SUFFOLK CLOSEUP
By Karl Grossman
Election Day this week in Suffolk County was dominated by contests for county and town offices including district attorney, sheriff, all 18 seats on the Suffolk Legislature and various posts in the county’s 10 towns.
After all the political mailings, ads and campaign signs (that now line much of the landscape) and charges and counter-charges, I thought it might be instructive to highlight the last interview I did, forty years ago, with among the most remarkable Suffolk County officials I’ve known—H. Lee Dennison—and some of the advice he gave. Mr. Dennison was Suffolk’s first and still longest-serving county executive.
Most people in Suffolk probably now only associate the name H. Lee Dennison with the office tower in Hauppauge named after him after he left office in 1973. The building houses the county executive and staff and other county government components.
Mr. Dennison was the quintessence of political independence. An engineer, he was born upstate, near Hornell, and came to Suffolk in 1927 to work in the then county Highway Department. But he was ousted after writing a a report saying Suffolk government was so mired in partisan politics that it was “doing nothing to encourage adequate county planning.” He retreated to running a private engineering practice.
In the 1950s a series of special state prosecutors were sent to Suffolk, unearthed corruption and brought charges against and gained convictions of Suffolk Republican figures. What was called the “Suffolk Scandals” led to establishment of the position of Suffolk County executive. The Suffolk Democratic Party in 1960 ran Mr. Dennison, although an enrolled Republican, for the new position as a reformer.
A key problem for Suffolk, said Mr. Dennison in that 1977 interview, was population. Steps need to be taken to “strongly limit” the county’s population through upzoning and clustering of residences to 1.5 million people, some 200,000 more than in Suffolk then. That’s the county’s population now. More would be “too many people for the resources we have…fresh water, air and space.”
He charged “the towns never did any planning at all, until we forced them to.” Much local zoning had provided for quarter-acre house lots and “five million people could have moved into the county.” He said of the population increase already where he lived and his engineering practice had been located: “Just look at Port Jefferson. You can’t even cross the street.”
About Suffolk County government 40 years ago, then far smaller than it is today, he said there was “no question, too much bureaucracy” in county government. “You can’t make efficient government by adding up numbers or piling up money. It takes leadership.”
There is “too much local government” as well. “There are 550 “separate, independent tax-imposing and tax-spending agencies of local home rule government.” He called for “streamlining” government.
Of the Nassau-Suffolk “Master Plan” designed to set orderly growth, its formulation coming under an initial Dennison appointment, Lee Koppelman, as Suffolk planning director, he said it wan’t being well-implemented. “The towns use it when it’s to their advantage; they haven’t really snagged on to it and pushed it.”
Of the Democratic Party, he said “I fully support its principles when the party does. I regard it as the party of the people.” The Republican Party is “in serious trouble. It’s always been a party of the status quo, do things as they are, don’t upset the boat, don’t disturb anything, patronage, power, perpetuity.”
He said he thought it too late to stop the then Long Island Lighting Company’s half-completed Shoreham nuclear power plant but said the county could use its powers of condemnation to acquire as a park the square-mile of land at Jamesport on which LILCO wanted to build four more nuclear plants—and thus “stop” them. A decade later, New York State created the Long Island Power Authority with the clout to use the state’s condemnation powers to seize LILCO’s assets or stock if it persisted with Shoreham. And Shoreham was blocked from operating. The Jamesport nuclear project was subsequently cancelled and the land along the Long Island Sound became state parkland.
Mr. Dennison called Suffolk “the most exciting county in the world, the greatest place on earth.” He spoke of “the exciting four seasons of the year, the blessings of an island status, an endless supply of fresh water as long as we can save it, our wonderful location and marvelous shorefront…the potential we have for educational, cultural, recreational and economic development. We have everything we can ask for. It takes a little planning and cooperative effort and creative thinking.”
Six years later, Mr. Dennison died of a heart attack. He was 79.
His successor as county executive, Smithtown’s John V. N. Klein, said: “Politically, he rushed in where angels feared to tread. He was his own man.”
Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books.