Residents said Blend LIC has been a bad neighbor, and accused its management of repeatedly lying to the community about its intentions.

Blend’s management “don’t want a restaurant that co-exists peacefully with the neighborhood,” said resident Tim Lee, a 48-year-old photographer.

“There’s a big difference between a restaurant that serves liquor and a place that’s positioning itself as a bar stop.”

Blend, which bills itself as a Latin fusion restaurant, had its initial application for a liquor license rejected by the State Liquor Authority in November 2006.

Now the restaurant’s owner, Cullen Partners, is preparing to ask Queens Community Board 2 for a beer and wine license.

“The opening of their rear garden would surround our building with noise,” said Tim Doocey, 38, another concerned neighbor.

. . .

“There’s a saturation of bars and restaurants” in Long Island City, said Community Board 2 Chairman Joe Conley. “People are saying enough is enough.”

In a 2006 letter to Cullen Partners, Conley wrote: “Please be advised we have already spoken in a loud and unambiguous voice on this issue and are unlikely to reconsider the decision” in regard to a new license.

Charles Linn, attorney for Cullen Partners, declined to comment and added that no one at Blend would be available for further comment.

The original disapproval states the “application information was misrepresented by the applicant” and that the applicant “submitted an application with misleading information.”

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) had attached nearly $2 billion to a transportation bill to extend the existing AirTrain between JFK Airport and Jamaica, Queens, to lower Manhattan.

But Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, complained on the chamber floor that New Yorkers were trying to fleece taxpayers.

“They have decided to raid the federal treasury for the purposes of building this, this train to nowhere,” Gregg told fellow senators.

An incensed Schumer insisted Ground Zero is hallowed ground, not a dead-end destination, and that the cash is the “last part of the $20 billion that President Bush promised to New York after 9/11” to rebuild the devastated city.

“It was always intended for transportation projects around lower Manhattan,” Schumer said. “It is blasphemy to New Yorkers and all Americans to exploit the sanctity of Ground Zero to score a cheap political point.”

Gregg’s portrayed the effort as a “train to nowhere” was an allusion tohis Republican colleague Sen. Ted Stevens’s infamous “bridge to nowhere” — a $223 million project to connect a tiny Alaskan island to the mainland.

“This ‘nowhere’ of lower Manhattan is also the heart of American and world finance,” said Mayor Bloomberg’s spokesman, Stu Loeser. “The senator might not remember what happened there seven years ago and what happens there every day, but the rest of us cannot forget.”

Bloomberg’s message came in response to a study warning that the pool of nearly 700 teachers who’d been cut from schools — but are paid full salary and benefits to serve as substitutes – would grow indefinitely.

The report, by the nonprofit The New Teacher Project, called for putting teachers on unpaid leave after they’d spent a year in the pool known as the Absent Teacher Reserve.

“We are spending tens of millions of dollars, which we are struggling to come up with, and the taxpayer [money] would be better spent on the classroom [than] on supporting these teachers,” said Bloomberg.

“There was an outside study that said we should not pay them after a while — that the money could be better used.”

According to industry sources, Darren Star, who created those smash shows, has teamed with Sony and NBC for a proposed series about a group of affluent characters who live in the upscale Brooklyn neighborhood.

Sue Kramer, who wrote and directed the 2006 romantic comedy “Gray Matters” starring Heather Graham, Bridget Moynahan and Molly Shannon, is writing the script.

“It’s an hour-long dramady,” Kramer, who lives in Park Slope, told Page Six.