New Hyde Park Mayor’s Message: Small Business Saturday 2012

The following are the opening remarks of New Hyde Park Mayor Daniel Petruccio made during the public meeting of the New Hyde Park Village Board on Nov. 20, 2012:

Saturday is actually Small Business Appreciation Day. It’s a day that we’re being asked to go and patronize the businesses, the smaller businesses. It’s kind of an interesting timeframe because on Friday being Black Friday that’s the day where most people will be out at the big stores spending money. So I guess to kind of jump on that idea on Saturday maybe make some time to go along the turnpike and hit one of the local stores that they might have kind of fallen out of the practice of going to. So we’d like to encourage that.

I want to stay on that theme. This is an ongoing problem for this board, I don’t think any board in western Nassau has been able to rectify this problem: we have less and less viable small businesses, retail businesses on the turnpike and that is a problem for Mineola, Floral Park, all of these communities.

People often say “well, it would be nice if we had a bakery in new Hyde Park” or they mention different types of things. We’ve had those businesses come in and they don’t make it, sometimes for a bad business plan, sometimes for just poor timing, but Saturday’s an opportunity to try to rekindle some of that enthusiasm. If you can, we appreciate it on November 24, Saturday.