The town’s Chief Fire Marshal Chris Mehrman said small businesses need to think about the fire code with outdoor dining this fall. Photo from Brookhaven Town
As the temperature drops in the fall and into winter, fire departments on Long Island and elsewhere are trying to help restaurants and other businesses remain open outside while ensuring a safe environment for customers.
“The town has gone above and beyond and continues to try to accommodate those businesses to keep them open or get them open, to increase their occupancy load,” said Brookhaven Town Chief Fire Marshal Chris Mehrman. “We have to balance between safety and allowing businesses to operate.”
The fire marshals have been busy, as they try to educate business owners about the safest way to run heaters, as well as to prepare for the coming winter.
Some business owners who don’t typically have outdoor seating or who aren’t aware of the rules regarding heaters and tents have found the rules difficult, particularly amid the strains caused by the pandemic.
As examples, portable heaters are prohibited within five feet of any building and within five feet of any exit or exit discharges. They are also not allowed on any exterior balconies or within any tent, canopy or other membrane structure.
Some business owners “thought they could just do what they needed to do,” Mehrman said. “People don’t realize there are codes and standards that we need to enforce.”
Although there’s no cost, business owners need to understand the process.
“The town has gone to great lengths to make sure they get these COVID-19 accommodations for outdoor dining,” Mehrman said.
The fire department has been working with business owners to help them meet code and permit requirements.
Fire marshals are sometimes taking steps out of order. Merhman said they have arrived at sites and conducted inspections. Even though the business may not have permits, the fire marshals conduct inspections to see if a tent can remain where it is legally.
The marshals have told business owners to submit their application immediately and to obtain an engineer’s certification, so the marshals can legalize the installation.
The town department has streamlined the process. At the same time, fire marshals have focused on the next step in the march towards winter: snow.
While tents offer opportunities to expand restaurants and bars into outdoor space, they need to be able to handle the additional weight.
“We have to ensure that the tents are going to withstand the snow loads,” Mehrman said.
On a small number of occasions, fire marshals have had to order tents down, either because they were improperly installed or because they were not going to be able to meet the state code.
Putting tents up on decks against buildings is a violation of the state code. Businesses have to have a permit for an addition to a building.
Businesses have also improperly used heaters and were ordered to remove them.
“Thankfully, everybody is complying,” Mehrman said. In some cases, the fire marshals need to convince the managers or owners, but marshals are reluctant to issue court appearance tickets.
“We want to achieve compliance, but we want to do it in an appropriate manner,” Mehrman said.
The fire marshals have been checking and rechecking on sites, to ensure safety and compliance.
To accommodate and streamline the process for outdoor dining, the town has created a COVID-19 Dining Accommodation permitting process. The town is offering a one-stop location to submit paperwork for the accommodations, which includes putting up tents.
Residents who have questions about tents, heaters or fire codes can reach out to the marshals at (631) 451-6262 or by email at [email protected].
Mehrman said residents who read the documentation on the web site, fill out the application appropriately and submit it electronically could probably complete the process within a couple of days.
Legislator Rob Trotta, center, was joined by Republican lawmakers and a few environmentalists to decry proposition 2. Photo from Trotta's office
Several Suffolk County Legislators and a New York assemblyman urged residents to reject proposal 2, which County Executive Steve Bellone (D) put on the ballot to help close the financial gap caused by the pandemic.
If approved, the proposal, which was added to the ballot in July after a 14-3 vote in the county Legislature, would reduce the sewer stabilization fund by $180 million and move $15 million to the general fund. Bellone had proposed the moves to shore up the county’s finances after the economy stopped during the COVID-19-related shutdown.
“My hope is that Suffolk voters will ultimately see this proposal for what it is – a ploy to bail out Bellone’s mismanagement,” Legislator Rob Trotta (R-Fort Salonga) said in a statement.
“Proposal two has to be defeated,” Lee Koppelman, former Executive Director of the Long Island Regional Planning Board and the past head of the SUNY Stony Brook Center for Regional Policy Studies, said in a statement. “It is wrong to take money from a dedicated fund to balance the budget.”
While several of the politicians who opposed the proposal were republicans, Assemblyman Steve Englebright (D-Setauket) also decried the measure.
“I already voted and I voted against Proposition Two,” Englebright said in a statement. “I am totally against taking money from this fund to cover county expenses and I encourage the residents of Suffolk County to vote no, too.”
The Long Island Pine Barrens Society also opposed the proposal, suggesting the area needed the funds were needed to replace polluting septic systems with nitrogen-removing technology as well as sewers.
The Suffolk County Drinking Water Protection Program was created in 1987 by a 0.25% sales tax to fund water quality initiatives, the preservation of open space and control taxes in sewer districts.
Bellone has indicated that the measures would prevent layoffs of county workers that might be necessary to balance the budget. He also said on several calls to get the measure on the ballot that the county would not spend any less money on existing environmental programs.
