Video, Audio, Photos & Rush Transcript: Governor Hochul Announces Groundbreaking of $2.8 Million Mineola Community Center Renovations on Long Island

Governor Kathy Hochul today announced the groundbreaking of a $2.8 million project to modernize the Village of Mineola Community Center in Nassau County, creating an improved year-round destination for recreation, community programs and local organizations. New York State is supporting the project with a $1.13 million grant through Empire State Development to upgrade the aging facility and ensure it can continue serving Mineola residents for years to come.

VIDEO: The event is available to stream on YouTube here and TV quality video is available here (h.264, mp4).

AUDIO: The Governor's remarks are available in audio form here.

PHOTOS: The Governor's Flickr page will post photos of the event here.

A rush transcript of the Governor's remarks is available below:

Thank you, Mayor. It is great to be back again, not just because you give me the best Portuguese pastries when I show up - and he's so proud of his community. He has to always let me know it's the largest Portuguese population in the State of New York, and then we talk about places we've been in Portugal. But his love of Portugal, his history, his personal journey, but also this community, is so evident.

When I see leaders like the Mayor here, it reminds me of back when I was in local government. Fourteen years I was a town board member, but I had two villages, one was 3,000, one was 10,000, and I always looked out for my villages. And the work that you do - why I love local government so much - it really has a direct, profound impact on communities. It's not like you're off in Washington debating lofty issues, and we're going to get around to it someday, and no one ever votes on anything and nothing happens. Or even Albany, we do the best we can, we enact policies to help make people's lives better, but at the local level you get your hands dirty. You decide with your community what we want to do, what we want to build, what our vision is. And to lay that out and to have someone like you, with your depth of experience in local government, but also many years as a beloved teacher here - happy retirement - your presence has made a difference in positioning Mineola for the future. And I want to give you another round of applause, Mayor. Mayor Pereira.

And I do what I do up in Albany and deliver for communities like this with great leaders and allies like Senator Bynoe, and I want to thank her for her advocacy for money and many projects that have come to fruition. She's a voice we reckon with in Albany, and we have a lot of respect for her, and she has a great relationship with our office, which makes a difference. I want to give another round of applause to Senator Siela Bynoe.

And we get the money out of Empire State Development. I want to thank Kevin Law for being our Chairman of Empire State Development, and I see Resi Cooper here as one of our members of the local Regional Economic Development Council, and the work she does. And it's people that step up from the community and say, "I want to serve." You don't get big paychecks, right? We're not paying you anything, right? Okay. But they do it because of a love of community, and I thank all of you for being part of this journey. And of course, we're going to hear from Joanne, who I - really excited about this, I thought we're going to see a little dance moves or somethingNo? Okay. All right - never too old to dance. I will not accept that.

But I want to thank everyone for coming here today and seeing the before and after. I think I'm looking forward to the after better than this. And, I think about how this building has served Mineola in so many ways, and the Mayor mentioned the Golden Age Bingo Club and meetings of the American Legion, and I appreciate the pledge of allegiance at the start of our meeting, and I know you just did a 9/11 event here recently, honoring that tragic point in our history when people did come together in a powerful way and commemorating 25 years later. And gatherings of our firefighters and a lot of the sports, athletes in the area, Mineola PAL and the Athletic Association right here. And, this building has given a lot of love over many years, and now we're trying to give some love back to this building.

So today, we're breaking ground on a $2.8 million renovation. And this is more than cosmetic. As you heard from the Mayor, I'm talking about new HVAC. We're talking about a new boiler, a modernized kitchen, but really a full transformation of the gym that we're in here today, and improved classrooms, and new lighting and more office space, and storage - all the things you need, updated AV equipment - if you've ever tried to run a scout meeting in a dim room with a broken radiator, then you know: these updates really make a difference. And people are going to want to come here, it's more welcoming, and the community deserves this.

It's part of my long-standing commitment to this incredible journey. Last year, I announced the $1.3 million - 1.13 - Is it 1.3 or 1.13? Give 1.3, I said it. It's great to be Governor.

