Suffolk Closeup: Full Circle For Suffolk County Democratic Chair Rich Schaffer

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman 

“I’ve been doing this since I was 12,” Suffolk County Democratic Chair Rich Schaffer was saying the other day about his involvement in Suffolk politics.

Now 57 years old, Mr. Schaffer has been the Suffolk Democratic chair since 2000. As county Democratic leader, “I especially love the generational stuff—getting young people into politics,” he said. It’s kind of full-circle for Rich. 

He’s a former member of the Suffolk County Legislature—elected to it at but age 22. On the legislature he charted an independent course—indeed, informed independence has been a hallmark of Mr. Schaffer’s route in Suffolk politics and government.

He’s been Babylon Town supervisor for more than 18 years. After two series of terms, he is the longest-serving supervisor in Babylon history. And this year he’s running for re-election. 

“I’m a homebody, most comfortable staying local,” says Mr. Schaffer of North Babylon. “I love doing the supervisor’s job—I kind of love doing both, being supervisor and county Democratic chair.”

And, also, he is chair of the Suffolk County Supervisor’s Association,

I’ve known Rich for decades. He’s always been—and still is—a self-effacing, open and available guy. For example, he lists not only his office phone but his cell phone number on the Town of Babylon website for constituents to call.

How many government officials do that!

He was speaking the other day by Zoom to the Suffolk-based group Reachout and Rebuild, “a grassroots group of activists,” it describes itself. Starting by explaining how he began in Suffolk politics at 12, he said it was because “Tom Downey’s brother [Jeffrey] and I were good friends.” Mr. Downey had gone on to be elected to the House of Representatives after a stint as a Suffolk County legislator. 

Mr. Schaffer subsequently worked for Babylon Town Supervisor Tom Fallon and the town’s deputy supervisor, Pat Halpin, who became supervisor, and town board member Sondra Bachety, who became a county legislator and the first woman presiding officer of the legislature. 

Mr. Schaffer graduated as a political science major from SUNY Albany—where he further learned applied politics as its student association president. He attended Brooklyn Law School. But then “in the middle of law school” he was asked to run for the Suffolk Legislature.

And he won in 1987—a victory that led to his losing his law school scholarship, he noted. He had to finish up as an evening student and thus was not entitled to a scholarship.

On the legislature, his independent bent included working closely with Legislator Fred W. Thiele, Jr. of Sag Harbor, then a Republican, both environmentally and reform-minded. 

This independent quality continues. For example, although Steve Bellone is the Democrat currently in Suffolk government’s top county job, county executive, Mr. Schaffer has firmly broken with him. This has included in recent times Mr. Schaffer corresponding with other Democratic chairs throughout New York warning them about Mr. Bellone who is seeking the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. He’s told them that Mr. Bellone is “not statewide candidate material.”

Rich left the county legislature in 1992 to be Babylon supervisor through 2001 and returned as supervisor in 2011. In recent elections he’s received 70 percent of the vote.

He sees Suffolk as a “purple” county with Donald Trump winning here in 2020 by only 232 votes compared to 51,440 in 2016, and Democrats having successes in a variety of contests over the years. He also notes changing demographics are advantageous to Democrats.

His efforts to get young people “more involved” in the Democratic Party includes promoting “Young Democrats” clubs and getting young people on the executive board of the Suffolk Democratic Committee. 

He’s encouraged minority candidates. Under his leadership, Errol Toulon, now Suffolk sheriff, became the first African-American in a countywide elected post, and DuWayne Gregory, the first African-American to be presiding officer of the legislature.

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: LIA's Kevin Law Asks For Federal Funds To Bury Electric Lines

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

On his last day as president and CEO of the Long Island Association (LIA), Kevin Law sent a letter to President Joe Biden and Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer requesting federal help for the undergrounding of electric lines on Long Island. And Mr. Law knows the situation well. Before becoming in 2010 the head of the LIA, the region’s largest business organization, Mr. Law was president and CEO of the Long Island Power Authority (LIPA) which owns those lines.

Long Island is heavily treed and has near dependence on transmitting electricity through lines on poles. Getting hit with a big storm means outages. More extreme storms can be expected as a result of climate change, and thus even more widescale outages. 

Last year I told in this space about an article on T&D World, a website for utilities, headlined: “It’s Time for Utilities to Reconsider Undergrounding Power Lines.” It stated that “climate change is unquestionably generating intense, costly storms…a hard fact that utilities must confront.” It said “most utilities opt not to bury power lines due to cost. But leaving so much of our power infrastructure exposed to environmental assault may not be worth the short-term cost savings.”

Indeed, undergrounding electric lines is more expensive than stringing lines on poles. But needing to be considered are the huge costs of post-hurricane, post-storm electric restorations. We must recognize too, the terrible hardships which extended outages cause Long Islanders.