The county executive has also indicated that the sewer funds can either protect taxpayers against higher sewer tax rates or against higher taxes that might be necessary to prevent a reduction in services.
On the ballot this year is also Proposition 1, which will extend the term of legislators from two years to four years.
Noah Strycker once made a bet with a cruise ship full of passengers: if any of them spotted him without binoculars at any point during a 14-day trip, he would buy them all drinks. Even with that incentive, no one won a free drink, in large part because Strycker’s passion for birds means his binoculars are never out of arm’s reach.
A master’s candidate in Heather Lynch’s lab at Stony Brook University, Strycker, who has turned his world travels in search of his feathered friends into books, is working through the second year on Lynch’s specialty: penguins.
As a part of the team, Strycker is contributing to a population analysis of chinstrap penguins. Last year, he ventured to Antarctica with a field team for several months to count colonies of these six-to-ten pound birds.
The “piece de resistance” of that journey was a trip to Elephant Island, which is where, over 100 years earlier, Ernest Shackleton and his crew were marooned for several months before their rescue.
During Strycker’s journey to the famous but uninhabited island, the team counted the number of chinstrap and compared the population to the last known count, which occurred 50 years ago.
They determined that the chinstrap has had a significant decline, in some cases losing more than half its population in some areas. After a survey of Elephant Island and Low Island, the research team suggested that the decline in the chinstrap’s main source of food, krill, likely caused this reduction.
As for this year, Strycker had planned to travel back to Antarctica until the pandemic caused the cancellation of the trip. He is conducting a literature search to find previous chinstrap penguin counts. In the final part of his master’s program, he will help provide an updated assessment for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.
While the IUCN provides information on threatened or endangered species, Strycker recognizes that the chinstrap won’t likely be on that list. “There are many millions of them,” he explained in a recent interview. “[But] they are declining. We are trying to give the IUCN updated information.”
Lynch’s lab will provide information for IUCN’s green list, which is for species that aren’t endangered. Species on this list might benefit from additional information that could help shape a future conservation strategy.
Strycker, who traveled to 41 countries in 2015 to count as many birds as possible in a year, appreciated and enjoyed his interaction with penguins. These flightless birds have no fear of humans so they waddled up to him and untied his shoelaces. They also fell asleep next to his boot and preened the side of his black wind pants.
Strycker landed in the world of penguins when he was working as a naturalist guide on a cruise ship and met Lynch, whose team was on the same boat.
Lynch was delighted with the chance to add Strycker to her team. “One of the most difficult things about our work is that there is such a steep learning curve for doing Antarctic field research,” Lynch explained in an email. “To grab someone like [Strycker] with so much Antarctic experience under his belt was just fantastic.”
Lynch appreciates how Strycker led the chinstrap survey work, not just in collecting the data but also in analyzing and writing it up. Strycker is “a terrific writer (and very fast, too) and his finesse with writing helped us get our research out for review faster than would normally be possible,” she said.
After seeing and hearing birds around the world, Strycker has an unusual favorite — the turkey vulture. When he was in high school in Eugene, Oregon, Strycker watched a nature documentary with David Attenborough in which the host put rotting meat out in a forest. In no time at all, turkey vultures discovered the feast. “That is the coolest thing I’ve seen,” Strycker recalls thinking.
Months later, he discovered a road kill deer while he was driving. He put the dead animal in the trunk of his ’88 Volvo Sedan and dumped it in his front yard, waiting to see if he could duplicate Attenborough’s feast. Fairly soon, 25 turkey vultures arrived and were sitting on the roof of his house. The neighbors didn’t complain because Strycker grew up on a dead end, 20 acres from the nearest house.
Fortunately for him, his parents didn’t seem too upset, either. “When they realized that their only child had become addicted to birds at a young age, they rolled their eyes and said that there’s much worse things that he could become addicted to,” Strycker recalled.
As for Long Island, Strycker said the area is currently in fall migration season. All the birds that nested in Canada are passing through New York on their way to spend the winter in warmer climates.
The migration patterns typically start with shorebirds in August, transition to warblers in September and to waterfowl, such as ducks and geese, which appear in October and November.
“This fall has also been exciting because several species of northern songbirds have ‘irrupted’ south, so we’re seeing unusually high numbers of them on Long Island,” said Strycker. This month, red-breasted nuthatches, purple finches, and pine siskins have appeared in large numbers, which doesn’t happen every year.
At this time of year, birds sometimes get lost outside their usual range. Last week, a painted redstart, which should be in Arizona, arrived in Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn.
“I was out there at dawn the next morning, along with half the birder population of New York, but unfortunately it had already moved on,” said Strycker.
