People of low-income, and especially minorities, constantly struggle with the financial and social hardships that arise from racism. While the financial disparities and social injustices are well known, many are still unaware of the environmental racism that many people and communities endure, and how deadly it actually is. Currently, the COVID-19 pandemic is making this issue more apparent and is increasing the need for awareness about environmental justice.
Sapphire Perera
Environmental racism is a form of systemic racism where people of color are disproportionately impacted by environmental hazards through policies and practices. It has existed in America ever since the Europeans made contact with the Native Americans, and it has progressively worsened with the Industrial Revolution and the increasing amount of toxic waste and new technology that is being created.
The working populations that lives in low-income communities aren’t given the power to have their voices heard regarding environmental laws. Moreover, the land in these areas is cheaper for industrial actors to acquire. This is why about 70% of contaminated waste sites are located in low income communities. With such a great imbalance of political power between the upper class, less diverse neighborhoods and the low-income African American neighborhoods, the latter’s communities are being subjected to the greater amounts of air pollution, toxic waste sites, landfills, lead poisoning and flooding.
The health effects from environmental racism are extremely harmful and lethal. Most often, people of low income communities who are subjected to environmental racism will see increases in obesity, asthma, diabetes and many different cancers because they are living amongst industrial toxic chemicals and toxic waste.
One example that demonstrates the harmful effects of environmental racism is the so-called Cancer Alley in Louisiana along the Mississippi River. In 1987, African Americans of low-income neighborhoods started noticing an abundance of cancer cases within their community. People began making the connection between cancer cases and the 85-mile-long stretch of oil refineries and petrochemical plants. The petrochemical plants are extremely harmful to human health because petrochemicals can be absorbed through the skin or ingested and will accumulate in tissues and organs. They can then cause brain, nerve and liver damage, birth defects, cancer and asthma. This is why living in Cancer Alley increases one’s chance of getting cancer by 50%. Currently, Cancer Alley is also experiencing a highest rate of coronavirus deaths.
Another community that is a target of environmental racism is the African American community of Uniontown, Alabama. On Dec. 22, 2008, an impoundment burst and spilled more than a billion gallons of highly toxic coal ash into the Emory River. The coal ash contained various pollutants such as arsenic, mercury, and lead, which can penetrate deeply into the lungs. Two years after the spill, the Tennessee Valley Authority moved four million cubic yards of coal ash from the Kingston spill to Arrowhead Landfill in Uniontown Alabama. The workers who were sent to clean up the coal ash suffered from brain cancer, lung cancer and leukemia due to exposure. The people of Uniontown Alabama, a low-income African American community, saw similar health effects to that of the workers. Unfortunately, the people of Uniontown did not have any recourse because the Resource Conservation Recovery Act classified the ash as non-hazardous in Uniontown.
‘Environmental racism is a form of systemic racism where people of color are disproportionately impacted by environmental hazards through policies and practices.’
There are hundreds of examples of environmental racism, but we are currently witnessing one of the largest impacts of environmental racism. With the COVID-19 pandemic, we are seeing that African American and other minority communities are being hit hardest by the pandemic all across the country. With a lack of available resources and preexisting conditions that already arise from environmental racism, people of these communities are more susceptible to catching COVID-19. African Americans not only have environmental racism to worry about during this pandemic, but also mass incarcerations for minor misdemeanors, overcrowded housing, and under-funded public transport, which all have been increasing the COVID-19 infection rates. Unfortunately, this connection between pandemics and low-income neighborhoods isn’t new because in the 1990s there were higher mortality rates among communities of color for the HIV pandemic as well.
Different policies and laws set forth by our government have placed African Americans and minorities in these neighborhoods which are subjected to environmental racism. We need to stop hearing news stories of the unbreathable South Bronx air, the North Carolina hog farm raw sewage lakes enveloping African American farmland and lead in the Flint river in Michigan. The environmental justice movement is one way to achieve equity for the African American and disadvantaged neighborhoods because it focuses on fair distribution of environmental benefits and burdens.
Sapphire Perera is a rising senior at Port Jefferson high school. The “Turtle Island,” as the name for this ongoing column refers to the Native American mythology about North America existing on the back of a great turtle that bears every living being on its spine.
Hurricane Laura is expected to cut across the breadth of the U.S. and come at Long Island as a series of storms. PSEG LI said its ready for any cleanup afterwards. Image from NOAA
Amid numerous investigations about its failed communication systems and inaccurate estimated time to restore power after Tropical Storm Isaias, PSEG LI is returning to an earlier version of outage software.
Tropical Storm Isaias uprooted a tree in St. James. Photo by Rita J. Egan
The utility, which is overseen by the Long Island Power Authority, is rolling back from version 6.7, which was installed earlier this year, to version 5.5, according to an email from LIPA in response to TBR News Media’s questions.
This is one of several steps PSEG, under LIPA’s supervision, is taking to address any future storms that might hit Long Island.