Mr. Law on April 1 wrote to Messrs. Biden and Schumer: “As our country continues to respond and recover from the Covid-19 pandemic, this is indeed an opportunity to reimagine and rebuild a new economy. The Long Island Association… supports your efforts to invest in our national infrastructure and create new through the proposed American Jobs Plan. Your efforts to invest in our roads, bridges, rails and offshore wind industry are commendable and we are hoping Long Island gets its fair share of these funds as Long Island historically contributes billions more to the U.S. Government than we get back in federal support.”

“As for the $100 billion earmarked to update the country’s electric grid, we encourage you to make these funds available to make electric grids more resilient to climate disasters on Long Island,” he stated. “Portions of this pot of funds should be used to bury the electric grid on Long Island. Owned by the Long Island Power Authority, our region’s electric transmission and distribution system is primarily above ground and contains approximately 10,000 miles of overhead lines.”

“Major storms, including Hurricane Isaias, Superstorm Sandy and Hurricane Gloria demonstrated the immense vulnerabilities of our grid,” said Mr. Law. “These storms caused significant disruption and widespread damage such as downed trees and fallen power lines and left most of Long Island’s residents and businesses in the dark, with some out for longer than a week.”

Mr. Law declared: “The modernization and hardening of the country’s electric systems could increase our economic competitiveness around the world, spur additional growth and create jobs while establishing a more resilient infrastructure to combat the negative impact of climate change. The undergrounding of Long Island’s power lines would advance those goals while benefiting every single Long Islander.”

It is great that Mr. Law—as he closed out his tenure at the LIA—addressed this important issue. It’s high time to get electric lines on Long Island lowered into the ground.

I wrote in the column last year about my 1986 book, Power Crazy, and how on its cover was a photo of a Long Island Lighting Company (LILCO) pole with it and its electric lines tilted at a 45-degree angle after Hurricane Gloria struck the year before. The book started, I noted, with how Hurricane Gloria caused a loss of electricity to 700,000 customers of LILCO (whose poles and lines were acquired by LIPA when it was established.) But Power Crazy pointed out, service to 96 percent of telephone customers on Long Island had not been interrupted. 

Why? 

“New York Telephone began placing cable underground wherever feasible in the early 1970s in connection with a nationwide trend to avoid visual pollution and increased corporate concerns for cost-reduction,” explained company spokesperson Bruce W. Reisman. “Cost studies clearly indicated to us that it would simply be less costly for us over the long term to place much of our telephone cables underground. It is generally less expensive to maintain a telephone plant when it is underground. This is because underground facilities are less likely to be damaged by falling trees or branches, high winds, ice storms, etc…” 

What’s good for telephone lines is good for electric lines—going underground.

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: What Books You Read Is Determined By Book Publishers

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

With major publishers, one after another, buying up other major publishers, the existence of a small, independent, highly active book-publishing firm in Suffolk County is notable. The company was put together by Martin Shepard, who passed away in December, and Judith Shepard, his wife.

HarperCollins, in a $349 million deal last month, bought Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, a venerable U.S. publishing company. Will Harper Collins, owned by Rupert Murdoch, follow in its tradition? Highly unlikely. And this is just the latest consolidation among major publishers. As The New York Times reported in its story on this sale: “The book business has been transformed by consolidation in the past decade.” 

This has included Penguin Random House buying Simon & Schuster last year—in a $2 billion deal. That acquisition, said The Times, “has drawn scrutiny from antitrust regulators and has raised concerns among booksellers, authors and agents.” 

It and the other consolidations in book-publishing should raise concerns for everybody. For books, newspapers, radio and TV and other media, many voices, a variety, are needed to keep people fully aware. As English free press crusader John Milton centuries ago described it, a “marketplace of ideas” is vital for an informed citizenry.

The good news is that here in Suffolk, along Noyac Road in Sag Harbor, there is a publishing house—literally a house—a trailblazing operation begun by Marty and Judith.

Judith had been an actress, Marty a psychiatrist and author. In an interview with book reviewer Norm Goldman on the website www.bookpleasures.com in 2011 he related how he had written 10 books, all these for major publishers. When he wanted to “revive an out-of-print book” and “when none of my publishers wanted to reissue it, we decided to do it ourselves…So that’s how we began: starting two imprints: Second Chance Press and The Permanent Press.”

Mr. Goldman started the interview by speaking of their commitment “to publishing works of social and literary merit and how, over the decades” their publishing house “gained a reputation as one of the finest independent presses in America.”

Marty also commented in that interview how his going into publishing was “an extension of my own life-long sense of rebelliousness from arbitrary and misguided authority.” For instance, during the Vietnam War, he noted, he co-founded Citizens for Kennedy/Fulbright—“the first ‘Dump Johnson Movement. We had chapters in 15 states, preparing to deny LBJ renomination, and eventually [President Lyndon] Johnson retired.”

