Smithtown Landing's Greenskeeper's Cup Results

By Jerry Gentile

On June 12th and 13th the Greenskeeper`s Cup was played at the Smithtown Landing golf course.

The Championship Flight was won by none other than Bob Marsicovetere, who continues his fine play with a super gross score of (77). Second place went to Emmett Cassidy with a fine gross (79).

The A Flight winner went to two time former SLMGA Champion (1994) & (2004) Chris Koenig with an excellent gross (76). The (76) was also low gross for the tournament.

Second place went to Ryan Hillen with a nice (83).

Honorable mention must go out too Kevin Cohen (see pic in Golf Talk) who managed a smooth (81) but his net score was not enough to overcome Ryan.

Our B Flight was won by solidly consistent Ken Wolf with a fine (82). Second place went to 6` 6“ (Too Tall) Tim Mulcahy (He’ll say at one time it was 6` 7“). C Flight was a squeaker with Bruce Falkenberg beating out Doug Dortman on a match of cards, both shot a respectable gross (90). D Flight was won by Ed Doherty with a very respectable gross (85). Ed also won Low Net. Second place went to the `tiptoe putting wizard` Angelo Difrancisco (89).

Congratulations to all the golfers on a fine tournament. JG SLMGA PR Board Member.

The pic is sweet, swinging lefty Kevin Cohen on his way to a 3rd place finish in the A Flight Division.

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP : Diversity In Education

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

Alleged bias in hiring in a Suffolk County school district could lead to a statewide law prohibiting discriminatory practices “in relation to the qualifications of professionals in education.”

Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele, Jr. of Sag Harbor is a co-sponsor. The legislation has been introduced in the State Assembly by Michaelle Solages of Elmont, chair of the New York State Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic and Asian Caucus. She is also the deputy Assembly Democratic leader. 

The bill cites a 2019 state Department of Education study, titled “Education Diversity Report,” that states that “New York’s student population of students of color is 50 percent. The racial and ethnic composition of the teacher workforce does not reflect the diversity of the student population.” 

It goes on: “Access to a racially and culturally diverse teacher workforce is beneficial for all students, particularly for students of color, who often thrive in classrooms led by teachers who share their racial and cultural backgrounds. This bill would encourage educational institutions to signal and embrace the importance of teacher and school leader diversity as well as change the recruitment practices to identify qualified applications.”

Mr. Thiele commented: “I think that everyone can point to a teacher in their lives as they went through school—whether grade school or high school—who made a difference as a role model or mentor.” But he said, in many schools in the state, commonly “nobody on the faculty looks like students they are teaching. The bill is designed to make hiring patterns more transparent and provide greater diversity. I think it is of critical importance.”

The measure grows out of an investigation by the Islip Town branch of the NAACP which “has identified racially discriminatory policies and practices that are used by the Brentwood Union Free School District to increase the employability of whites and reduce the employability of Blacks.”

The branch president, William King Moss III, said that “the Brentwood School District often times does not interview any Black applicants for a given teaching position even though the Black applicant is more qualified than white counterparts.”

There are 18,500 students in the district, nine percent of whom are Black, while of its 1,300 teachers, 2.5 percent are African-American. 

The district has an 80 percent Latino student population and 20 percent of teachers are Latino but this, said Mr. Moss, is largely due to a New York regulation that holds that “English-language learners” require specialized instruction. So, there is hiring of Spanish-speaking teachers because the district “does not have a choice even though it has an apparent white-first agenda.”

Mr. Moss was the 1995 salutatorian at Brentwood High School. He went on to Harvard where he received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and a masters’ in mathematics education. A Brentwood resident, he taught mathematics for 11 years in Brentwood and was involved in developing the “fair hiring policy” for the district which, he says, it “fought tooth and nail” and now “often ignores.” For the past 11 years he has been director of academic affairs in the Lawrence School District. 

The Brentwood School District denies bias in hiring with its attorney having declared: “Brentwood has been a leader in increasing the diversity of its teaching and administrative staff.”

“Teacher Diversity in Long Island’s Public Schools” was the title of an extensive report issued in 2019 by The National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University—which reflected Brentwood as not being alone on Long Island.