“LIPA is currently conducting an end-to-end review to understand the root causes of the communications and restoration systems issues, including the outage management system and the various feeder systems,” LIPA representatives explained in its email.
The power authority also indicated that it was closely overseeing PSEG’s immediate, corrective actions through daily calls and reports and an independent review of system modifications and testing.
LIPA and Electeds Conduct Reviews
LIPA is planning to issue 30, 90, and 180-day reports to the LIPA Board of Trustees and the public.
The reviews include an evaluation of pre-storm readiness of the telecommunication systems, a root causes analysis of unprocessed calls and text message, and review of the design and implementation of outage management and restoration systems and processes and actionable recommendations on storm preparedness, system and management controls and approaches to increasing system reliability and performance.
“It’s good that they’re doing an outside report … It’s not going to help us now.”
– Jim Gaughran
While State Sen. Jim Gaughran (D-Northport) welcomed the review, his primary concern, he said, was whether the utility was prepared for the next storm, particularly in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Laura, which devastated parts of Louisiana.
“It’s good that they’re doing an outside report,” Gaughran said in an interview. “It’s not going to help us now. This is a crisis situation and you would think that they would have an emergency task force… that would come up with changes and implement them” within days of the response to a storm that knocked out power for more than a week to parts of Long Island.
PSEG said in an emailed statement that the company is “working diligently to be prepared for the next major weather event and ensure that our response to Tropical Storm Isaias was an anomaly.”
The utility company indicated it had made configuration and capacity changes to the phone system, rolled back the outage management system to a more “stable” version and put “processes in place to continuously monitor our IT systems for capacity and bottleneck issues.”
A tree lies across Old Post Road East in Mount Sinai after Tropical Storm Isais. Photo by Kyle Barr
While New York State Attorney General Letitia James is conducting her own investigation into the company’s response to the storm, LIPA indicated that the Department of Financial Services, in cooperation with the Department of Public Service, was also participating in a review.
The involvement in the DFS is “good,” said Gaughran, who has been a consistent critic of both LIPA and PSEG even before Tropical Storm Isaias. “The more the merrier.”
One of the questions Gaughran and other representatives asked about LIPA’s oversight of PSEG LI related to the timing and effectiveness of the most recent stress test. In response to a letter Gaughran and Assemblyman Fred Thiele, Jr. (D-Sag Harbor) sent to LIPA, CEO Thomas Falcone indicated that the outage management system was most recently stress tested in June of this year.
“Part of LIPA’s review includes the stress-testing procedures used in the past and improvements for the future,” Falcone said in his response.
Cost of the Cleanup
Senator Gaughran and Assemblyman Thiele said they are also focused on the source of any reimbursement the company receives in connection with costs related to the storm.
Long Island rate payers “shouldn’t be paying for the cost of out-of-town crews sitting around waiting to do work and not doing work because the management failed to communicate,” Gaughran said. The costs of bringing in those crews from out of state and feeding and housing them should be shared by shareholders of PSEG, Gaughran contended.
“I believe shareholders have to be responsible for at least any portion of the additional costs related to their incompetence and failure in dealing with the communication system,” he said. Had the communication system worked as it should, the time to restore power might have been cut down dramatically, Gaughran argued.
“LIPA retains a third-party auditor for storm recovery costs where federal funds are involved, as will likely be the case for Isaias,” Falcone said in the letter.
LIPA estimates that the cost of restoration, which involved over 6,000 personnel, was over $350 million, with $260 million eligible for FEMA reimbursement. The main driver of the costs, Falcone said in his letter, was the extensive damage to the electric grid, which occurred at over 20,000 locations.
Reiterating sentiments he shared during a virtual joint hearing of the New York State Senate and Assembly, Falcone said the system PSEG LI designed and implemented did “not meet the standards of our contract. LIPA retains all of its contractual rights and remedies and will pursue the appropriate course of action after the conclusion of the various investigations.”
“LIPA retains a third-party auditor for storm recovery costs where federal funds are involved, as will likely be the case for Isaias.”
Thomas Falcone
Gaughran said he would consider Falcone’s response to his letter and would likely respond with additional questions that address additional concerns.
“There are a lot of issues I hope” LIPA addresses, the state senator said, including why the company didn’t contract with workers from National Grid, who were already on Long Island.
“You had Long Islanders ready to work,” Gaughran said. “They could have been put into operation immediately.”
Gaughran doesn’t necessarily think LIPA needs to revoke its contract with PSEG LI. Rather, he wants to “get a system so the lights can go back on at a reasonable time.”
Ultimately, the state Senator believes the way LIPA oversees PSEG LI may not provide sufficient reassurance for residential and business customers.
Ultimately, Gaughran would like the legislature to revisit the structure of the agreement between LIPA and PSEG LI.
“This structure isn’t working,” Gaughran said.
In his letter to the politicians, Falcone agreed that “Long Islanders deserve better” than the response they got from PSEG LI after Isaias. “LIPA is working to ensure they get better.”