People interested in tracking bird migration by radar can use the website birdcast.info, which can predict bird migration like the weather using radar data. Strycker advises interested birders to type “Stony Brook” into their local Bird Migration Alert tool.
Once he earns his degree, Strycker plans to build on and share his experiences.
He would like to write books, give presentations and “generally inspire the world about birds.”
As we trudge through the last quarter of a year filled with challenges, I wanted to share some light hearted, ridiculous and truly 2020 fortune cookie message ideas. Enjoy!
• A vaccine may be in your future. Whether you take it is up to you.
• You will Zoom again some time soon.
• You will continue to see toilet paper in a whole new light.
• You will have another opportunity to learn an academic lesson you missed years ago.
• You don’t have to look hard to find heroes.
• The four walls around you will look better at some point.
• You will save money on gas this year.
• The election will end, hopefully.
• If you get off the couch and do some push ups, your body will thank you.
• This is the only 2020 you have. Make the most of it.
• It’s okay to lose track of the day: don’t lose track of your goals.
• Watch one fewer episode. You can make better use of your time.
• Use a shower to wash away your cares, and your stench.
• Don’t use a mask to hide from the truth.
• One person’s monster is another person’s savior.
• Feel free to pat yourself on the back. Don’t break your arm doing it.
• Petting the dog will bring you relief. Taking him out will bring him relief.
• Sometimes being odd is the only way to get even.
• Keep your enemies at bay. Six feet should work.
• Even while social distancing, do your best to stay connected.
• Love conquers hate, but hate can’t defeat love.
• Don’t forget to floss. Your periodontist will thank you.
• Lock your doors at night, but open your heart.
• Mythology occurs when we dare to dream.
• Take chances, but make sure you wash your hands.
• Consider what the younger version of yourself would do.
• Your children are not a younger version of you.
• Remember which days your kids are in school and make the most of them.
• Mute your computer before the dog starts barking. Your colleagues will thank you.
• Our editor is quarantined because he started coughing, so the gloves are off.
• When people calm down, they are better at solving their problems.
• When people stop telling other people what to do, they become more tolerable.
• Don’t expect a fortune cookie to change your life.
• Wow, you’re going off the rails there, George. Are we allowed to do that?
• Yes, Alissa, our editor is gone and we have to fill these cookies with something.
• Love has no statute of limitations.
• What, so you’re now a lawyer?
• I could have been, Alissa.
• Did you read about the shower? That one was for you.
• Perfect effort means giving 110 percent.
• You can’t give 110 percent. It’s not possible.
• Then why do these athletes say it?
• They’re talking about how hard they’re working. It’s an exaggeration.
• Your intelligence is an exaggeration.
• Get us out of here. They don’t even let us order Chinese food.
• Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes.
• You got that from the Airplane sequel. You can’t put it in a fortune cookie.
• In a fortune cookie? I don’t think someone from Airplane the Sequel is going to find us.
• That’s your problem. You don’t think.
• Thinking alone never cured anything.
• You’re wrong and you never tried thinking.
• I have to get out of here. That’s not the voice in your head. That’s me, George.
From left: Carl Safina, Larry Swanson and Malcolm Bowman. Swanson who died Oct. 17, was renowned not only for his work at SBU, but also his kindly demeanor. Photo from Stony Brook University
Stony Brook University’s Robert Lawrence “Larry” Swanson, associate dean of the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, died Saturday at the age of 82, leaving behind a professional legacy that included awards for his stewardship of waterways and numerous personal connections.
Swanson was a chair of the SoMAS Boat Committee for years and loved being with the crew and out on the boat. He was known for his appreciation for snacks, particularly Oreos. Photo by Jason Schweitzer
Swanson, who had planned to retire next summer, was teaching waste management issues remotely this fall.
A fixture at Stony Brook since 1987, he led the Waste Reduction and Management Institute. The 6-foot, 2-inch Swanson, who was interim dean for SoMAS from 2016 to 2018, had joined Carl Safina, endowed research chair for Nature and Humanity and Malcolm Bowman, distinguished service professor SoMAS, on the New York State Ocean Acidification Task Force since 2018.
In an email, Safina described Swanson as a “gentleman” and a “kind and knowledgeable man who was a well-recognized leader.”
In 1979, Swanson came to the rescue for Bowman, his wife Waveney and their young family. The Bowmans had rented their Stony Brook house during the summer and planned to live in the United Kingdom. With their children, the Bowmans decided to return to New York, where they endured mosquitoes and yellowjacket stings while living in a tent.
Swanson offered the Bowmans his house as long as they took care of Swanson’s golden retriever while he and his family traveled.
He met his wife Dana Lamont at a party in Seattle, where the scientist rose to the rank of captain as a commissioned officer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Swanson used to take long walks in Seattle. After the couple started dating, he told Lamont he must have walked by her house numerous times before they met, which Lamont likened to the song “On the Street Where You Live” from “My Fair Lady.”
