SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: Redistricting "They Did It Because They Thought They Could"

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

They did it because they could. And now New York State’s highest court said they shouldn’t have.

With Democratic majorities in both the State Assembly and State Senate, a redistricting plan—a map giving Democratic candidates an advantage in districts throughout the state and notably Long Island—was passed. And Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul signed off on it.

But last month, the state’s highest court, its Court of Appeals, by a 4-3 vote, rejected the plan. The court’s majority held that it was “substantially unconstitutional.” The mapping of Congressional districts in particularly was “drawn with impermissible partisan purpose.”

A “special court master”—Jonathan Cervas with the Institute for Politics and Strategy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania and an expert on redistricting—will redraw the map.

The plan by the Democratic majorities in the State Legislature was an extreme case of gerrymandering—the word coined for the redistricting done in 1812 under Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry with the “mander” for salamander—what one Massachusetts Senate district looked like. 

The New York plan involved multiple salamander-shaped districts.

For example, Suffolk’s lst Congressional District which long consisted of the five East End towns, all of Brookhaven and most of Smithtown, was to have GOP-leaning areas between Westhampton and East Quogue in Southampton eliminated. Left of Brookhaven would be only its northern half which has a substantial Democratic presence. Smithtown would be cherry-picked and include Democratic-inclined Commack. The district would then extend west into Islip and pull in heavily Democratic Brentwood, Central Islip and North Bay Shore. Further west it would take in the northern portion of Babylon Town, which votes reliably Democrat, and a southern part Huntington including Democratic-voting Dix Hills. Going yet further west, the lst C.D. would extent into the Democratic bastions of Plainview and Bethpage—in Nassau County. 

“Preservation of communities of interest” is considered important when it comes to redistricting which is done to reflect population changes after the national census every decade. 

But in the New York plan, in the lst C.D. and other districts, communities were combined not to represent common interests but for Democratic political advantage.

Gerrymandering based on the 2020 census wasn’t just a New York Democratic move but happened elsewhere in the U.S. and involved both Democratic and Republican Parties.  

The media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Media features an article exploring this in the current issue of its monthly newsletter Extra! The piece, by Dorothee Benz, quoted USA Today as connecting gerrymandering to “increasing polarization,” “gridlock,” and “an even more divisive Congress.” It cited the concern of The New York Times about gerrymandering causing a “lack of competition in general elections” which “can widen the ideological gulf between parties.”

This is because of “uncompetitive districts—that is, one-party districts,” wrote Benz. 

She reported that “the percentage of competitive districts in Congress is set to shrink from an already appalling 17% after the 2010 redistricting to a truly deplorable 9% after the 2020 redistricting.” She quoted USA Today stating uncompetitive districts are “driving the lack of action on issues that a lot of Americans really care about.”

Other recent gerrymandered redistricting moves, she noted, included in Ohio where Republicans “redrew congressional maps in a way that turned 64% of them into safe Republican districts.” That plan was struck down by the Supreme Court of Ohio.

In New York, the gerrymandering and its judicial rejection will necessitate having two primaries—one in June, one in August—at a multi-million-dollar additional cost.  

There are a number of organizations that have long sought reform in redistricting. A leader in New York has been its League of Women Voters which entered a “friend of the court” brief in the challenge to the state plan. It declared: “This appeal raises a question of monumental importance: whether the courts will enforce the procedural requirements adopted by the people in the New York Constitution to prevent partisan gerrymandering…”

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. 

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP - Climate Change "The Jury Has Reached A Verdict"

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

“The jury has reached a verdict. And it is damning,” declared UN Secretary-General António Guterres after the recent issuance at the UN of the third Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. The report “is a litany of broken climate promises. It is a file of shame, cataloguing the empty pledges that put us firmly on track towards an unlivable world,” he said.

“We are on a fast track to climate disaster,” continued Guterres.

Guterres went on: “Major cities under water. Unprecedented heatwaves. Terrifying storms. Widespread water shortages. The extinction of a million species of plants and animals.  This is not fiction or exaggeration. It is what science tells us will result from our current energy policies.”

“We are on a pathway to global warming of more than double the 1.5° Centigrade [2.7 degrees Fahrenheit] limit agreed in Paris [at the UN Climate Change Conference there in 2015]. Some government and business leaders are saying one thing, but doing another. Simply put, they are lying,” said Guterres. “And the results will be catastrophic. This is a climate emergency.”

Guterres, who became the UN’s top official as secretary-general in 2017, is former prime minister of Portugal. Earlier, for 17 years he was a member of the Portugese Parliament. He’s an experienced international diplomat, for a decade the UN’s high commissioner for refugees.

