_________________ BALDWIN ________________
CoMMUNItY UPDAtE Infections as of July 1
4,157
Infections as of June 23 4,148
$1.00
HERALD
Major crime goes down in Nassau
Dept. christens hook and ladder
From student leader to grad
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Vol. 28 No. 28
JUlY 8 - 14, 2021
Scout rallies for front-line workers BY MAtt HUgHs
Courtesy Daniella McCoy
DANIEllA MCCoY PrEsENtED gifts made by Plaza Elementary students in front of a Kousa dogwood tree that she planted.
Baldwin High School senior Daniella McCoy, 17, is finishing her Girl Scout Gold Award, displaying some of the hand-crafted gifts from Plaza Elementary School students addressed to pandemic front-line workers. McCoy is a Girl Scout Ambassador for Troop 2315, working on the highest rank in Girl Scouts, equivalent to Eagle in Boy Scouts. An ambassador usually does community service or holds events with younger Girl Scouts to engage with and teach them valuable lessons
and skills. Due to the coronavirus, however, McCoy said, “We have only been able to hold one event with middle school girls in the past year, where we taught them about the importance of friendship.” She added that before the pandemic, they also did multiple food and clothing drives for local food banks. Seeing the hard work the front-line workers put in, McCoy decided to use her Gold Award Project to give back to them. Her project, Essential Giveback, is in the process of Continued on page 23
Baldwinites return to work, but not at pre-Covid levels BY MAtt HUgHs Economic recovery in Baldwin is moving along, but business still isn’t back to pre-Covid levels. Similar to the rest of the country, the coronavirus pandemic caused major setbacks in Baldwin’s business community, with the economic downturn reaching recession levels. According to the New York State Department of Labor, Nassau County reached a peak unemployment rate of 17.5 percent in April last year, which shrank steadily to 4.6 percent this May. H av i n g re c ove re d f ro m
Covid-19 at a rate similar to the rest of Nassau County, Baldwin’s unemployment rate is currently in the 3.9 to 5.9 percent range, based on U.S. census fiveyear estimates. DOL unemployment data shows that before the pandemic, the county saw an unprecedented low of 3 percent unemployment in April 2019, and it stayed below 4 percent all of 2019. Butch Yamali, owner of the Coral House in Baldwin, is having trouble finding customers and employees these days. Yamali said his venue “rents to people months and years in advance, and many people are
M
y business is far from back to normal.
BUtCH YAMAlI
Coral House, Baldwin not willing to plan that far in advance with Covid. My business is far from back to normal.” Yamali also said that some former employees don’t want to retur n to work because of unemployment benefits, and while other employees are
returning, they want specific hours. Staffing the Coral House, he said, is difficult. Yamali even cited an example from mid-June: “I had 15 interviews planned for one week — not one of them showed up.” Jay Cohen, principal at AJC Search Associates, a Baldwinbased executive search firm, said, “There are multiple open-
ings within my industry in Nassau County, but I can’t find enough people qualified to fill those positions.” From April 2020 to April 2021, Long Island saw a 92 percent increase in jobs in the leisure and hospitality industry and a 33.4 percent increase in retail, according to the Hofstra RegionContinued on page 04