The SLSC's Suffolk Libraries Empowering Discovery bus will be there Sept. 1 for the Comsewogue Library's Census Awareness Day. Photo from SLSC
The Comsewogue Public Library is trying to spread the word that every person counts.
The Comsewogue Library is welcoming community members to its Census Awareness Day event Tuesday, Sept. 1, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Library staff, Suffolk County Library System staff, and census representatives will be working together to assist community members in filling out the census.
Library staff said this is a chance for local residents to receive information about the census, be counted, learn about the library, and to enjoy giveaways.
A grant from Suffolk County and the Long Island Community Foundation is allowing the Suffolk Cooperative Library System to support local libraries by deploying its Livebrary.com outreach bus, also known as the Suffolk Libraries Empowering Discovery vehicle, to events sponsored by local libraries throughout the month of September. The SLED will also be in attendance at the Comsewogue event.
The public libraries in Suffolk are all working with their local communities to ensure that all Suffolk County residents are counted for the 2020 US Census. The census count has a direct impact on funds that state and local governments receive for such programs as those that support highway planning and construction, local schools, and firefighters.
In a previous article by TBR News Media, statistics showed that many places in Long Island were behind where they were in previous years for filling out the census. New York as a whole is still behind where it was in its self response rate compared to 2010 by close to 4%, according to U.S. Census data as of Aug. 27. New York is also behind the national average in its self response rate as well.
“Our message is that completing the census matters now more than ever,” said Comsewogue Public Library Director Debra Engelhardt. “The census helps shape your community and can personally impact you and yours. Federal funding and representation are at stake. Census data is confidential and cannot be used against you. The Library is proud to partner with SCLS in the census awareness campaign.”
To learn more about Comsewogue Public Library’s Census Awareness Day event, contact the Library’s Adult Services Department at 631-928-1212, option 3.
Stony Brook University's COVID-19 testing site. Photo by Matthew Niegocki
As part of an awareness campaign, Suffolk County is trying to provide residents with updated information on testing locations, including sites in pharmacies that are free of charge.
Suffolk officials said this was in response to U.S. Centers for Disease Control Guidelines which were inexplicably changed Aug. 25 to say that individuals do not necessarily need to get tested for COVID-19 after coming in contact with someone who has tested positive. New York State officials have also spoken out against the change, arguing it flies in the face of what we currently understand about COVID-19.
Such sites are listed below:
Town of Brookhaven and East End
CVS Pharmacy, 6221 Route 25A, Wading River, NY 11792
CVS Pharmacy, 496 County Road 111 Building C, Manorville, NY 11949
Rite Aid, 803 Montauk Hwy Unit D, Shirley, NY
CVS Pharmacy, 29 Havenwood Drive, Shirley NY 11967
Walgreens, 1580 Route 112, Medford, NY 11763
CVS Pharmacy, 470 West Main Street, Patchogue, NY 11772
CVS Pharmacy, 1710 Route 112, Coram, NY 11727
CVS Pharmacy, 2315 Middle Country Road, Centereach, NY 11720
Rite Aid, 229 Independence Plaza, Selden, NY
CVS Pharmacy, 729 Portion Road, Ronkonkoma, NY 11779
Stony Brook Drive Through Testing Site, 100 Nicolls Rd, Stony Brook, NY 11794
Town of Smithtown
CVS Pharmacy, 977 Jericho Turnpike, Smithtown, NY 11725
CVS Pharmacy, 111 Terry Road, Smithtown, NY 11787
Town of Huntington and Western Suffolk
CVS Pharmacy, 520 Larkfield Road, East Northport, NY 11731
CVS Pharmacy, 2000 Jericho Turnpike, East Northport, NY 11731
CVS Pharmacy, 111 Depot Road, Huntington Station, NY 11746
CVS Pharmacy, 107 South Country Road, Bellport, NY 11713
CVS Pharmacy, 450 Main Street, Farmingdale, NY 11735
CVS Pharmacy, Candlewood Road and 5th Avenue, Brentwood, NY 11717
CVS Pharmacy, 311 Main Street, Center Moriches, NY 11934
CVS Pharmacy, 831 Connetquot Avenue, Islip Terrace, NY 11752
CVS Pharmacy, 105 Montauk Highway, West Sayville, NY 11782
Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) said during a press conference Aug. 26 that New York would not adhere to the new guidance. He instead proclaimed that the CDC was following the bidding of President Donald Trump (R). He called the new health policy “political propaganda.”
Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone (D) said in a release that the new CDC guidance is inconsistent with what has already helped stop the spread of COVID-19.
“From day one, we have prioritized access to testing, especially in our hard hit communities,” Bellone said in a release. “In light of the puzzling CDC guidance released this week, I am proud to stand with Governor Cuomo and others in the medical community to encourage our residents to continue to get tested. If we want to avoid a second wave and keep our infection rate below one percent, testing must be a top priority.”
For their part, federal health officials have told reporters the CDC’s change in testing policy was not based on politics and the change was made by CDC themselves. However, Trump has publicly said that he believed the reason the number of coronavirus cases continues to increase was because the U.S. has increased the number of tests it conducts.