The UN report came as a parallel report was issued by a grouping of U.S. government agencies led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It, too, presented a damning picture. Among other things, “Sea level rise will create a profound shift in coastal flooding over the next 30 years by causing tide and storm surge heights to increase and reach further inland. In addition to the rise caused by “emissions to date,” “Failing to curb future [greenhouse gas] emissions could cause a rise of up to “7 feet by the end of this century.”

The UN report was issued and the presentation by Guterres made at the UN in New York —across the East River from Long Island, among the ground zeroes for climate change impacts.

In Suffolk County, announced recently was a $1 million plan for county projects to “counter the impact of stronger storms and increasing flooding resulting from climate change,” as Newsday described it. “Projects could include beach nourishment, wetlands restoration and open space acquisition,” said Newsday, summing up the plan. County Executive Steve Bellone said: “This is all of us stepping forward to say that we have to aggressively address coastal resiliency.”

The reaction of Kevin McAllister, president of the Sag Harbor-based organization Defend H20—who has been in the forefront in Suffolk in speaking out about climate change and what is being done and not being done—says of the plan: “Open space acquisition, particularly with coastal lands, is a meaningful endeavor in response to a rapidly rising sea. Wetland restoration is, of course, important but let’s be clear, expanding and revegetating wetlands is very different from dredging new ponds for mosquito reduction, the current county priority, which is, in fact, contrary to the absorption of floodwaters. As to so-called beach nourishment, this is a strategy that is both environmentally and economically unsustainable and that only delays and makes more costly what really needs to happen—moving back from the edge and out of harm’s way.”

Published last week was an article titled “Climate Adaptation Is Going To Be A Disaster” by Andrew Dessler, professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University and co-author of the book The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change. He wrote that “reducing our emissions of greenhouse gases by switching from fossil fuels to climate-safe renewables is the easier way to deal with climate change. Wind and solar energy are now the cheapest energy sources…” 

Getting at the cause of climate change—mainly the burning of fossil fuel: coal, oil and gas—and not simply dealing with its effect, is key. That’s completely possible technically. The resistance is from vested interests: the coal, oil and gas industries, and their political clout.

Published in 2020 was 100% Clean, Renewable Energy and Storage for Everything, a book by Mark Z. Jacobson, director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program and professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University. It details the huge potentials of “WWS”—“Wind-Water-Solar”—through onshore and offshore wind, wave and tidal power, solar photovoltaic and concentrated solar power and other green energy sources. Green energy is the way out of the looming climate disaster. Dr. Jacobson is also a co-founder of the aptly named The Solutions Project.

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. 

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: Climate Change

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

Long Island—this island jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean—is among the most vulnerable places in the United States to be impacted by rising sea levels caused by climate change. 

As a recent U.S. government multi-agency report states: “Sea level rise will create a profound shift in coastal flooding over the next 30 years by causing tide and storm surge heights to increase and reach further inland. By 2050, ‘moderate’ (typically damaging) flooding is expected to occur, on average, more than 10 times as often as it does today, and can be intensified by local factors.”

The report, by a group of agencies led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), says “sea level along the U.S. coastline is projected to rise, on average, 10-12 inches…in the next 30 years…which will be as much as the rise measured over the last 100 years.” The greatest rises are predicted in the report to happen on the East and Gulf Coasts.

And, the report notes, even if the world can slash the burning of fossil fuels—coal, oil and gas and their emissions—the main reason for climate change, seas will continue to rise through 2050 due to the global warming that has already been caused. 

Sea level rise by 2100 “because of emissions to date” could be “about two feet.” And, “Failing to curb future emissions could cause an additional 1.5-5 feet of rise for a total of 3.5-7 feet by the end of this century,” it says. The uncertainty about the range is because of questions about how the world’s largest ice sheets will respond to rises in temperature.

Melting ice sheets add more water to the world’s oceans. 

The U.S. government study was issued in February. On March 25 the Associated Press reported: “An ice shelf the size of New York City has collapsed in East Antarctica, an area long thought to be stable and not hit much by climate change, concerned scientists said.” 

Exactly a week before, the headline of an article in The Washington Post was: “It’s 70 degrees warmer than normal in eastern Antarctica. Scientists are flabbergasted.”

