Borough presidents may not have as much power as the city comptroller or Council speaker, but you wouldn't know it from the scene last week at the Evander Childs High School campus where those officials and many, many more - including two former Council speakers and former borough president Fernando Ferrer - turned out for Ruben Diaz, Jr.'s debut State of the Borough address.

Alba Vazquez immigrated to America in 1977 from her native Uruguay, where a military dictatorship had seized power a few years prior. She settled in the Bronx with the hopes of building a safer, more prosperous life for herself and her young family.

On Monday, she spoke in support of bill which would guarantee decent wages and benefits to cleaners, security guards, and other building service workers at new commercial and residential developments financed by city tax-dollars, and at buildings the city leases from others.

I write in response to Don Bluestone's op-ed ("What We Lost in Defeat of Armory Proposal") in the Feb. 11 edition of the Norwood News.

Surely everyone realizes that defeating "The Shops at the Armory" is a bittersweet victory. Sweet in that our City Council voted as we the voters asked them to, as they did not when they voted on the filtration plant and the new Yankee Stadium; bitter, in that we are back to the drawing board in our 10-year effort to have the Armory appropriately developed.

As a vote neared in the City Council on the Kingsbridge Armory redevelopment, only Oliver Koppell was publicly expressing reservations about joining with the Bronx delegation in rejecting the project.

But when the vote came, he voted with the Bronx delegation and 44 of his colleagues, in a stunning rebuke of the mayor and one of his top outer-borough economic development priorities.

Sometimes, the leader you become depends on the times you live in. Ruben Diaz, Jr., is learning that firsthand. His arrival coincided precisely with the final innings of a community battle over the Kingsbridge Armory.

Less than 18 months ago, Fernando Cabrera was a college professor living in Westchester County who spent his spare time leading the Morris Avenue church he founded two decades ago.

On Jan. 1 he will become a New York City councilman and recently, weeks before officially taking office, he played a central role in helping to stop one of the biggest development projects in Bronx history.

The City Council voted nearly unanimously on Monday to defeat a developer's proposal, backed strongly by Mayor Bloomberg, to turn the Kingsbridge Armory into a shopping mall.

The vote was 45 to 1. Only Helen Sears of Queens dissented. Council members said it was the first time they had defeated an economic project backed by the Bloomberg administration.

An explosion of street violence upended three Bronx communities in recent days, taking the lives of two teenagers and severely injuring a girl, all of whom appear to be ordinary kids guilty only of crossing paths with errant gunshots. (On Thanksgiving, three people were shot on the Grand Concourse, near Fordham Road.)

Crime is indeed down, but that doesn't change the realities of these tragically truncated lives or the neighborhoods that have not benefited equally from otherwise welcome statistical trends.

There is no single answer to solving this problem, but there are many things that can help and we should try them all and more.

Here are just a few:

• Whatever your opinion of Mayor Bloomberg, he is a national leader on the gun control issue. We should support his efforts any way we can.

• As stated above, there are neighborhoods where the city's statistical drop in crime has not been felt on the street. When the inevitable budget cuts are proposed to cope with the economic downturn, cuts to youth programs and police should be a last resort, especially in neighborhoods where crime has gone the opposite way of the citywide trend. In fact, we need to find a way to increase funding for youth programs, whether that comes from the city, state or federal government.

An explosion of street violence upended three Bronx communities in recent days, taking the lives of two teenagers and severely injuring a girl, all of whom appear to be ordinary kids guilty only of crossing paths with errant gunshots. (On Thanksgiving, three people were shot on the Grand Concourse, near Fordham Road.)

Crime is indeed down, but that doesn't change the realities of these tragically truncated lives or the neighborhoods that have not benefited equally from otherwise welcome statistical trends.

There is no single answer to solving this problem, but there are many things that can help and we should try them all and more.

Here are just a few:

• Whatever your opinion of Mayor Bloomberg, he is a national leader on the gun control issue. We should support his efforts any way we can.

• As stated above, there are neighborhoods where the city's statistical drop in crime has not been felt on the street. When the inevitable budget cuts are proposed to cope with the economic downturn, cuts to youth programs and police should be a last resort, especially in neighborhoods where crime has gone the opposite way of the citywide trend. In fact, we need to find a way to increase funding for youth programs, whether that comes from the city, state or federal government.