NEW YORK (1010 WINS/WCBS 880) – Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman pushed back Thursday against a suggestion by Queens Borough President Donovan Richards to turn the Nassau Coliseum into a migrant shelter.
“Nassau County is not a sanctuary county,” Blakeman told WCBS 880. “Our school districts cannot handle any more students. Our services would be overrun and it would increase the costs to our taxpayers.”
Richards on Wednesday floated the idea of using the roughly 15,000-person arena in Uniondale, saying “unused or underutilized assets” across the state should be considered for housing migrants, as New York City is “doing more than its fair share.”
“This is not about a Nassau versus Queens thing,” Richards told WCBS 880 on Thursday, “but more about how do we make sure that as these individuals come in, how do we ensure that they’re treated humanely and that they can integrate into society?”
Blakeman said Nassau is not taking in migrants just because New York City has welcomed more than 100,000 of them since last spring.
“If you invite guests to your home, you shouldn’t ask your neighbors to take them in,” Blakeman said. “We didn’t invite these guests, other municipalities did.”
The Republican county executive said the migrant crisis is a “federal problem that should be solved on the federal level.”
“For those who want to have a sanctuary city or a sanctuary county or whatever, the bottom line is that’s their choice,” he said. “Our choice in Nassau County is not to be a sanctuary county.”
Richards, a Democrat, said there needs to be a broader approach with no end to the predicament in sight.
“We shouldn’t get hung up and fixated on one site, we really need to be looking statewide at assets that are not being utilized,” he said.
The borough president said he has no plans to backtrack on the proposal amid ongoing coordination with the state and federal governments.
“We’ve been talking to the governor, certainly, about Floyd Bennett Field [in Marine Park, Brooklyn],” Richards said. “We can look at locations across Long Island, as well, look as locations upstate.”
The widening migrant crisis has not only strained the relationship between New York City and surrounding local governments but also the relationship between the city and state officials like Gov. Kathy Hochul, whose lawyer was sharply critical of the city’s migrant response in a letter this week.
“The city has not made timely requests for regulatory changes, has not always promptly shared necessary information with the state, has not implemented programs in a timely manner, and has not consulted the state before taking certain actions,” the lawyer, Faith E. Gay, wrote to a judge overseeing a case related to the city's “right to shelter” law.
Adams has repeatedly said the state and federal governments have “failed” the city, which according to City Hall could spend more than $12 billion on the issue over the three fiscal years ending in 2025. Migrant relief centers continue to open across the five boroughs—with the latest on Randall’s Island set to begin operation next week—even as the city’s shelter system buckles amid a crush of some 500 new arrivals each day.
The humanitarian crisis has begun to hit closer to home for many residents in the area as the number of new arrivals continues to grow. On Wednesday evening, multiple arrests were made in Queens Village as hundreds of demonstrators protested against the opening of a 1,000-person migrant shelter on the grounds of the old Creedmoor Psychiatric Center.
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