The news of the shelving of the Third Track came like a benediction to those communities along the mainline. Hopes soared that the MTA's "Reign of Terror" was over and their plans of trampling over our villages like the Goths who sacked Rome were permanently dashed.

But no sooner did LIRR President Helena Williams announce the dismantling of plans to build the Third Track, and then MTA Board members fired salvos of defiance. One member, Mitch Palley of Stony Brook, who has been a vociferous proponent of the track, sounded as if he saw the movie Patton one too many times imperiously declaring that "come hell or high water" a third track will be constructed on schedule. Although ensconced miles away from the intrusion of the third track, the pronouncement had all the earmarks of a royal decree issued against his unruly subjects. Lord Palley was hurriedly joined by the Marquis of Manhasset, fellow board member James McGovern, who apparently taking his cue from my Newsday quote that building the Third Track is not "a hiccup for the mainline communities but a cardiac arrest" stated that the "Third Track is actually angioplasty for a clogged artery" referring to the infamous Jamaica crawl.

At a meeting held on the Third Track at Mineola Village Hall on Thursday, July 17, I addressed the Task Force about the Jamaica Crawl. This crawl, it is argued, will be further exacerbated when the tunnel under the East River going from Queens to the Grand Central is completed around 2015. I noted that while this bottleneck usually materializes from Jamaica into the city and not from Hicksville to Jamaica. Moreover, I noted that if the reverse commute, the original justification for the Third Track had actually existed the way to rectify it was not to build a $1.5 billion track designed to wreak havoc on our communities but by additional railcars and double-decker trains.

We should exercise the same moderating measures in addressing the Jamaica Crawl. Hazarding another medical analogy, I submit the first principle of the Hippocratic oath: First, do no harm. It describes surgery, by its very nature, as intrusive and radical and should only be used when more moderate means are either useless or exhausted in treating the malady. The same is true with the Third Track, which may cure the problem but end up killing or at least disfiguring the patient. There are measured and balanced alternatives that are conspicuously less expensive and invidious than the insurgency of a Third Track in our communities. I sketched out some of these actions at the Mineola hearing including computer-based spacing, high speed switches, sideline tracks to park trains and rail yards out east to avoid the congestion of empty trains traveling back to the west side of the city. My point is you don't have to burn the house down to boil an egg.

Ed Powers of New Hyde Park, who, along with our own Dennis McEnery, is one of the most insightful, informed and perspicacious observers of the dynamics and interplay of political and technical forces driving the Third Track, marvelously and trenchantly expanded on these ameliorative steps. For the record, Mr. Powers noted that the technology used to move trains through Jamaica is no further along than it was in 1920 and urged the MTA to modernize its technology and expand outward with the stars rather than shrink inward with the Luddites. Amen.

The real underlying reason for its construction of the Third Track among the task force and the audience, many who testified very informatively and compellingly, can be summed up in one word: Freight! Why? In responding to a panel of Ivy League crime experts who were seeking some mysterious unresolved childhood trauma on why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton dropped their collective jaws by replying: "Because that's where the money is." Well, freight is where the money is also and although at a meeting in December of 2006 the LIRR categorically and unequivocally not only denied that intention but also the capability of a Third Track to accommodate freight, the fact is they have dissimulated on their real intentions so often that their credibility has become the first and most conspicuous casualty.

So what's next? As reported last week, we have asked that the LIRR in having announced the delay of the Third Track to formerly withdraw its application to the Federal Transit Administration and to pull back the Draft Environmental Impact Statement. Since then, MTA board members have sniped at that decision. But make no mistake that behind Lord Palley's rhetorical bravura is a smoldering anger. That the mighty MTA Gulliver could be tied down in what Lord Palley sees, as the land of Lilliputians must be, to say the least, maddeningly frustrating. But last season a lot of people in New England didn't think the Giants could prevail over the Patriots. But guess what, the New York Giants are the Super Bowl champs.

The MTA's past performance does not instill confidence in the future. Back in 1965, Governor Nelson Rockefeller made a promise to turn the LIRR into the best commuter railroad in the country. Of course we know that this did not happen. Rockefeller saw government largesse as a sure way to resolve problems. For him, as for President Lyndon Johnson who was president in 1965, the public's money belt was irrepressibly elastic. The first sought to build a greater New York the second the "Great Society." Both, with some political assists, created stupendously reckless debts that New Yorkers and Americans will be paying off for generations.

