ASTORIA — Will the real Queens Community Board 1 please stand up?
A mock website surfaced recently that looks to be the actual site for Astoria's CB1 — except that it's loaded with satirical digs at the board, painting its members as elitist and out of touch with the rest of the neighborhood.
"Queens Community Board 1 is proud to represent the interests of business and property owners," the "About" page of the phony site reads.
"We have a certain amount of clout with elected officials and city agencies," another page says, before adding that the board's role is to "provide helpful cover to local elected officials when they take positions at odds with the majority of people in the community."
The fake page lists a number of the CB's most contentious past issues as "accomplishments" — including votes against a pedestrian plaza on Newtown Avenue and a bike corral at the Queens Kickshaw restaurant — and criticizes the board as favoring the interests of drivers, developers and property owners.
Other parts of the site take shots at the board members' ages ("Four of our members are nonagenarians! Maybe it's something in the air") and knocks the board as lacking ethnic diversity.
"It's a bogus site," said CB1 District Manager Lucille Hartmann, adding that its portrayal is "not representative at all" of the actual board.
"Certainly they're not all property owners and homeowners," she said, pointing out that she, too, is a renter. "There are different points of view."
The web tool Whois.net shows the domain name was registered on Nov. 25.
Hartmann said she didn't know who might have started the phony page.
"Printing personal views as someone else's is cowardly," she said.
"It's a free country," Hartmann added. "Everybody is entitled to an opinion."