Suffolk Commissioner of Health Services Dr. Gregson Pigott said testing is the best way to prevent a new wave of the virus come the end of summer.
“A robust testing program allows us to identify as many positive cases as possible, isolate those individuals and quarantine their close contacts, therefore slowing and containing the spread of COVID-19,” Pigott said in a release. “In order to protect public health and help prevent a second wave in the fall, we will continue to recommend everyone who is exposed to the virus gets tested.”
Cops said that over the past week there have been a rash of car thefts and vehicle break-ins within the Three Village area.
Now several Port Jefferson residents have also reported vehicles were stolen from their property as well, though police said they are still investigating if the same perpetrators were committing the robberies in both areas.
Suffolk County Police provided TBR News Media a list of 16 total car thefts and break ins. The list shows a total of four cars were stolen from residences in Stony Brook Aug. 23. Two of those vehicles, a 2020 Nissan and a 2019 Volkswagen were recovered — the former was found in Connecticut while the latter was located in Stony Brook. Two other cars, a 2016 Mazda and a 2009 Acura, have so far not been located, according to police.
The 12 other incidences were petit larcenies of property from cars in Stony Brook, Setauket and Old Field. Several items electronics like laptops or earphones, while others were purses, money and car keys. All incidents took place within the 6th precinct.
Suffolk County Police Detective Lt. Sean Beran said all incidents were from unlocked vehicles. The investigation is ongoing, according to Beran, though he added there are a couple of people of interest.
Uniformed and plainclothes personnel have been patrolling the area, and the Special Operations Team has been assigned to the case. Beran said no additional break-ins or thefts were reported after Aug. 23 in the Three Village community.
Beran said it’s important for car owners to remember to lock their vehicles, make sure they have their car key FOB and remove belongings even when parking a car in a driveway.
Police confirmed that more car thefts have since been reported by locals in the Port Jefferson area as well. A man in the Harbor Hills section of the village on Landing Lane said two cars were stolen from his driveway at around 1:45 a.m. Friday, Aug. 28.
One vehicle was a 2020 Honda Accord and another was a 2016 Honda CRV, according to the Port Jefferson man’s posts on social media. Cops also said that a 2013 Mercedes was also stolen from Sands Lane in Port Jeff. That vehicle has since been recovered nearby.
Police said it is still under investigation whether the Three Village and Port Jeff car thefts are connected.
People can contact the 6th Precinct with information at 631-854-8652 or submit an anonymous tip by calling 1-800-220-TIPS (8477), utilizing a mobile app which can be downloaded through the App Store or Google Play by searching P3 Tips, or online at www.P3Tips.com.
The Belle Terre village board. File photo by Kyle Barr
With two trustee seats and the mayoral position up for election in the Village of Belle Terre, three individuals have thrown their hats into the ring along with the three incumbents.
This year, incumbent Mayor Bob Sandak is joined by Deputy Mayor Sheila Knapp and Trustee Jacquelyn Gernaey. Opposing them are newcomers Enrico Scarda, who’s running for mayor, along with trustee candidates Peter Colucci and Lou Bove.
The mayoral race has already started to heat up in anticipation for the Sept. 15 voting date. Ballots can be cast at the Belle Terre Village Hall from 12 to 9 p.m.
Mayor
Enrico Scarda
Enrico Scarda
Scarda, the president and founder of the Crest Group development agency, said he is running to help bolster local property values and update how the village communicates with residents.
“We’re all getting up in age and want to sell our homes to downsize, and I believe we could do much better with property values than our [competing villages],” Scarda said. “The village has the opportunity here to get an attorney who has experience in the community for free.”
The Crest Group owns multiple properties around the Port Jeff area, including Danford’s Hotel & Marina and The Waterview at the Port Jefferson Country Club. Scarda is a 20-year resident of the village, having moved there with his wife to help raise his three children. With his two sons having already graduated from college they are helping him run the business, and with his daughter also graduating soon as well, he said he has more time to spend caring about local issues.
The village, he said, could do better with its communications efforts, including buffing up its website. He suggested Belle Terre should create a ticket system for things like road repair that can be submitted electronically, such as he has in his business. The village would give updates through the system for when a ticket has been accepted and when a project is complete.
He added there could be small additions that would make the beach program more attractive, including more renovations to the beach pavilion.
All these small changes, he said, would go to making the village more attractive, and thereby increasing everyone’s property values.
His home on Seaside Drive is only one of several Sound-facing homes which are facing issues with eroding bluffs. Scarda said though he has already received permits from the New York Department of Environmental Conservation to begin revetment of those bluffs, the village should work with all property owners along that road to shore up the bluffs, especially because fixing one residents’ bluffs will still leave an issue for others all along the shore. It’s not to benefit him or any one person but creating some kind of initiative to do bluff repair would go a long way.
“If one home falls into the sound, the property values of the rest of the village are going to go down,” he said. “If we all did the work at the same time, we could protect that bluff, we would all be safe.”