And earlier that week, the headline of another piece in The Washington Post was: “Record ‘bomb cyclone’ bringing exceptional warmth to North Pole.” The sub-head: “Arctic temperatures could approach the melting point as they surge nearly 50 degrees above normal.” What’s being termed a “bomb cyclone” is a low-pressure storm that intensifies at breakneck speed and has been attributed to global warming. 

Kevin McAllister, president of the Sag Harbor-based organization Defend H20, who has been in the forefront in Suffolk in speaking out about climate change and what is being done—and not being done—here, says of the U.S. government report: “It is based on the most current science and further evidence of the urgency to act. On a global scale it means drastically curtailing fossil fuel emissions. And on a local scale it’s rethinking the current approach to rapidly rising waters— costly sand replenishment of perpetually eroding beaches and allowing the hard armoring of irreplaceable shorelines, both of which are environmentally and economically unsustainable practices…For the more vulnerable areas, the appropriate response is to move out of harm’s way. Our elected officials need to come to terms with the inevitable changes before it’s too late.”

Or, as Jeff Peterson, retired senior policy advisor at the Environmental Protection Agency and author of the book A New Coast: Strategies for Responding to Devastating Storms and Rising Seas wrote this month on the The Hill website out of Washington, D.C.: “Today, the accepted response strategy is to hold the shoreline right where it is by building seawalls or adding sand to beaches. On the other hand, sea level rise is coming at a scale that will eventually defeat such interim protection measures. In most places, a durable solution requires stepping back from the coast, gradually relocating homes and other assets to make room for the ocean.”

This month the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations, composed of 278 experts from all over the world, issued its newest report on climate change which stated, “The cumulative scientific evidence is unequivocal: Climate change is a threat to human well-being and planetary health.” 

That next week.

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. 

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP - Will LIPA Be "Municipalized"

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

“This Legislative Commission on the Future of LIPA is tremendous and is the first step in establishing true public power for Long Islanders,” said State Senator Jim Gaughran of Northport about the inclusion in the new state budget of creation of a commission that will perform a study that could lead to the Long Island Power Authority becoming a full public utility.  

“For-profit billion-dollar companies running the electric grid guarantee Long Islanders two things: the highest electrical bills in the nation and unreliable service,” said Gaughran, the prime sponsor of the measure establishing the commission. 

“Nothing short of a triumph for Long Islanders,” declared State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele, Jr. of Sag Harbor, the prime sponsor of the measure in the Assembly.

The budget for the state’s 2022-2023 fiscal year, approved two weeks ago by the state legislature and promptly signed by Governor Kathy Hochul, establishes an eight-member panel that would perform the study that could lead to LIPA being “municipalized.”  

Its members will be appointed by the legislative leaders of both parties in both the State Assembly and State Senate. Guiding and assisting the commission will be an advisory committee of area “stakeholders”—a wide variety including representatives of business, labor, local governments, environmental groups, Native American tribes, educators and those involved in social justice issues.

The commission’s work can “serve as a path toward fully realizing what LIPA should have always been: a public power authority responsible to the customers it serves,” said Thiele.

“For more than 25 years, ratepayers have been routinely failed by a third-party management model” that LIPA has used—hiring private utilities to run the Long Island electric grid. This “historic” move, said Thiele, “gives motion to the actions necessary to implement a municipalized model that’s transparent and accountable.”

Governor Hochul’s working with Thiele, an Independent and previously a Republican, and Gaughran, a Democrat, in creation of the commission and its study mission was a far contrast from the behavior of her predecessor as governor, Andrew Cuomo.

It was Cuomo who foisted a New Jersey-based utility, PSEG, onto Long Island as the most recent company running the Long Island electric grid for LIPA. It replaced National Grid which Cuomo decried for its performance during Superstorm Sandy in 2012.

There will be opposition no doubt involving PSEG to what could now happen. 

The utility from Newark has prized its expansion onto Long Island.

The original vision decades ago by those who crusaded for founding LIPA was for it to operate the Long Island electric grid—and also to run democratically with members of its board elected by Long Islanders. A model was the Sacramento Municipal Utility District which then and now operates the electric grid in a large chunk of California and has an elected board. But Andrew Cuomo’s father, former Governor Mario Cuomo, cancelled having elections for LIPA board members, and his successor, George Pataki, formalized elimination of elections and instead appointments mostly by the governor and also legislative leaders. 

The Legislative Commission that will be set up will now consider “the method of governance” of LIPA. A return to the concept of democratic governance could be proposed.

It will also consider “improved transparency, accountability and public liability” and how there could be “improved reliability of the system.” National Grid’s terrible Superstorm Sandy performance was followed in 2020 by PSEG’s miserable performance in Superstorm Isaiah when 646,000 outages occurred. The panel will consider “improved storm response.”

