WHERE TO TURN NEWS 2/26

[DMCKEON]

Our snow shovelers once again did a great job and we received numerous calls from seniors complimenting the students. The Staten Island Advance ran a story on the program and mentioned that we needed additional volunteers and we wound up with over 25 new seniors calling to register.

We have worked all week on our graffiti removal plan and will present it at our press conference on Friday 2/29 at Boulder Creek at 4:30. If you would like to view the handout click the link below. We have invited every elected official on Staten Island and have forwarded our press release to our entire distribution. We are hoping for a good turn out. On Saturday we will clean up the Boulder Creek site with volunteers fro St. Peters. Over the next few weeks we will clean up 3 Little League sites and the Boy Scout trailer at Holy Child. We are still looking for designs for our mural project.

http://www.where-to-turn.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=41744


We had a conference call tonight with 6 family members who lost children in furniture accidents. We discussed our trip to Washington on 5/15. We will present our petition, with over 10,400 signatures in support of HR Bill 4266 to every member of the House and Senate and will hold a press conference on the steps of the House of Representatives.

On the local level Assemblyman Michael Cusick called to inform us that he will introduce a NYS version of the bill into the New York state Assembly later this week.
Needless to say the family members were ecstatic and all wanted me to pass their thanks along to Mike. To learn more about this effort click the link below.

http://www.where-to-turn.org/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=33

Robert Kirkpatrick, Steven Knapp, William Macko and Monica Rodriguez Smith and her unborn child, John DiGiovanni, and Wilfredo Mercado.
Names you may not be familiar with but 15 years ago today they were killed in the first bombing of the World Trade Center. Take a moment and remember them in your prayers as they were hardly mentioned in any of today’s papers.

We are meeting on Wednesday with members of Wagner College to discuss possibly working together on our not for profit websites. We will keep you posted.

We are meeting with St. Johns on Thursday to begin planning this year's Academic All County Awards ceremony.

We still have not received the initial grant for the Hearts and Hands Memorial but we do have a TV reporter who wants to do an on site story about the quilt being packed away in storage in Atlanta. Details to follow.

In the meantime we still need 8 x 10 photos of those who died on 9/11

http://www.where-to-turn.org/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=38371

We are going to once again ask for an update to supposed improvements to the facilities at Walter Reed and other veteran facilities. A year after many promises were made and we have neither seen nor heard of any improvements.

Finally we still not gotten any response from the mayor’s Office to our numerous requests for a reconciliation of the remains found during the recent search. We kept track daily and we show almost 1,000 remains that were recovered that no longer appear in the ME’s report. For months we have not even gotten word of any DNA matches and still no audit of the NYPD property Department as to the alleged missing money (nearly $1 million) and nearly 1,500 personal items.

Dennis