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CORRECTION: Sylvia Hack is chairwoman of Community Board 9. Her last name was misspelled in a photo caption yesterday. (1/20/99; A02 Q)
Scrambling to win approval for its proposed Kennedy Airport rail link, officials of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey are making neighborly overtures these days in Queens.
From Jamaica to Howard Beach, the agency is promising to fund long-sought community improvement projects, spurring supporters to hail the moves as signs of good faith, and foes to dismiss them as shallow sweet talk from bureaucrats.
The most controversial portion of the agency's $1-billion-plus project, a light-rail track down the center of the Van Wyck Expressway, is churning its way through the city's land-use process amid fevered professional lobbying on both sides. Construction has already begun on a track linking airport terminals.
The clearest example of Port Authority efforts to sell the next phase has been in South Ozone Park, which borders the airport. Authority officials are displaying a new openness toward a public waterfront facility, such as a park or boat launch, at the foot of Lefferts Boulevard, championed for years by community leaders but requiring cooperation from the agency.
"I look at this as an opportunity. They {authority officials} have got to listen to us for a while," Community Board 10 chairwoman Elizabeth Braton said last week, a few days after her board...