And, it will, among other things, look at “increased reliance on renewable energy sources to produce electricity.” PSEG has been claiming in what a recent article by Mark Harrington in Newsday noted as $1.1 million “on self-promotion” since December that it’s “working on a cleaner more sustainable future.” But PSEG is, in fact, a big nuclear utility. It operates the Salem and Hope Creek nuclear power plants in New Jersey and is part-owner of the Peach Bottom nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. 

Another original vision for LIPA was for it to have a commitment to safe, renewable, green energy. That came in the wake of the now defunct Long Island Lighting Company seeking to build seven to eleven nuclear power plants on Long Island. Shoreham was the first to be completed but was shut down and decommissioned as a nuclear facility in the face of public and governmental opposition and formation of LIPA to replace LILCO. 

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. 

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP- Is peace possible? Is War Part Of The Human Condition?

By Karl Grossman

Is peace possible?  Or is war a never-ending part of the human condition?

For 20 years, from Suffolk County I would regularly to go to the United Nations in New York for meetings as a charter member of the Commission on Disarmament Education, Conflict Resolution and Peace sponsored by the UN and the International Association of University Presidents. 

 At the entrance of the UN, one passes its garden with a collection of statues donated by member nations, including one of a man with a hammer beating a sword into a plowshare, as Isaiah urges in the Bible. There’s also a statue of a giant pistol, its barrel knotted so no bullet can be fired. 

The president of the SUNY/College at Old Westbury where I’m a professor, L. Eudora Pettigrew, who was the commission’s chair, asked me to be a member. Like the UN itself, it had diverse membership—people from all over the world. This included leaders of peace organizations, academics, and also, interestingly, several military representatives

A central part of the commission’s work was conflict resolution—the name for an area of intense study and development in the last several decades—focusing on how conflicts can be resolved through peaceful methods and settlements arrived at. Conflict resolution theory has many applications including for schools, businesses and nations.

The commission was an initiative for peace with which I was thrilled to be involved. But in the last two months, what it strove for has been challenged by the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine, the savagery, the extreme violence of Putin’s onslaught, the killing of large numbers of innocent civilians and the decimation of a neighboring country. Only last week came news of the ghastly atrocities committed by the Russian forces. 

Not only did I regularly travel to the UN but I journeyed globally on the commission’s behalf. This included going to China where I coordinated a panel at the World Conference on Women about women and children being main victims of war. In Norway I gave a presentation on the threat of nuclear-powered weapons being placed in space based on a book I wrote, Weapons in Space. I helped run a program in Japan in which our peace studies course module was unveiled to hundreds of college and university professors, deans and presidents. Its main author was commission member Dr. Victor Sidel, co-president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.

I gave presentations in Thailand, in Mexico, and at the UN. On Long Island, I ran conferences for the commission at SUNY/Old Westbury. 

My wife, Janet, who taught at Pierson High School in Sag Harbor, would tell me about conflict resolution techniques being used at the school. At the UN many of those involved in peacekeeping weren’t well informed about conflict resolution methods in schools, I found, and, likewise, the activities of the UN “Blue Helmet” folks didn’t seem to be related in school programs. So, I coordinated having several hundred high school teachers and advisers from Long Island and the city join with UN peacekeeping personnel for a two-and-a-half day conference at SUNY/Old Westbury and the UN to share their work. For lead-off speaker, I arranged to have Stephen P. Marks of Southampton, long involved in UN peacekeeping work, just back from Cambodia and writing a new constitution to bring democracy and peace to a nation that had been through the nightmare of the Khmer Rouge and slaughter of 1.5 to 2 million people or more. 

The commission also held yearly retreats bringing people on opposing sides from hotspots around the world for two weeks together to foster person-to-person communication and trust-building, keys to conflict resolution.

Linda Pentz Gunter of the organization Beyond Nuclear penned an article before the Russian army moved on to nuclear power plant sites in Ukraine, one of which it shelled. She predicted “Ukraine’s nuclear plants could find themselves literally in the line of fire” and wrote about “the misguided megalomaniacs who run far too many countries in this world” and their “war-mongering.” She said the mix of war and nuclear power is another reason “we must stop using nuclear power.” The “reality is that we are a warlike species,” she noted. “Nothing in our history suggests we are evolving on this front, even if most of us abhor war.”

Peace is possible—but takes a lot of work, understanding and a new direction for humanity on a planet in which a form of mass murder called war has long been practiced.

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.