Letters

We attended an exciting football game in New Jersey on Sunday. It was everything a fan could hope for.

But this letter is not about football. It’s about the return trip from the Meadowlands in New Jersey to our meeting place in Hauppauge.

It took four hours to go 55 miles. That averages to 13.75 mph. The condition of the roads is poor.

The roads were never designed to handle the amount of traffic on them today. The Cross Bronx Expressway was completed in 1963, according to a Google search. The Long Island Expressway was completed to Exit 72 in the early 1970s. These two highways are critical arteries for freight and passenger traffic. Without them, Long Island will fail economically. Yet they have too few lanes and no evidence of professional maintenance in at least 20 years.

Lee Zeldin has been our representative in Congress for many years. He has done absolutely nothing to promote the rehabilitation of these two roads.

You guessed it — this letter is about Lee Zeldin and his repeated failure to answer the needs of his constituents. These are the two main roads under federal control in our area. The roughest road surface on the LIE is in Zeldin’s district. Yes, the Cross Bronx is outside of Zeldin’s district, but the impact is directly on us.

Speaking of outside his district, Zeldin recently bemoaned the lack of funding for the “Iron Dome” in President Joe Biden’s budget proposal. The Iron Dome is a missile defense shield for Israel. Which is nowhere near Long Island’s 1st Congressional District.

Now Mr. Zeldin is running to be our governor on a caravan of failure. His recent mailing to constituents was a laugh. I have written some of those. If you actually really did something, you say so. If not, you take credit for “fighting for” it, or “supporting” it or “demanding” it. You can do all these in your own imagination and take credit for at least thinking about it. There’s lots of imagination in Mr. Zeldin’s mailer.

And what about raising taxes to fix our highways? Yup, it costs money to fix highways, and the only way governments can get the money is through taxation. President Biden’s plan is to raise taxes on those who fly overhead in their obnoxious helicopters and who never experience a pothole obstacle course like the LIE or an overcapacity artery like the Cross Bronx.

And who’s to say Zeldin will not shift highway ownership of state roads to overburdened counties (“The Highway Shuffle”) just so he can ignore his true responsibilities and look to his imagination for things that are not related to the job at hand.

Bruce Doscher

Hampton Bays