Swanson and Lamont have two children, Larry and Michael.
Lamont recalled how Swanson spent considerable time at sea. Lamont said her husband was on a ship once and tried to teach college students reluctant to learn about celestial navigation because they had GPS.
“A week or two later, there was a fire on board, they lost all technology and [Swanson] said, ‘OK, you put the fire out. Now, take us to Hawaii,” Lamont said. They had to use celestial navigation.
Lamont said her late husband was “never afraid of anything, such as flying through the eye of a hurricane.”
Swanson testified in a Supreme Court case in 1985. Lamont said he “loved” the experience.
Described by people who worked with him as kind, caring, steady, reliable and humble, he was considered a role model as well as a leader.
SoMAS adjunct professor, Frank Roethel, recalled how he had major surgery in a Manhattan hospital. One afternoon, he woke to find Swanson in a chair next to his bed.
“I was shocked that he would travel just to spend a few moments with me, but that was him,” Roethel said by email.
Bonnie Stephens, who worked for Swanson for 22 years, appreciated how the man brought people together for lunch, where they discussed politics, shared jokes and offered personal stories.
A dog lover, Swanson also leaves behind their dog Lily, a Chesapeake Bay Retriever, which was his favorite breed of dog.
Born in Baltimore, Swanson spent his childhood primarily in Maryland with his parents Hazel and Lawrence.
A 1960 graduate in civil engineering from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Swanson earned his doctorate in oceanography in 1971 from Oregon State University.
Partha Mitra at the Shanghai Natural History Museum in China where he was giving a talk to children on how birds learn to sing.
By Daniel Dunaief
Throw a giant, twisted multi-colored ball of yarn on the floor, each strand of which contains several different colored parts. Now, imagine that the yarn, instead of being easy to grasp, has small, thin, short intertwined strings. It would be somewhere between difficult and impossible to tease apart each string.
Instead of holding the strings and looking at each one, you might want to construct a computer program that sorted through the pile.
That’s what Partha Mitra, a professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, is doing, although he has constructed an artificial intelligence program to look for different parts of neurons, such as axons, dendrites and soma, in high resolution images.
Partha Mitra at the Owl Cafe in Tokyo
Working with two dimensional images which form a three dimensional stock, he and a team of scientists have performed a process called semantic segmentation, in which they delineated all the different neuronal compartments in an image.
Scientists who design machine learning programs generally take two approaches: they either train the machine to learn from data or they tailor them based on prior knowledge. “There is a larger debate going on in the machine learning community,” Mitra said.
His effort attempts to take this puzzle to the next step, which hybridizes the earlier efforts, attempting to learn from the data with some prior knowledge structure built in. “We are moving away from the purely data driven” approach, he explained.
Mitra and his colleagues recently published a paper about their artificial intelligence-driven neuroanatomy work in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.
For postmortem human brains, one challenge is that few whole-brain light microscopic data sets exist. For those that do exist, the amount of data is large enough to tax available resources.
Indeed, the total amount of storage to study one brain at light microscope resolution is one petabyte of data, which amounts to a million megapixel images.
“We need an automated method,” Mitra said. “We are on the threshold of where we are getting data a cellular resolution of the human brain. You need these techniques” for that discovery. Researchers are on the verge of getting more whole-brain data sets more routinely.
Mitra is interested in the meso-scale architecture, or the way groups of neurons are laid out in the brain. This is the scale at which species-typical structures are visible. Individual cells would show strong variation from one individual to another. At the mesoscale, however, researchers expect the same architecture in brains of different neurotypical individuals of the same species.
Trained as a physicist, Mitra likes the concreteness of the data and the fact that neuroanatomical structure is not as contingent on subtle experimental protocol differences.
He said behavioral and neural activity measurements can depend on how researchers set up their study and appreciates the way anatomy provides physical and architectural maps of brain cells.
The amount of data neuroanatomists have collected exceeds the ability of these specialists to interpret it, in part because of the reduction in cost of storing the information. In 1989, a human brain worth of light microscope data would have cost approximately the entire budget for the National Institutes of Health based on the expense of hard disk storage at the time. Today, Mitra can buy that much data storage every year with a small fraction of his NIH grant.
“There has been a very big change in our ability to store and digitize data,” he said. “What we don’t have is a million neuroanatomists looking at this. The data has exploded in a systematic way. We can’t [interpret and understand] it unaided by the computer.”
Mitra described the work as a “small technical piece of a larger enterprise,” as the group tries to address whether it’s possible to automate what a neuroanatomist does. Through this work, he hopes computers might discover common principals of the anatomy and construction of neurons in the brain.
While the algorithms and artificial intelligence will aid in the process, Mitra doesn’t expect the research to lead to a fully automated process. Rather, this work has the potential to accelerate the process of studying neuroanatomy.