Similar houses in Belle Terre compared to Old Field are going for a worse rate than their counterparts, he claimed, saying it’s because of small things that are leaving the village in the past.
Other issues for the candidate include safety, as he calls for more cameras including one by the village gate. He also said the village should do more to beautify the roads, including repair and garbage pickup.
Overall, he said his experience would make him a great pick to lead Belle Terre.
“The village is getting an experienced developer who has built communities as large as Belle Terre from the ground up,” he said.
Bob Sandak
Four-year Mayor Sandak has been a village official since he became trustee in 2004. He came on as trustee during Vincent Bove’s 25-year reign, and originally ran unopposed in 2016.
Sandak said he and fellow trustees have already made many strides since the time he’s sat on the board. The mayor is a former school administrator, having worked in districts such as Hicksville, Half Hollow Hills and William Floyd at times overseeing millions of dollars’ worth in construction along with other administrative tasks over 38 years. He said this work has translated well into administrating a small village like Belle Terre.
“We’ve tried to pass codes that make this a nice place to live for everybody,” he said. “Noise is something we deal with — there’s no construction on Saturday and Sunday — we try to make it a nice place to live.”
The village, he said, has done well in creating public/private partnerships to create municipal projects that are partly funded by both residents and Belle Terre. These include the restoration of the gatehouse and entrance wall, the design and construction of the children’s playground, the installation of the walking/cycling track, the reconstruction of the “Circle” at the end of Cliff Road, and most recently the reconstruction of the bathhouse pavilion at Knapp Beach. The latter was originally built in the 1930s and needed to be made handicap accessible. That project, which he said started in concept around two years ago, was done with volunteered architectural designs by a resident and donations from the community.
The community also donated their time and money to help construct kayak and canoe racks at Knapp Beach. These proved so popular that the village plans to help construct additional racks in the future, along with some mats that people may walk down onto the beach.
In the future, Sandak said Belle Terre needs to be readier to handle potential storms. He said he wants to propose the community center should be turned into a shelter for residents, especially those who lose power in a storm. This would require backup generators for people to use the location as a refuge.
“We’ve really noticed a real change in weather patterns — we’ve been hit by nor’easters — they really batter us,” he said. “It leads to a lot of road reconstruction.”
In terms of property values, the Belle Terre mayor said the noticeable loss in property values was due to a large number of people who inherited their homes from longtime residents all started putting homes on the market at once, many of whom had not been fixed up since the 1960s. To his knowledge, there are only four houses up for sale in the community, and he expects property values to increase up to levels comparable with similarly sized villages on the North Shore.
Sandak also agreed that erosion around homes on the edge of the Sound was a major issue, though he said he had two years ago proposed to property owners a special taxation area that could help pay back a bond that would be used to fix the erosion issues, but only two of 11 homeowners were interested in that.
“We certainly want to try and help stop the erosion there,” he said.
Trustees
Sheila Knapp
Sheila Knapp
Knapp, who has spent a lifetime amongst the Belle Terre community, said she is running again to continue to make the village live up to her memories of spending time there as a child.
“A year before I was born my parents bought our home in Belle Terre. It was the most wonderful place to grow up,” she said in an email response to questions. “The beach, the friends, the belonging to a community that was like family … I want everybody to love this place as I do.”
Knapp has been beach commissioner since 1977, trustee since 1997 and deputy mayor since 2004. She said the best part of the village is the natural beauty and peacefulness, and that every board she has served on has had the goal “to keep everybody’s quality of life here at it’s best.”
Close to 70 years ago, when Harbor Hills Country Club was built, she said her father got the land for what is now the current beach, which she has long worked to take care of. Otherwise, she said the village has passed noise and construction ordinances to keep the village serene on the weekends. She said the new wall along the beach parking lot is a “dream come true” and their recently installed cell tower has allowed more reception range throughout the village.
The 43-year beach commissioner said that in the future she would continue on with Belle Terre’s current trajectory.
“Things are not broken here,” she said. “We improved communication and do our best to keep residents informed with the website, meetings, emails and letters. All of the trustees and mayor publish our private phone numbers. We want to be accessible.”
Peter Colucci
Peter Colucci
Colucci, who has lived in Belle Terre along with his wife for 12 years, said he is running because he deeply cares about the community and believes he can improve several aspects of the village.
Two things he’s running on are security and modernizing the village’s communication systems. In 2017 he and his wife were victims of a home invasion and burglary where police at the time said the perpetrators got away with several hundred thousand dollars in cash and jewelry.
“I would like to see modernization in all areas,” Colucci said in an email response to questions. “Simple things are easily done such as upgrading security cameras and increasing communication to all residents especially during times of weather-related emergencies.”
He said he would like to continue with current efforts to keep the beauty and quaintness of the village going, but he said he would also look forward to working on a plan to alleviate the issues with Anchorage Road, where people park all along the road making it dangerous for both cars and pedestrians looking to access McAllister County Park.