Indeed, the acquisition of the LIRR by New York State to become a part of a regional transportation organization known as the MTA was but one cog of the culture of big government that Rockefeller saw as a panacea. Nevertheless, the LIRR continued to be a financial burden with one major difference from its previous owner the Pennsylvania Railroad: The State of New York had much deeper pockets to sustain a money losing operation. And it has by having about 50 percent of its operating costs being covered through subsidies.

Like our village, both Nelson Rockefeller and Lyndon Johnson were born 100 years ago this year. In a fiscal sense, our policies have fared much better, albeit on a dramatically smaller scale. While there is much in their huge ambitions for social justice that is admirable and laudatory the same cannot be said for the prodigies of energies expended to design a government to tasks that were misguided and prohibitively costly of which the Metropolitan Transit Authority has, to its shame, become a tattered symbol.

I bring this up only because the MTA Gulliver will most assuredly stir again. It might not be tomorrow or next year. Maybe it won't be considered again, as their spokesman Joe Calderone suggested, until 2015. But the giant will ultimately break free from the ropes that bind it and while we can bell the cat we can't stop it from pouncing.

In my concluding comments in Mineola, I stated it was time for the MTA to disenthrall itself from their neurotic fixation to build a Third Track and to reorganize and reestablish their priorities and rehabilitate our existing infrastructure such as our stations, commuter parking, drainage as well as embark on an honest effort to create a clean and aesthetically appealing environment. But this, by my own reasoning, will never fully come to fruition simply because it argues that government created municipal authorities can operate like a business in a marketplace environment. Unless, the MTA is able, frankly, to foster a strong, vigorous and competitive union focused on improving productivity and enhancing, if not creating, competitive capabilities they will be condemned to managing decline and failure.

Of course I recognize the need to work with the tools we have and the realities that exist. At the same time, however, I feel it imperative that government leadership commit itself to planting the seeds for a rail system that is privately built and operated, run safely and efficiently and is not bankrolled by taxpayers.

Overbuilding and the law:

In last week's "Letters to the Editor" a resident inquired about what happened to our rules about overbuilding. First, nothing happened. There are building ordinances that regulate the percentage of buildable lot coverage, which has always been 30 percent for all interior lots and 35 percent for corner lots. Years ago our residents were not building outsized homes for various reasons. But circumstances do change. Adding additions can be the result of accommodating larger families although I don't think this is, in general, a contributing factor. An infusion of affluence is another and instead of moving outside of Floral Park to a community with larger homes some of our residents choose to build.

Today, where multiple televisions, computers and modern appliances of every kind characterize life in the 21st century, there is no doubt that our technological age is also a powerful motivator in expanding our living arrangements. Then there is the desire, untethered by any sociological reality, just to live larger and more spaciously. It would be nice if legislators could divine all these trends before they manifested but such prescience is not the property of human thought or understanding.

Nevertheless, the village board has liberally used its powers as a corrective tool when the situation demanded new laws but always in the light of our particular history, the prospect of constitutional challenges as well as our ability to manage and administer whatever measures were adopted. Several years earlier the board had successfully adopted laws to make subdivisions more difficult as a means to discourage developers from building in a haphazard fashion. It became clear, however, more measures were needed.

In consultation with our superintendent of buildings, village attorney and Frank Gunther, a professional architect, who is the chairman of our Architectural Review Board and who has substantially contributed to the board's subsequent actions regarding this matter, the village board held public hearings on the subject of overbuilding and other related matters.

The upshot was the unanimous adoption of local laws 1 through 5 of 2008. These local laws addressed, among other things, the location and acceptable noise levels for residential air conditioning equipment and increased the minimum allowable distance between newly constructed houses and garages from 8 to 10 feet.

More importantly, three of the local laws addressed the issue of new construction by requiring that new residences comply with certain architectural criteria for sky-planes (height) and wall planes (building contours). In addition, the maximum coverage for residences on corner lots was reduced from 35 percent to 30 percent. These new laws will enable the village to regulate overbuilding and so-called "box" construction in our residential districts. Both the president of the Hillcrest Civic Association and an officer of the North End Civic Association spoke in favor of adopting these local laws.

The board also is considering amending the regulations governing the location of air conditioning units for residences situated on corner lots. In addition, the board is reviewing the provisions of the village code relating to block parties and the authorization to serve alcoholic beverages.