasio had insisted that the ongoing battle with Cuomo didn’t matter.

“I think people should stop focusing on this,” he said. “I think it’s just a moot point,” he told reporters.

But he took a different position with Weitzman Friday.

“Alexa you’re obviously right that it would have been nice if there had been one consistent approach from the beginning,” he said.

“That’s sometimes hard to do between different levels of government…it is not helpful but it is often a reality,” he said.

De Blasio said his goal is to emerge from the state order locking down parts of Brooklyn and Queens by the end of next week, though Cuomo said Thursday it’s too early to tell and the decision is ultimately up to him, not the mayor.

The mayor said there’s a “leveling off” in the rise of coronavirus cases citywide, but some hotspots continue to see an increase in cases. He did not identify specific neighborhoods and the city’s Health Dept. has stopped publishing daily data by zip code.

Still de Blasio remained optimistic that the city could avert a second wave of the pandemic and start focusing on luring people back next year when he hopes to remake the Big Apple as a “great life sciences, biotech capitol.”

He first laid out the vision for the plan in September but still has not provided any details on how to make it a reality.