Down the road, this kind of understanding could enable researchers and ultimately health care professionals to compare the architecture and circuitry of brains from people with various diseases or conditions with those of people who aren’t battling any neurological or cognitive issues.
“There’s real potential to looking at” the brains of people who have various challenges, Mitra said.
The paper in Nature Machine Intelligence reflected a couple of years of work that Mitra and others did in parallel with other research pursuits.
A resident of Midtown, Mitra, his wife Tatiana and their seven-year-old daughter have done considerable walking around the city during the pandemic.
The couple created a virtual exhibit for the New York Hall of Science in the Children’s Science Museum in which they described amazing brains. A figurative sculptor, Tatiana provided the artwork for the exhibition.
Mitra, who has been at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory since 2003, said neuroanatomy has become increasingly popular over the last several years. He would like to enhance the ability of the artificial intelligence program in this field.
“I would like to eliminate the human proofreading,” he said. “We are still actively working on the methodology.”
Using topological methods, Mitra has also traced single neurons. He has published that work through a preprint in bioRxiv.
Jill has been cutting hair for 38 years. She has owned a few salons, but these days she has been scheduling hair cutting appointments at people’s homes.
She wears a mask, asks her customers to do the same and does her work outside or in the shelter of a garage, where the wind isn’t as strong.
An immigrant from Lebanon, Jill is completely professional, asking for extension cords through the garage, setting up a chair for her customers, and carrying her sterilized scissors, electronic clippers and comb.
Reflecting on the decades she’s spent chatting with customers while she works, she has an easy, purposeful manner about her efforts, while she rolls her “r’s,” sharing linguistic hints on her life.
These days, she lives with her daughter, son-in-law and her three grandchildren. She has her own space in the house, but is hoping, before too long, to rent or buy a small place where she can call the shots.
She shared a story with me that offers some perspective about life and our reactions in the moment to our wins and losses.
Back in February, Jill had decided it was time to own a salon again. She pooled all her savings and placed a bid on a property. She was excited about the prospect of serving more customers, hiring staff and growing a business that would help her make money and increase her savings towards retirement.
She knew she was close to winning the bidding and had started imagining how she’d reinvent the space and the people she’d hire. But, then, the people selling the property informed her that they had chosen another bidder, who had deeper pockets and was a part of a larger chain. She was incredibly disappointed and felt as if she’d lost out on a business she knew she could run. She spent several weeks irritated by the situation.
A month after she lost the property, she joined the rest of the world in the pandemic-triggered lockdown. Initially, she couldn’t get out much.
As the days stretched into weeks and the weeks into months, she realized how lucky her loss on that property had been. She would have had to carry a $4,000 monthly mortgage for a location that was producing no revenue for months.
She considers herself an incredibly lucky loser. Back in February, of course, a mere month before the virus changed the United States, she had no way of knowing that her loss would save her from a mountain of unmanageable debt.
She feels as if a force from up high was looking out for her, protecting her from a financial burden and responsibility that would have been hard to manage, even with whatever government program she might have turned to for help.
Down the road, when the world returns to something resembling the experiences of 2019, she may, once again, consider buying a salon. Until then, however, she’s perfectly happy without the debt and the uncertainty of managing through a difficult small business and economic environment.
In the meantime, she will continue to show up at people’s homes, brushes, clippers and scissors in hand, ready to provide on-site haircuts to people who prefer, or can’t, leave their properties.
The challenges and obstacles that disappoint also sometimes protect us, even if we can’t see that in the moment, particularly when we know how much we want something.
Many of us will confront those frustrations in the future over which we have no control. Sometimes, we may gain perspective on what, at first, appears to be an unfortunate outcome.
Suffolk County Legislator William "Doc" Spencer. File photo
*Updated to include information about actions by the Suffolk County legislature.*
Suffolk County Legislator William “Doc” Spencer (D-Centerport) was arrested Tuesday for allegedly attempting to trade oxycodone for sex.
Spencer, who is a legislator for the 18th district and was in a Suffolk County vehicle at the time of the arrest Oct. 20, allegedly planned to meet a prostitute in the parking lot of a Goodwill store in Elwood to trade sex for the pills, which were reportedly oxycodone, a legal form of an opioid. Authorities had arranged a sting operation.
Spencer, who had two oxycodone pills in his possession at the sting operation, is charged with criminal possession of a controlled substance in the third degree, a class B felony, and criminal sale of a controlled substance in the third degree, a class B felony.
Spencer, 53, was arraigned on Wednesday at the John P. Cohalan Jr. Courthouse in Central Islip. The man has been a legislator since 2012 and serves on the county’s opioid task force.
Spencer is due back in court on Feb. 26th. If convicted of the top count, he could face a maximum of up to nine years in prison.