But I announced that funding for the project that came through our Regional Economic Development Council is part of a $40 million pro-housing community we have initiative. And you put your finger right on it, Mayor. The communities that are stepping up and saying, "We love our community so much, we love our families, that we want their kids to be able to live here someday," or people who want to downsize to be able to stay in this community, you have to create more housing options. And so you want to make sure that places like Mineola get a lot of credit. You stepped up when it was not the most popular thing to do. And people were like, "Where is she going with this one now? What's she trying to do? Is she going to try and put skyscrapers next to our little villages?" Like, never were, never will. But there's a lot of negativity associated with our efforts to just try and make New York State more livable and build more housing here on Long Island.

And one of the reasons we have some of the highest housing prices in the entire state - median household prices, Nassau County over 800, over 700 in Suffolk County - who gets their starter home like that? How are families supposed to survive? And so we said, "If you're willing to be a pro-housing community, pass a resolution with the clerk and everybody, do the right thing and meet growth targets, then I'm going to give you extra benefits to help you grow." You're one of the first on Long Island. The first - I'm corrected - the first of 20 on Long Island. And I remember saying at the time "I've got $750 million dollars I'm giving out to pro-housing communities. I've only got a handful. These first 20 are going to do great." And word started getting out, and now we have hundreds, but more to come. But you showed the vision, Mayor, that others have then followed, and that's making a real difference.

And it's also part of the larger revitalization of Mineola through our $4.5 million investment through New York Forward, which is - I saw the check in your office again. We were here in January of '24, I think. And this is how we connect the heart of Mineola's downtown with the Long Island Railroad, with the Jericho Turnpike, and benefit not just the residents of Mineola, but all Long Islanders, in fact, all New Yorkers, and to have them see the great opportunity and potential of this community.

When we talk about tackling the housing shortage and making investments, and the Mayor was pointing out the window and - what burned down? The restaurant burned down, you're putting 17 housing units there. This is what you do because guess what? You're bringing customers in for the other businesses, right?

I was trying to bring back my downtown when I was growing up. It's hard to describe when I was growing up and outside of Buffalo when all the big jobs left, the steel industry left, and people were unemployed. My little downtown that was once cute was "Gone out of business" signs. Nobody was around, and I tried to help bring it back with my mother who started a business at that time. So I know what it's like.

But when you bring people right downtown and say, "This is your home, and you can walk to public transportation, you can walk to the railroad, you can walk to the shops," that's an investment not just in that person and their home, but also in the local downtown area. You're bringing people right there, and that's smart planning. That is brilliant planning, in fact. And so earlier this year, we launched some more of the rounds of DRIs in New York Ford, and we've now had $1.4 billion for this program, and we've invested hundreds of millions in childcare and workforce development and transportation.

But we keep coming back to places like Minneola because you show us how it's done. I don't want Albany to tell communities what to do. I didn't like it when I was in local government, and I sure don't like it as Governor. Tell us your vision, and I'll put the money there, even if it's higher than I thought when I walked in the door, it's now 1.3. But you show us how you want to transform your community. This is your community. No one knows better than our local trustees and your local clerk and the local Mayor. You know what to do working in partnership with your state officials.

So I just want to say, I'm going to point to Mineola as a model of what we can be doing, what we should be doing, looking at every space in a downtown area and saying, "Who could live there? Could we bring housing on the first floor of abandoned retail?" That is really smart, and I think other communities should be doing this and getting rid of outdated regulations that might prohibit it. A lot of downtowns don't allow for any apartments downtown unless you have two parking spaces for every unit. You don't have that when you're building in a downtown block. So get rid of that rule. This is what I'm doing in State government. We are getting rid of all the red tape, the inane rules, whether it's the SEQRA law that was slowing down so much of the housing that we're trying to build. So I'm embracing, at a statewide level, the opportunity to say, "Let's get out of the way. Let's take all these overburdensome regulations and move them out of the way. Always protect the environment and health and safety, but just what are the barriers?"

And you've already shown the path here with this vision. You showed me the areas where you have identified higher density, lower density. That's what I did in my local government many years ago. We had a 20-year master plan, and we said, "Growth here, not growth here, retail here, industrial up here, farmland down here." And it's all about what we did after having 40 community meetings and asked the residents what their vision was. So I thank you for just being the person that this community needs, the right person at the right time. And with that, I want to bring up our Senator, Siela Bynoe, to talk about her vision for this community and what she's going to continue doing for us up in Albany. Senator?