Prepared by William Mangino, chairperson of and professor in Hofstra’s Department of Sociology, and Lawrence Levy, executive dean of the center, it noted that, “For example, 61 percent of Long Island public schools do not have a single Black teacher…”

It said: “Because diversity brings different viewpoints, understandings and cultural frames, people who are exposed to diversity blend these various ideas.” Further, “if people of color are not adequately represented among the teaching force, whites and non-whites alike will gain the mistaken impression that people of color are not appropriate for such roles.”  The report spoke of a “lack of effective efforts to recruit and retain minority teachers. Most of the minority educators dispute the contention of many school district officials that they are being aggressive and creative but that the pool of qualified minority applicants is too small.” It said that “racial disparities could even widen” without an effort to make “the hiring of minority teachers a priority.”

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 : The Race To Replace Lee Zeldin

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman 

Suffolk County Legislator Bridget Fleming has announced her seeking to be the Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in the lst Congressional District in next year’s election—and now the field has more declared and possible entries.

The incumbent, Republican Lee Zeldin, wants to run for New York governor in 2022.

On the GOP side, there’s a potential nominee to run in Mr. Zeldin’s stead with a name well-known in this area: LaValle. 

Kevin LaValle, a Brookhaven Town councilman from Selden, is a cousin of Kenneth LaValle, a state senator from Suffolk from 1977 until last year when he retired. Kenneth LaValle, of Port Jefferson, a teacher and school administrator before running for the State Senate, was a big vote-getter during his tenure. 

Kevin LaValle is also the brother of John Jay LaValle, a Brookhaven Town councilman from 1996 to 2000 when he was elected town supervisor. John LaValle departed town government in 2005 and in 2009 became Suffolk Republican leader for a decade.

Could the LaValle name and Kevin LaValle being from Brookhaven Town provide him with an advantage in a lst C.D. contest?  Nearly 500,000 residents of the lst C.D., which has a total population of somewhat over 700,000, live in Brookhaven Town.

Another Brookhaven Town Republican councilman seriously considering the race is Neil Foley of Blue Point. “The possibility is real,” he said. “I’ve been blessed with people coming up to me, constituents, family members, encouraging me to run. I’m very interested in running.”

Mr. Foley said his emphasis—as a councilman since 2014—is “listening to the district. We’re elected to be the voice of our district. I’m a big listener.” He describes himself as “my own type of Republican.”

In addition to being a town councilman, he is vice president of New York Cancer & Blood Specialists based in Port Jefferson Station. He sees health issues as highly important. “We need to get people proper health care.”

Kevin LaValle commented, also in an interview last week: “I’ve been talking to friends, family and supporters. I certainly have an interest. I’m reaching out to appropriate people trying to make the most informed decision. This is a huge decision.”

He said Mr. Zeldin, from Shirley, also in Brookhaven Town, “has set a roadmap for the district” in his four House terms. As to issues, Mr. LaValle said “we have to worry about the environment on the East End; the business community that has been so significantly affected by the [COVID-19] shutdown, and now we are starting to open back up and we have to get business owners thriving again; and we are seeing a rise in crime and we have to make sure our police departments have the necessary tools. These are a few issues.”

In addition to being a councilman, Mr. LaValle is a mortgage loan originator at Lynx Mortgage Bank. “I like helping first-time homebuyers,” he says.

Beyond populous Brookhaven Town, a minor portion of the lst C.D. includes all five East End towns—Southampton, Riverhead, East Hampton, Southold and Shelter Island—most of Smithtown, and a sliver of Islip. Legislator Fleming resides in Noyac in Southampton Town. Part of her county legislative district of Southampton, East Hampton and Shelter Island extends into southeastern Brookhaven. 

She seems highly likely to get the Democratic Party’s designation. She announced her run for the lst C.D. seat at the start of last month flanked by a group that included Suffolk Democratic leader Rich Schaffer; the presiding officer of the Suffolk Legislature Rob Calarco; and town Democratic chairs. Ms. Fleming would be the first woman to represent Suffolk County in the U.S. House of Representatives. She previously was a member of the Southampton Town Board and, in Manhattan, an assistant DA.

Her Democratic competition: two men in uphill tries. 