Assistant District Attorneys Kevin Ward and Laura de Oliveira, of the Public Integrity Bureau, are prosecuting the case.
“The message here is that the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office will continue to work in partnership with all of the law enforcement agencies operating here on Long Island, including the DEA and members of the Long Island Heroin task Force, to hold criminals accountable no matter who they are or what their walk of life is,” Suffolk DA Tim Sini (D) said in a statement.
“Law enforcement officers follow the evidence and this time, the evidence led to a prominent member of the community,” Suffolk County Police Commissioner Geraldine Hart said in a statement.
Spencer was the chief of otolaryngology at Huntington Hospital. In a statement, a Huntington Hospital spokeswoman said Spencer is “not an employed physician at Huntington Hospital but has privileges as a voluntary physician with his own private practice. His privileges at the hospital have been temporarily suspended pending further investigation.”
Spencer is also Associate Clinical Professor at Stony Brook University Hospital. Spencer has not had medical privileges at Stony Brook University Hospital since 2014, a hospital official said.
Spencer runs a private practice, Long Island Otolaryngology & Pediatric Airway in Huntington.
Suffolk County Republican Committee Chairman Jesse Garcia was quick to jump on the news, calling in a release for Spencer to step down “immediately” as a county legislator.
In a statement, Garcia called Spencer’s alleged actions a violation of his oath as a doctor and elected official.
“This alleged act was an attempt to abuse his position of power and trust, prey on women, and take advantage of those he believed were prisoners of addiction,” Garcia said in a statement. “His legislative record of sponsoring dozens of resolutions focusing on health and drug abuse makes this alleged drug-for-sex trade all the more evil, because he clearly knew the consequences of his behavior on his intended victim.”
Suffolk County Legislature Presiding Officer Rob Calarco issued a statement in response to Spencer’s arrest, saying he has stepped down as Democrat majority leader.
Calarco said, “Legislator Spencer has stepped down from his position as Majority Leader of the Legislature’s Democratic caucus. He is also being removed from his post as chair of the Legislature’s Health Committee which subsequently removes him from any assignments linked to that chairmanship, including serving on the Legislature’s Heroin and Opiate Epidemic Advisory Panel.”
“There is nothing in the law that requires a legislator to resign while charges are pending, and while the allegations against Legislator Spencer are serious, he is entitled to his day in court,” Calarco continued. “My colleagues and I remain focused on continuing the business of the people. The Democratic caucus will convene in the future to select a new Majority Leader, and a new health committee chair will be chosen in due time.”
Spencer is married and has three children.
Prior to his arrest, Spencer had been involved in several legislative efforts, including to combat the effects of the opioid epidemic. Spencer proposed a resolution that passed unanimously to make Narcan, which reverses the effects of narcotics, available to policy emergency responders in the Second Precinct.
Spencer had sponsored 35 resolutions, with close to 1/3 of them related to health and safety, including prohibiting smoking at county beaches and county parks. Spencer’s bills include a 5-cent fee for single use plastic bags, which stores started charging in January, 2018.
During his time in office, Spencer had worked to ban the sale of powdered caffeine to minors, raise the age of selling tobacco products, helped pass a measure to stop companies from manufacturing energy drinks to youth and led a ban on flavored e-cigarettes.
Last fall during the run up to his reelection, Spencer told the Times Beacon Record Newspapers he was committed to finding treatment and addiction solutions for people affected by the opioid crisis.
Spencer won reelection in 2019, defeating Republican Garrett Chelius and Independent Daniel West for a seat in a district representing Huntington, Halesite, Centerport, Northport, East Northport, Cold Spring Harbor, Lloyd Harbor among other towns.
An ordained minister, Spencer serves as the Pastor of Willow Manor Fellowship in Centerport.
Spencer was released on his own recognizance. He has to hand over his passport and a legal firearm.
This story was updated to include details about the number of pills Spencer had in his possession, the specific charges, the potential prison sentence if convicted, the names of the attorneys prosecuting the case, and comments from DA Sini and SCPD Commissioner Hart. The update also indicates that Spencer was released on his own recognizance and that Spencer is no longer the chief of otolaryngology at Huntington Hospital.
This story was updated Oct. 22 to update the statement by Rob Calarco.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, raised a red flag about the safety of annual family gatherings during Thanksgiving last week on an interview on CBS.
People may have to “bite the bullet and sacrifice that social gathering unless you’re pretty certain that the people that you’re dealing with are not infected,” Fauci told CBS.
Richard Gatteau, SBU Dean of Students. Photo from SBU Website
Doctors at area hospitals and officials at Stony Brook University are offering guidance to residents and students over a month before an annual holiday that often brings people from several generations, cities and states together.
Before they send some of the 4,200 on campus students at SBU home, the university plans to test them for the presence of the virus that causes COVID-19.