Jacquelyn Gernaey
Jacquelyn Gernaey
Gernaey, who has been on the board of trustees for six years after she was originally appointed to the board, said the best part of being on a board like that in Belle Terre is that “trustees really don’t have a personal agenda, and I like being part of a group that can make changes for the village not personally focused.”
The trustee has lived in the village for 25 years, originally hailing from Kings Park. She said she came to love the community feel of Belle Terre, especially since it emphasized keeping trees and nature serene.
As the fiscal officer in the village, Gernaey said one of the big issues she said is that village residents will be losing out in taxes due to the settlement over the Long Island Power Authority power plant tax certiorari case. Over a 10-year glide path, LIPA’s property taxes will decline, which will necessitate village residents pay more in Port Jefferson School District taxes over time.
“We want to continue to get state grants, something we’ve been very successful in doing,” she said, adding they have gotten several hundred thousand for roads from the state and $800,000 in FEMA aid for storm damage.
In addition, she said she wants to keep the pressure on Suffolk County to remediate the parking issues with McAllister Park on Anchorage Road. She said they have been working with more county park officers to deter any more parking along that road.
Erosion issues for houses along the sound are also a major issue. While the village has received a small $100,000 grant towards stabilizing the beach, the issue may be in the near future the whole cliff could start to go, making the homes along the bluff structurally unsound.
“In the last since we applied, we lost 30 feet,” she said. “That’s something we’re really working on.”
As a founder and CEO of two companies, one a human resource outsourcing company and a small business consulting firm, she jokingly said “she certainly doesn’t need this to keep me busy,” but that “she was always taught to give back.”
“We work hard for the village — all about the village, not about us,” she said.
Lou Bove
Bove is the president and CEO of East Setauket-based contractor Bove Industries and is now seeking a seat on the Belle Terre village board.
The candidate did not return several requests for comment through his company. If he does respond in time for the election, his comments will be put on the website version of this article at tbrnewsmedia.com.
Mount Sinai senior running-back Matthew LoMonaco drags a Babylon defender out of the back field in the semi-final playoff round at home Nov. 15, 2019. Photo by Bill Landon
Players in Suffolk schools will be hitting the courts and fields come the start of the September sports season … well, some will be.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Aug. 24 that certain sports are allowed to start up Sept. 21, though all leagues must stay in their home region until Oct. 19.
Sports have been divided into what are considered low or high risk. Low risk sports include soccer, tennis, cross county, track, field hockey and swimming. High risk sports would be football, wrestling, rugby, hockey and volleyball. How the distinction between the two was made was up to the New York State Department of Health.
All those sports deemed high risk will be allowed to practice starting Sept. 21 but not to play against other teams until after Dec. 31.
There are still lingering questions about how some sports were determined to be high risk while others remain medium or low. The Department of Health guidance about sports details that a low risk sport is mostly individual activities like running, swimming or golf, or any sport that maintains little cross contamination of equipment. Medium risk sports have more but still manageable interaction between shared equipment (or the ability to clean between use) but with limited ability to maintain distance, which includes sports like baseball, soccer or even flag football. Games that need to have shared contact with equipment like volleyball or games that mandate close confines like wrestling are off the table, at least for the rest of this year.
Not every region will be participating in the fall. Nassau County school officials and Section VIII, which handles Nassau high school sports, have already made the decision this week to postpone all sports until the start of 2021. Meanwhile members of the Section XI board, which governs Suffolk sports, voted to host its sports season as described by the governor’s parameters.
What the exact guidelines for practices and games is still to be determined. Section XI wrote in a release Aug. 26 that the New York State Public High School Athletic Association has already met twice based on Cuomo’s Aug. 24 announcement. The association said it will come up with guidance for school districts to help them get started on their sports seasons.
“Over 200,000 students participate in the fall high school sports seasons and yesterday’s announcement was certainly a positive step for all those athletes,” said NYSPHSAA’s Executive Director Robert Zayas.
There will be several known restrictions for the start of the fall sports season. Indoor facilities can be at no more than 50% occupancy and districts must limit spectators to no more than two spectators per player. This is in addition to the normal masks and social distancing guidelines.
Coaches whose students will be left out of the chance for a fall sports season said it’s a hard pill to swallow. More so because of the vagaries still left for how the sports year will progress after December.
“I am in contact with the kids and I think all they want is a plan — something concrete — whether we play in the fall, or a condensed schedule starting in February,” said Mount Sinai High School Football Coach Vinnie Ammirato. “It would just be nice to get some clarity and a plan.”
Still, he understands why the decision was made.
“Everyone wants to play — with that said we need to keep the health and safety of all the players and coaches at the forefront.”
Brookhaven intends on completing the North Country Road repaving, having recently come close to finishing a section in Miller Place. Photo by Kyle Barr
The Town of Brookhaven has come close tofinishing a single section of a much larger project along North Country Road.