John Atkinson of Farmingville is described on his campaign website as a “progressive Democrat” who “has refused to take any campaign donations from corporations or political action committees.” He states: “Our country has many problems, and our entrusted elected officials in Washington represent themselves and their big money, corporate donors instead of representing us…If I am elected to Congress, I vow to vigorously fight to take on the corruption that has entrenched D.C. for far too long within the governing process and restore the power back to you.” 

Austin Smith is a bankruptcy attorney with a practice in Manhattan that specializes in assisting with student loan forgiveness. He has a bipartisan history having started in politics as a “full-time” fundraiser for the late GOP Senator John McCain and working in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign “contributing ideas about addressing student debt,” relates Yahoo Finance. 

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 : Sewers

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

Money is pouring in—large amounts of federal and state dollars—for sewer expansion in Suffolk County. The aim is to do sewering to offset the leaching of nitrogen into groundwater and protect water quality. 

However, what about water quantity?

Most, although not all, of the sewer expansion plans—that include western and central Suffolk and the East End—involve sending wastewater through outfall pipes into surrounding bays and also out into the Atlantic Ocean.

Suffolk’s biggest outfall pipe, extending 4.2 miles into the Atlantic from the county’s Bergen Point Wastewater Treatment Plant in West Babylon, is designed to discharge 30 million gallons a day of wastewater into the ocean. It would receive additional wastewater. There are smaller outfall pipes all over Suffolk. 

But outfall causes a depletion of the quantity of water in the aquifers on which Suffolk and the rest of Long Island depends, emphasizes Long Island naturalist John Turner. Mr. Turner is conservation policy advocate for the Seatuck Environmental Association in Islip and former director of Brookhaven Town’s Department of Environmental Protection. He was legislative director of the New York State Water Resource Commission. He has championed treatment and reuse of wastewater to help preserve the underground aquifers.

Sitting between the Atlantic Ocean, bays, and Long Island Sound, the aquifers below Long Island constitute its sole source of potable water, its reservoir. 

There is an interface between the fresh water of this reservoir and saltwater that surrounds us. Lowering the level of fresh water in the aquifers through outfall can — and has — resulted in saltwater intrusion and loss of potable water and the lowering and drying up of streams, rivers and lakes.

Saltwater intrusion is a large part of how Brooklyn and Queens on the western portion of Long Island lost their potable water supply years ago. They now must rely on the system of manmade reservoirs and pipes to bring water down from upstate.

           Mr. Turner speaks of “the sandy aquifers that underlie Long Island. This layered system of water-saturated sand, silt, gravel and clay sits atop a basement of bedrock…In the middle of Suffolk County, the aquifers, replenished only by rain and snowmelt, are about 1,000 feet deep, while they are shallower in Nassau County. These tiered sets of aquifers…are our drinking water supply and the sole source for meeting all our water needs.”

“Imagine,” he says, this reservoir “to be a balloon of a certain size and due to pumping of water and coastal discharge of the wastewater the size of the balloon lessens. Some significant things happen. First, as the water table drops, the top of the balloon, the surface water bodies such as streams, lakes and rivers either dry up or are significantly diminished. Second, the salty water surrounding the island pushes landward in a process known as saltwater intrusion, contaminating the edges of the aquifer.”

Neighboring Nassau County has been hit by a lowering of its aquifers because 85 percent of the county is sewered and all its sewage treatment plants rely on outfall of wastewater into surrounding waterways. In Nassau, lakes, ponds and streams which are the “uppermost expression of the aquifer system, have dropped considerably.” Hempstead Lake “is Hempstead Pond,” relates Mr. Turner. Some 25 percent of Suffolk is presently sewered.

A model in Suffolk for reuse of wastewater and aquifer replenishment arrived in 2016 when the Riverhead Sewage Treatment Plant began sending treated effluent to the county’s adjoining Indian Island Golf Course. This has meant nitrogen-laden wastewater “no longer finding its way into the marine environment” causing algae blooms and other impacts. 

There is also a drive in Suffolk for conversions of the cesspools used in 75 percent of residences to “Innovative/Advanced Treatment Systems,” but at the current rate it will take “many decades,” says Mr. Turner, to convert a substantial number. “Water reuse can help reduce nitrogen inputs in a much shorter time frame.”