The week of Nov. 16, “every resident will be tested,” said Dean of Students Richard Gatteau. “Any positive cases would remain on campus” until the university knew they were negative.
Students remaining on campus would receive meals and would get the same level of care through the holidays that students would normally get if they tested positive during the semester.
Stony Brook expects the student population to decline after Thanksgiving, when all classes and final exams will be remote through the end of the semester.
For the students who plan to return to campus, Stony Brook realizes the logistical challenges of requiring viral tests during the short holiday and will provide tests in the first two days after these students return to their dormitories.
Even before the holiday, Stony Brook expects to increase the frequency of viral testing from bi-weekly to weekly.
Gatteau said the student government plans to educate students who plan to join family during the holiday about procedures to keep everyone safe. This guidance mirrors school policies, such as wearing masks inside when near other family members, keeping a distance of six feet inside and washing hands regularly.
The dean of students recently spoke with Dr. Deborah Birx, head of the White House’s coronavirus task force who visited Stony Brook to speak with officials about the school’s COVID response. Though Birx was pleased with the measures the university took, she was reportedly more worried about the behavior of extended family than with students during Thanksgiving.
“Her concern is with the older generation not following the rules,” Gatteau said. She wanted students to encourage their grandparents to follow the same procedures because “grandparents will listen to their grandkids.”
Types of Tests
Dr. Michael Grosso, Chief Medical Officer at Huntington Hospital, urged everyone to plan to get tested before coming together for Thanksgiving.
Dr. Grosso said two types of tests are available for students and parents. The first is an antigen test and the second is a PCR, for polymerase chain reaction, test. Grosso suggests that the PCR test is more reliable as the antigen test “misses more cases.”
The test technique is critical to its success. Some false negatives may result from inadequate specimen collection, Grosso said. The deep nasopharyngeal specimen “requires a little skill on the part of the person doing the test.”
Additionally, people getting tested before a family gathering need to consider the timing of the test. They may receive a negative test during a period of time in which the virus is developing in their bodies.
Active testing may have helped reduce the severity of the disease for people who contract it. People are coming to the hospital in some cases before the disease causes as much damage.
In addition to getting tested and monitoring possible symptoms, Grosso urged residents to continue to practice the new, healthier etiquette, even when they are with relatives during the holidays.
“Families need to have conversations” about how close they are prepared to get before they see each other, Grosso said. People need to “decide together what rules [they] are going to follow, and make sure everybody is comfortable with those.”
As for Thanksgiving in the Grosso home, the Chief Medical Officer said he and his wife have five children between them, two of whom will be coming for the annual November holiday. The others will participate, as has become the modern reality, at the other end of a zoom call. Typically, the entire family would come together.
Stony Brook’s Gatteau said he and his partner typically have 20 to 25 people over for Thanksgiving. This year, they are limited the guests to seven people. They plan to keep masks on in their house and will crack a window open so there is air flow.
The Monti and Saladino families, above, continue the work of The Don Monti Memorial Research Foundation. Photo from Jim Kennedy
Even amid the COVID-19 pandemic, The Don Monti Memorial Research Foundation continues to raise money to support cancer care and research on Long Island.
Caroline Monti Saladino speaks at last year’s Cancer Survivors Day. Photo from Mel Saladino
The foundation, named for Don Monti, who died at 16 in 1972 from acute myeloblastic leukemia, has changed some of the events this year, but not the mission.
Instead of the annual ball at the Woodbury-based Crest Hollow Country Club, which the Montis own, the foundation started its Capital Giving Campaign and hopes to raise $1 million this year. All of the proceeds support the mission, since the foundation’s senior staff, including Caroline Monti Saladino, president, work for free.
“Today with COVID, nothing has changed with the journey,” she said.
The foundation has mailed out a capital campaign brochure that includes letters from Michael Dowling, president and CEO of Northwell Health; Richard Barakat, director of Northwell Health Cancer Institute; and Bruce Stillman, president of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
“Your investment in cancer clinical care, research, wellness and survivorship enhances our ability to provide comprehensive, multidisciplinary care for our patients and enables us to provide support services for their families and loved ones,” Barakat wrote in his letter.
Monti Saladino, who has helped cancer patients for close to five decades, said the needs of cancer patients haven’t changed.
The Monti foundation has become a multigenerational family cause, which Tita and Joseph started months after their son died. The foundation has raised more than $47 million to support research, education and patient care in oncology and hematology. It has donated money to Northwell Health, Huntington Hospital, Long Island Jewish and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for everything from patient care and treatment to genetic counseling to basic research.
The foundation recently donated $50,000 to Huntington Hospital to help fund its developing cancer center.
Numerous members of the Monti and Saladino families have dedicated time and effort to improving the lives of people with cancer and to offering support to the families of patients. Monti Saladino said her children are involved, as are some of her 12 grandchildren, who have continued the family tradition by raising money to support the foundation.