This past weekend, Brookhaven finished paving and painting the lines along North Country Road in Miller Place from Honey Lane to the Miller Place Duck Pond, over to the entrance to the Laddie A. Decker School on Lower Rocky Point Road. The new resurfacing includes fixing the drainage along the side of the road and the installation of sidewalk and curbing. The new road and sidewalks pass in front of several area staples like the Town & Country Market, McNulty’s Ice Cream Parlor and the William Miller House.
According to the town Highway Department and Highway Superintendent Dan Losquadro (R), the North Country Road Highway project is actually a combination of three separate capital improvement projects.
The New York State Department of Transportation grant received by the Highway Department funded 60% of the “complete streets” portion of this project, which is the new paving in Miller Place. The contractor responsible for this section of the project should complete their work within the next few weeks. This part of the project came now in order to finish before schools reopened in September.
The second section of this project was the sidewalk and curb installation on North Country Road that was completed in 2019 from the entrance to the Laddie Decker School to Echo Avenue. The Highway Department resurfaced that section of North Country Road Aug. 6.
The final section of this project is North Country Road from Washington Avenue to Route 25A in Sound Beach. Highway crews are completing the preparation work on this stretch of road this week, with the milling and resurfacing of this section to be completed within the next few weeks.
The Brookhaven Highway Department has included in its 2021 budget request to install a significant amount of drainage infrastructure on North Country Road from Pipe Stave Hollow Road to Honey Lane to remove the water from the roadway. Once the drainage work is complete, that final section of roadway will be resurfaced.
This will complete the paving of North Country Road from the Village of Port Jefferson border to Route 25A at the Rocky Point/Miller Place border.
In July, the town announced the finalized resurfacing of Lower Rocky Point Road from Woodhull Landing Road to Rocky Point Landing Road, as well as Hagerman Landing Road. The town is also currently active milling 37 roadways all over Sound Beach. Once milling is complete at a near future date, weather permitting, all roads will be resurfaced.
Final details about the North Country Road project, including the total cost, grant funding and photos will be available when the project comes to completion in the next few months.
Port Jeff Bowl came back online Aug. 17 and is already planning multiple leagues. Photo by Kyle Barr
By Liam Cooper
Port Jeff Bowl is ready to see people inside hunting for strikes once again after a long hiatus.
Starting Aug. 17, bowling alleys all throughout New York were allowed to open at 50% their normal capacity. Port Jeff Bowl is now open at 50%.
The bowling alley has strict guidelines to follow in accordance with New York’s COVID-19 response plan. All patrons must wear masks at all times within the bowling alley and musttry to stay as socially distant as possible, as well.
“People have been coming in at a slower rate, so it’s easier to socially distance,” said Bob Suchan, the general manager at Port Jeff Bowl. “We put people in every other lane or further apart.”
As well as the bowling lanes, the vending machines, games, and snack bar are also open.
Before COVID, bowlers could come up to the snack bar to order food. Now, however, they must wait at their lanes and have a waiter or waitress come take their orders.
“People have to be served at the lanes,” Suchan said.
To remain safe, every bowling ball, shoe, vending machine, and game are sanitized. All balls are kept behind closed doors to better protect and sanitize them.
“Everything gets sanitized after every use,” Suchan said. “Any touchable surface is sanitized.”
The alley is also looking forward to restarting a few leagues, with competitive, mixed, ladies and kids leagues all starting in September. Port Jeff Bowl has published a list of league dates and times to its Facebook page.
Bowling alleys are just one form of recreational activity reopening in New York. Monday, Aug. 24 marked the day when city museums, aquariums, and other low-risk indoor cultural arts were able to reopen at 25% capacity.
Andi Fortier and James Burke have, in only a few months, built a farm from scratch. Photo by Kyle Barr
Boots squelching in the morning dew of the roughly shorn grass in East Hampton, James Burke and Andie Fortier together know they have a long day ahead of them.
James Burke prunes a grouping of sunflowers. Photo by Kyle Barr
In the land known for its mansions and rich flavoring from Southampton to Montauk, nothing comes easy to those who work the land. The farmers, both just 23 years old, have many vegetables to grow, their winter squash, the hot peppers, watermelons and many others in the small plot of land behind the restaurant they work for. After working a full day there, it’s over to another patch of land they farm in Amagansett where they grow produce for their stand at the Port Jefferson Farmers Market. They will be working from early morning until the sun kisses the horizon, but they will return to their small Amagansett apartment proud of what they’ve done, because everything they have, has been built with their own hands.
The pair effectively operate two small farms far out on the South Fork. One provides the food for a multitude of local restaurants, the other is for all their produce sold at the PJ Farmers Market, where they hold their stand as Sand and Soil Farm.
To them, nurturing things, whether it’s any one plant or an entire garden and farm, is only natural.
“It’s really satisfying to see something from start to finish, from when you put a seed in the ground then take care of it and harvest from it — watching things come full circle,” Fortier said.
Burke said he relishes watching the way customers react to their food. At their farmers market stand, customers come and say what they used the farm’s produce for. Others look for something they haven’t cooked with before, then they come back the following week and “they’re hooked on it,” Burke said.