Marty said of major publishers that they “no longer give new and mid-list writers the attention they deserve, and if a first- or second-time author doesn’t sell a minimum of 10,000 copies, that’s it: on to the small independent presses with you. This is good for us, but bad for new writers and for the public who are being fed the same formulas over and over again. The joke is that despite all this, the conglomerates are still losing money while pursuing their dreams of what might make ‘Best Sellers’ instead of choosing ‘Best Books.’”

And this was before the consolidation further producing homogenized publishing.

Marty and Judith published three books I wrote. The first was Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power. After the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident in 1979, Hilda Lindley of Montauk, a top New York literary agent, got in touch with me knowing of my journalism on nuclear power and asked if I would write a book on nuclear power. I began writing it but then Hilda came back telling me no major publisher was interested saying nobody would be interested in nuclear power several months past the TMI disaster. An environmentalist, she was shocked. I ran into Marty, told him what Hilda had encountered, and he and Judy said they would publish the book. It’s been out now for more than four decades and become an important handbook on nuclear power especially because it’s full of facsimiles of actual key—and damning—government and corporate documents.

In 2011, after the Fukushima catastrophe and the earlier Chernobyl disaster, Marty thought major publishers would now be interested in reissuing my book on nuclear power, updated. He asked me to put together a new edition. Meanwhile, he approached major publishers but got the same “no” that Hilda got.

So Marty and Judy took the new edition—and put it online for free downloads!

How’s that for a bold, independent press operating from Suffolk.

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: Rob Trotta The PBA And Its "Exceptional Political Clout"

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

It was quite a blast at the power of the Suffolk police unions in The New York Times last month—two full pages with the headline: “The County Where Cops Call The Shots.” The county is Suffolk, and the article was written by Farah Stockman, a member of The Times editorial board. 

It began by quoting a person who cannot be described as “anti-police”— Suffolk Legislator Rob Trotta, “a cranky Republican county legislator on Long Island who worked as a [Suffolk] cop for 25 years,” an “unlikely voice for police reform.” 

He’s “full of praise for the rank and file” of the Suffolk County Police Department, “Yet Mr. Trotta,” continued the article, “has railed for years about the political influence of police unions in Suffolk County, N.Y., a place where the cops are known to wield exceptional clout. He’s a potent messenger, since he can’t be smeared as anti-cop. He wore a badge and walked a beat.”  

The piece declared: “Mr. Trotta’s small, quixotic battle on Long Island is part of a much larger struggle in the United States to wrestle power away from police unions that for too long have resisted meaningful reform.”

The article focused on the Suffolk Police Benevolent Association (PBA)—which has long been a proverbial gorilla in the political room in Suffolk County.

Now, I know the Suffolk County Police Department well. My first beat at the daily Long Island Press starting in 1964 was covering cops-and-courts in Suffolk. Every morning included my going to Suffolk Police headquarters, sitting down with its commissioner, John L. Barry, and taking notes about police activities going on, then walking down that first-floor hallway and being with Bill Coleman, deputy chief of detectives, taking more notes, and dropping in and connecting with other top officers. In the field, I covered murders and other crimes and got to know, too, rank and file officers.

In 1969 I was shifted to writing a column on politics and government in Suffolk—that’s how this column began—and how I also got know, through these now 50-plus years, the ins and outs of Suffolk politics and government.

And Rob Trotta and Farah Stockman are not incorrect.

Suffolk police unions wield, indeed, “exceptional political clout” in the county.

Let me note, please, I’m a union person. As a professor of journalism for 43 years at the State University of New York, I’ve been a member of United University Professions, the union that represents SUNY faculty and much of staff, and at The Press a Newspaper Guild member.

Ms. Stockman tells of Mr. Trotta, of Fort Salonga in Smithtown, describing “politics as broken” in Suffolk “because police unions’ donations have been able to purchase deference from politicians.”

Newsday has picked up on this issue, too. “Long Island Law Enforcement Foundation spends big in Suffolk,” was the headline of a 2016 story in Newsday. The piece by David Schwartz began: “A super PAC run by Suffolk county police unions has built a multimillion-dollar campaign operation, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to help elect local candidates and boost its clout on law enforcement issues. Funded with $1-a-day mandatory fees from approximately 2,500 police department members, the Long Island Law Enforcement Foundation regularly outspent candidates it targeted for defeat in recent elections.”

A Newsday article last year by Michael Gormley began: “The Suffolk County Police Benevolent Association Inc. has become one of Long Island’s most powerful political forces, contributing millions of dollars to campaigns in direct spending or through a related group the union controls despite restrictions on campaign spending, according to records and political financing experts.”

The Suffolk Police Department came into being in 1960 following a countywide referendum in which voters were asked whether they wanted to disband their town and village departments—long the system in Suffolk—in favor of a county department.

