Toying
Robert Ariail Credit: Louis Lanzano
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Talking Point
Look closely at that model
The picture captured a proud and emotional moment: Sen. Chuck Schumer on Monday announcing a new Navy warship to be named after Long Island hero and Irish immigrant Patrick Gallagher, who was awarded the Navy Cross for saving Marines in a Vietnam grenade attack in 1966. He was killed in action a year later at age 23. This week, the Senate Democratic leader handed a model ship marked “USS Gallagher” to a relative of the slain Marine. The picture ran in Newsday. Then the letters to the editor came in.
Eagle-eyed readers pointed out that the model vessel was not an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer as the USS Gallagher will be. Stanley Kalemaris, 75, of Melville, said his nephew had served on the same class of destroyer. The model looked very different. Actually, it looked Russian, said Kalemaris, who learned all about Cold War hardware as a Grumman employee.
Kalemaris appears to be correct. An examination of the weaponry on the model ship matches with the specifications of a Sovremenny class destroyer, as listed in the authoritative compendium Jane’s Fighting Ships.
Sovremenny class vessels were built for the Russian Navy starting decades ago, and a few were sold to China.
The toy version is less of a geopolitical threat and is available for purchase online, with the same markings that exist on the bow of the Schumer ship. Not, however, with the Gallagher name.
“It was a generic, model destroyer for the family to symbolize the actual US Navy destroyer,” Schumer spokesman Angelo Roefaro wrote in an emailed statement.
Schumer is known for using props to dramatize issues, from e-cigarettes (potentially dangerous) to luggage (bad baggage fees). The props sometimes tell serious human stories and also enliven a career’s worth of news conferences.
This time, unfortunately, the model set sail a little too quickly to catch the Russian impostor. The real USS Gallagher will honor an American hero and, luckily, be constructed in very American Bath, Maine.
Mark Chiusano
Daily Point
Gateway to nowhere
Just hours before members of the Gateway Development Corp. were to gather Friday morning in lower Manhattan to talk about how to move the Gateway rail proposal forward despite President Donald Trump’s opposition to the project, the Portal Bridge in New Jersey got stuck in the open position, stopping Amtrak and New Jersey Transit trains in their tracks, unable to get into or out of Penn Station.
By 8:30 a.m. or so, after four hours of chaos during which some trains were diverted to Hoboken, where PATH trains quickly became overcrowded, the bridge was back in position. Train service resumed, but some delays and cancellations remained.
The Gateway Project, which would replace the Portal Bridge as well as build a new train tunnel under the Hudson River, can’t move forward unless federal officials pony up their share of the funds. And while officials said they hope incidents like Friday’s Portal Bridge malfunction will help persuade federal officials to change their tune, it might not be easy. Rep. Peter King spoke with Trump Thursday and spent about five minutes “very seriously” talking about Gateway.
“I made the argument. He fully understood the argument,” King told The Point. “He listened. We had a good conversation.”
King wouldn’t indicate whether Trump would consider a change of heart.
“It’s going to be his call,” King said.
The showdown could come to a head next week, as the latest government funding bill is due March 23. King said a decision on what’s in the bill will have to come earlier next week.
King, who said he has never voted against an omnibus spending bill in 25 years, promised to do just that if Gateway isn’t included. He said he’d “do whatever I can to block it.”
But Trump has threatened to veto a bill that does include Gateway.
Meanwhile, commuters hope the stuck bridge isn’t a metaphor for the funding debate in Washington.
Randi F. Marshall
Pointing Out
Bus lanes
The wheels are turning in Albany on a way to get more funding for Suffolk bus. The question seems to be which of two solutions being offered will prevail.
The State Assembly’s one-house budget includes a $1 surcharge on ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft, with the money going to non-MTA buses, part of a larger funding plan for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Uber has said its drivers provided hundreds of thousands of rides in the six months the service operated last year. Add in Lyft and other competitors over a full year and the measure might bring Suffolk $1 million to $3 million.
“The money has to stay in the region in which it was generated, and there is a lockbox in there,” Assemb. Fred Thiele (I-Sag Harbor) told The Point about the bill.
The Senate’s one-house budget takes a different, more convoluted but creative approach. It would guarantee that in terms of state aid, Suffolk’s bus system would have at least parity with the smallest upstate system, according to Sen. Tom Croci (R-Sayville). That’s Syracuse. This provision would mean an extra $7 million for Suffolk, which receives $26 million from the state compared with $33 million for Syracuse.
That doesn’t address the per capita unfairness. Syracuse has a population of 143,000, compared with Suffolk’s 1.5 million. But the provision would provide a cash infusion for a system that desperately needs it.
The funding most likely will be resolved next week, after big issues like school aid are settled.
“I’ve been up here now for four years, so I try to temper my normally optimistic approach to life with pragmatism,” Croci said. “I’m cautiously optimistic.”
Michael Dobie