Getting Hooked on Produce
Starting a farm at a young age is certainly not common, especially for two people whose families have no recent history or experience with extensive agriculture.
The pair are both 2015 graduates of Port Jefferson high school, though it would have been hard for either of them to say five years later they would find themselves knees in the dirt and their hands in the earth.
Andie Fortier and James Burke stand with their boss talking about what comes next for the garden in East Hampton. Photo by Kyle Barr
In high school, Burke was engendered to environmental issues. Later, when attending Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., he started working at an urban farm, which helped grow local products in the so-called food deserts, or the places in poorer urban areas that have no local access to a supermarket or any kind of fresh food. Coming back to Long Island, he knew that’s something he would want to continue but on a larger scale.
Fortier, like her father Andrew, was interested in music but did enjoy working with her father outside in his carpentry business. After graduating with Burke in 2015 she went to The New School in New York City to study theater. Missing wide open spaces and looking to find work she could really enjoy, she returned to Long Island and “fell into” the agriculture industry more on the education and market side of things. Gradually, she grew to love the farmer’s life.
“If you had asked me in high school if James and I would own a farm together, I would have said, ‘What are you talking about?’” she said.
The two worked at Amber Waves Farm Market & Kitchen in Amagansett for just a few years when in 2019 the owners of the Nick and Toni’s restaurant in East Hampton asked for somebody to clean up the establishment’s backyard garden. The person who previously worked that patch of land up and left one day without a word, and over months the half an acre became overgrown with weeds that reached up to chest height.
“It was kind of a blank canvas, so we just started seeding,” Fortier said. “It’s just grown and grown over the past couple of months.”
Practically by themselves, Fortier and Burke transformed it into a thriving garden, adding more onto it since they started handling it full time last September.
So much has been built by hand. Using excess wood found in a pile on the property, the pair built a 10-foot wide toolshed. Elsewhere in the garden, they found old half-moon metal rails buried in the weeds, and taking those they constructed their own greenhouse. The only items of those two projects they purchased was the roof for the shed and the canvas for the greenhouse.
During the winter months, especially at the edge of March during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the two had to keep seedlings warm in the greenhouse though they lacked a space heater. That’s when the pair started to get innovative, where they buried crockpots in the ground to keep the seeds warm at 75 degrees before being taken out in the mornings to receive light.
“We had to work with what we got,” Burke said. “We had to get creative.”
Growing Something New
The work was enough to keep anybody busy, but the pair wanted something more, something they could call their own. Working with the Peconic Land Trust’s Farms for the Future Initiative, a program that aims to protect land that could be potentially developed and keep it for agriculture, they hit the books, literally. The PJ natives trawled through pages at the local library along with online articles about how they would set everything up — from creating a business plan, to figuring out how many seeds they would need to buy, to what equipment they would need at the start. In Amagansett, they managed to procure a 1-acre plot of land, a piece of a larger property owned by the Peconic Land Trust where portions are run by a number of other small-scale farmers. They moved in this March.
Andie Fortier and James Burke at the garden they practically hand built in East Hampton. Photo by Kyle Barr
Through a winding dirt road cutting through fields, Fortier’s well-used van bounces along the uneven path until they reach their little patch of dirt in the northwest corner of the property, a place bursting with sunflowers, tomatoes, Malabar spinach and daikon radishes.
They didn’t have anything to start. They didn’t have a tractor or any heavy machinery to speak of, knowing that would be the biggest expense for any farm starting out. When plants needed water, they filled up a giant tub at home, stuck it in the back of a trailer and lugged the gallons down to the parched land in the spring and early summer when there was very little rain. So much of the heavy lifting was done by hand, and it was especially hard at first digging in each trough and seeding every ridge. The young farmers finally got an irrigation system going in early July, but they had to come up with solutions on the fly, like netting around the tomatoes to protect them from crows.
The families of the PJ natives have also noticed just how much the two care for their new farm. The Burkes and Fortiers often come out on Saturday to help with harvest and packing, getting everything loaded into vehicles so the two can set up their stand at the Port Jefferson Farmers Market on Sundays. During the pandemic, such escapades to the pastoral landscape were especially nice getaways for the families being stuck quarantined in their homes.
Burke’s sister Kyleen Burke said in an email that she was amazed, too, at the innovative means through which the pair have created so much from so little.
“I don’t think anyone is surprised that James has made his own way, but it is still amazing to see what he and Andie have been able to do and how quickly they have made the farm grow,” she said.
Now with summer starting to wrap up, the verdant field and garden are now what they have to show for their work. When they speak of their bounty, it’s with a sort of reverence one could reserve for one’s children. The two have even sectioned off a small part of their apartment where they keep vegetables in with the air conditioning on to help them avoid the oppressive heat of the late summer. They are still working out the logistics of owning a walk-in cooler.
“It doesn’t feel like work a lot of the time,” Fortier said. “It’s a real start of life now, sleeping next to the tomatoes.”
Bob Sandak
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