A majority of voters in the five East End towns of Suffolk voted no, along with voters in several western Suffolk villages including the large villages of Northport and Amityville and some small villages among them Nissequogue. So, the Suffolk County Police Department is only the uniformed force in the five towns of western Suffolk (outside of these villages). However, it provides specialized services—deployment of its Homicide Squad and Arson Squad, as examples—in all of Suffolk. Through the years county police department unions have sought to enlarge the department. In 2015 the Suffolk PBA helped finance a move to have the Suffolk Police Department take over the Riverhead Town Police Department. Earlier, the police unions, working with the then presiding officer of the Suffolk County Legislature, Anthony Noto of Babylon, campaigned to have the county department expand and take in all the East End. 

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: Suffolk County's History Includes Migrant Labor Camps

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

It was “a dark chapter in Long Island’s labor history,” as notes a just-published and important book, Long Island Migrant Labor Camps: Dust for Blood.

The book relates the building and operation between the early 1940s and the 1960s of more than 100 migrant farm labor camps in Suffolk County. “Thousands of migrant workers lured by promises of good wages and decent housing flocked to Eastern Long Island where they were often cheated out of pay and housed in deadly slum-like conditions. Preyed on by corrupt camp operators and entrapped in a feudal system that left them mired in debt, laborers struggled and, in some cases, perished in the shadow of New York’s affluence,” it recounts.

“Dust for Blood” was how a farmworker “grimly described” receiving little or nothing in pay from crew leaders who recruited them. 

The book, authored by Mark A. Torres, who is also an attorney, is published by Arcadia Publishing and The History Press.

The migrant farm labor situation in Suffolk County was part of Edward R. Murrow’s landmark CBS News documentary Harvest of Shame broadcast in 1960 exposing the plight of migrant farm workers. “We present this report on Thanksgiving,” Murrow said at its start, “because were it not for the labor of the people you are going to meet, you might not starve, but your table would not be laden with the luxuries that we have all come to regard as essentials.”

There was a spotlight on the “largest and unquestionably most notorious migrant labor camp in Suffolk County,” notes the book, “the Cutchogue labor camp.” Fire tore through it a year after the Murrow broadcast, killing four migrant farmworkers, it states.  

Harvest of Shame was followed by a documentary in 1968 on National Educational Television (predecessor to PBS), What Harvest for the Reaper? It also focused on the Cutchogue camp. But it wasn’t just in Cutchogue and elsewhere in Southold and Riverhead towns where potato farming was widespread and thus there were many farmworker camps, 24 in Southold, 30 in Riverhead. By 1960, Mr. Torres relates, there were also 13 camps in Southampton town, two in East Hampton, one on Shelter Island, 14 in Brookhaven, three in Babylon, one in Islip, 17 in Huntington and eight in Smithtown. 

“Crew leaders were a foundational part of the migratory labor system in Suffolk County,” writes Mr. Torres. They were “contracted with Long Island growers” and “sanctioned by the state to serve as labor contractors.” 

The crew leaders would make promises to those they recruited, promises not kept. And the migrants commonly ended up in debt to the crew leaders and stuck in the “migrant stream.” Mr. Torres cites Betty Jean Johnson at a Congressional hearing on “allegations of abuse at migrant labor camps throughout New York and New Jersey” testifying in 1961: “They bring us up from the South and make slaves out of us.”

Mr. Torres tells of Reverend Arthur C. Bryant, a leading advocate for farmworkers, pastor of St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Greenport and vice chair of the Suffolk County Human Relations Commission, declaring: “False promises and Shanghai methods are still used to induce men into a life of death, hardship and hopelessness.”

Mr. Torres cites others who have helped migrant farmworkers here. Among them: Mary Chase Stone, founder of Long Island Volunteers and Helen Wright Prince, a teacher of children of migrant farmworkers; and journalists who wrote on the situation, Newsday’s Harvey Aronson and Steve Wick. “Members of the press were also targeted for violence,” he says. 

I got my lumps, literally, on the issue. A New York Times article mentioning me is cited in the book. It was at the Cutchogue labor camp in 1971. State Assemblyman Andrew Stein of Manhattan, chair of the Assembly Committee on Malnutrition and Human Needs, was there with journalists. A man involved in the camp’s ownership drove up and, Mr. Torres relates, “attacked Grossman with a piece of wood.” I was working then for the daily Long Island Press.

Mr. Torres says: “Over the years, various state officials, reporters and civil rights advocates who attempted to visit labor camps allegedly received warnings of physical violence and even death threats from camp owners, operators and crew leaders.”

“By the late 1980s, most of the potato farms were gone and so were most of the labor camps,” he writes. Further, there “was a combination of increased mechanization, a shifting farming ideology and a sharp increase in real estate prices.”

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.