The foundation has an office at CSHL, where Stillman said he often sees “family members working there, helping to raise support — it’s an amazing dedication.”
In addition to the visible connection through laboratories at CSHL, the foundation has supported four Don Monti cancer centers in Nassau and Suffolk, at North Shore University Hospital, also Huntington, Glen Cove and Plainview hospitals.
The members of the Monti and Saladino families have also played instrumental roles by visiting patients, hosting Don Monti Cancer Survivors Day events and forging new relationships with recipients of their support.
When Northwell and CSHL were looking for a link between the basic research at the Lab where new ideas and methods are developed, and the clinic where medical teams worked to provide personalized care, the Monti foundation helped facilitate a partnership.
“We were very familiar with what was going on” at Northwell partly “through the Monti foundation,” Stillman said. “They were helpful. It was good that people on both sides knew each other.”
Cold Spring Harbor Lab Connection
CSHL has received between $300,000 to $500,000 each year for over a decade from the foundation, which supports innovative research and supplements the funds the scientists receive from government agencies like the National Cancer Institute.
Receiving national grants is difficult and competitive, which increases the value of philanthropic funding that is the “driver of innovation and one of the reasons the United States is so prominent in research,” Stillman said.
He appreciates how the foundation offers a direct connection between the scientists working to cure a disease and the patients and their families who are, and have been, battling cancer.
Principal investigators, postdoctoral researchers and graduate students attend Cancer Survivors Day, during which they see people who might benefit from their research efforts.
“When you see patients, it does change the way you think about how you do the research,” Stillman said.
The funds from the foundation have supported numerous research initiatives at CSHL, including the work of Nicholas Tonks and Christopher Vakoc.
Working with chemists, Tonks developed molecules that inhibit enzymes called protein tyrosine phosphatases, which could be used to treat breast cancer.
Vakoc, meanwhile, has found subtypes of cancer that require critical proteins to grow. He is working on a program to identify how to target what Stillman described as the “Achilles heel” of some cancers.
“Our reputation through the years as a patient-oriented organization and a research-oriented organization has really sustained us. A lot of the people we have healed through our organization are very generous.”
— Caroline Monti Saladino
Northwell Health Connection
The Monti foundation works closely with Dr. Ruthee-Lu Bayer, who is the chief of stem cell transplantation at Northwell Health.
“She and her team are amazing,” Monti Saladino said.
She recalled that Bayer was doing clerical work she didn’t have time to do in the midst of her life-saving and life-extending efforts.
The foundation’s president suggested that the hospital should hire an administrator so Bayer’s team could see more patients. Monti Saladino spoke to the hospital administrator and said she would contribute $100,000 a year for five years, if the hospital contributed the remaining cost. The hospital agreed, providing some relief for Bayer’s efforts.
Monti Saladino said contributors appreciate the history of the Monti foundation and its ongoing focus.
“Our reputation through the years as a patient-oriented organization and a research-oriented organization has really sustained us,” she said. “A lot of the people we have healed through our organization are very generous.”
Stuart Hayim, who is a dealer of Ferraris and Maseratis on Long Island, recovered from lymphoma in 1979 while receiving medical treatment and personalized attention from Tita Monti, at the Don Monti Division of Oncology at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset. Since then, he has won boat races and raised money each year for the foundation.
Monti Saladino said the foundation helps patients wherever and however it can.
When her young brother Don was diagnosed with leukemia in 1972, oncology and chemotherapy were “primitive,” she said. In terms of patient care, the medical experience “didn’t make people very comfortable.”
The Foundation’s Goal
Through the money the Don Monti foundation raised, the goal was to make the challenging experience of dealing with treating cancer more bearable for people and the families who go through it, she said.
The foundation built the first bone-marrow transplant unit in the 1990s, added a patient lounge and funded Cancer Survivors Day.
Monti Saladino said she “lives and breathes” her brother every day. Don died in June 1972, and her parents, Tita and Joseph Monti, had their first fundraiser that December.
Tita Monti, who died in 2006, said she didn’t want what happened to Don to happen to other people.
“We need to make a purpose out of his short 16 years of life, from the joy he gave us,” Monti Saladino recalled her mother saying.
Her brother’s story is a credit to his determination and to his mother’s perseverance, Monti Saladino said. Doctors had given him six weeks to live. His mother combined beetroot powder with natural and other healthy treatments that extended his life by 16 months.
Stillman said the legacy of the Monti family is evident throughout Long Island.
“It’s quite impressive, all of the number of people they’ve touched,” he said. “They’ve improved the treatment environment, the cancer environment, the clinicians and researchers.”
Monti Saladino said she and the family are far from perfect.
“We’ve got our issues,” she said. “They don’t affect this. This is a real focus that never changes.”
For more information, visit www.donmontifoundation.org.
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