Our spotlight for this Juniper Berry shines on a neighborhood volunteer, known to all as Tony Nunziato.

Tony Nunziato is currently a candidate in the 30th Assembly District. He will tell you the motivation to run for elected office resulted from his own observation that when he would go to meetings he discovered how seriously underrepresented our area was with elected officials who were never present to speak for the people on critical issues.

Tony saw the neglect first-hand because he was doing volunteer work on Community Board 5 and he sat on committees where he witnessed our community’s blatant underrepresentation on very serious issues. He decided that if it were going to be corrected, someone had to step up to start the process of bringing our neighborhood back to the people. After serious soul searching Tony Nunziato threw his own hat in the ring.

He arrives at the job of candidate with good credentials. Tony Nunziato has been an active member of our community for many years. He was a member of CB5 for 10 years, a past president of Maspeth Town Hall, past president of the Kiwanis Club of Maspeth, an active member of the Maspeth Chamber of Commerce, and the Knights of Columbus and he is on the Board of the Queensboro Chapter of UNICO. He is the Chair of the Maspeth-Middle Village Task Force and he sits on the Board of the Juniper Park Civic Association as the Treasurer.

Born in Woodside
On the personal side, Tony was born in Woodside in 1957. He went to St. Sebastian’s School in Woodside, Power Memorial Academy in Manhattan and he attended St. John’s University. He moved to Maspeth when he married his wife, Dolores, in 1980. They have three grown children.

Tony started out in the florist business as a partner in a large Manhattan firm. When he married, he decided he wanted to start his own business. He found a property in Maspeth, opened his own florist, named it the Enchanted Florist, and he has been a hard working businessman in Maspeth ever since.

When you go to the polls this November 2nd on Election Day please think long and hard about how neglected we all are with elected officials who take us for granted, who have been in office for too many years and have reached the point of barely “telephoning it in.”

A glaring example to point out that description is the fact that we’re still looking at hundreds of trucks a day on Grand Avenue, trucks that should have been rerouted 10 years ago if we had elected officials who did their job. Because of politics and territorial jealousy, we don’t, and we have all suffered. Stop the neglect, now!

Give our very own Tony Nunziato a chance to show you what it’s like to have an elected official who cares enough to show up at meetings and meet the folks and hear their concerns about our future. The time is now to stop voting for the familiar names on our ballots because those names are not working for the people. Start the uphill climb to bring our great neighborhood back to the people who pay the bills and away from the entrenched, special interest, career politicians we continuously re-elect and whom we’ve come to think of as “representation.”