There’s national action on water reuse. An extensive article this month on the website Truthout.org details how wastewater is being turned “into a resource” in the U.S. It points to Orange County in California, “a world leader in water reuse” using “advanced treatment” that also “saves massively on the cost of pumping Colorado River water from hundreds of miles away.” And the piece includes Las Vegas, Nevada with “a 12-mile-long channel that acts as the ‘kidneys’ of the environment, cleaning the water that runs through…by filtering out any harmful residues on its way back to Lake Mead.”

What about Suffolk County moving more aggressively on reuse?

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: Horseshoe Crabs "Critical To Humanity"

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman   

For decades, Suffolk County resident John T. Tanacredi has been a crusader for the survival of horseshoe crabs. He is a world expert on the creatures. 

He was speaking last week before Long Island Metro Business Action about the plight of horseshoe crabs—concerned about their potential extinction after 455 million years. They predate dinosaurs, he noted, by more than 200 million years.

Limulus polyphemus (photo wikipedia)And they could be “on the cusp of going over the cliff of evolutionary extinction,” Dr. Tanacredi told the business group in a Zoom presentation Friday. 

Beyond being an ancient component of the natural environment, horseshoe crabs are “critical to humanity—notably for the health of people, he emphasized. Indeed, the title of his talk was “Humanity & the Horseshoe Crab.” They have been indispensable in the testing of vaccinations for COVID-19, he stressed.  “All these inoculations need to be batch sampled,” he said.

It’s the “true blue blood” of the horseshoe crab that’s key. (Its blue color derived from its copper base rather than the iron that is at the foundation of human blood, he noted.) 

The blue blood of the horseshoe crab is universally utilized for the detection of bacterial endotoxins in medical applications.

The crabs are “harvested” for medical use, bled, the blood collected—and then they are “returned to the environment,” with most of them surviving, he said.

But the horseshoe crab has been facing destruction of its habitat. “Their main habitat…is the fragile edge we call the barrier beaches,” he said. With construction and other human activities on barrier beaches, this shoreline habitat—to which they return somehow to breed in the exact location where they had been born—is being increasingly lost. 

Dr. Tanacredi told of as a boy spending summers on beaches in Babylon. “There were tons of eel grass and tons of horseshoe crabs then.” Now? No horseshoe crabs, he said. “Nothing!”

And then there is the use of horseshoe crabs for bait—for catching conch and eel—even though there are “substitute baits,” he said. In the United States, 600,000 horseshoe crabs are harvested every year “and bled” for medical use, but there is an equal number “harvested for bait,” he said. New York State, he said, allows 150,000 horseshoe crabs to be taken annually for bait.

And horseshoe crabs are not all over the U.S. but limited to the East Coast from Maine to Florida. Indeed, there are “only four species of horseshoe crabs on Earth.” The four species are on the U.S. East Coast; in the “southern portion of Japan; a portion of Korea; and the southern portion of Taiwan.” Adding further to the threat of horseshoe crab survival: they have become a food delicacy in Asia.

Dr. Tanacredi proposed last week that “we declare every beach that has horseshoe crabs off-limits—like we do for piping plovers.” And he said we should “bar bait collection” of them. 

A Melville resident, Dr. Tanacredi is director of the Center for Environmental Research and Coastal Oceans Monitoring (CERCOM) of Molloy College of Rockville Centre. CERCOM is located in West Sayville. He is a full professor of Earth and Environmental Studies at Molloy. Before that, for 13 years, he was a professor and chairman of the Earth Marine Sciences Department at Dowling College in Oakdale, which closed down in 2016—itself undergoing extinction.

Dr. Tanacredi holds a doctorate in environmental health engineering from NYU-Polytechnic Institute and has had 50 peer-reviewed scientific papers published and has authored five books. He is an editor of the book Biology and Conservation of Horseshoe Crabs. 

Dr. Tanacredi’s background also includes 24 years as a coastal research ecologist for the National Park Service. He was an environmental impact analyst for the U.S. Coast Guard. For 12 years he was deputy director of the Aquatic Research and Environmental Assessment Center at Brooklyn College. And he has been chairman of the New York Marine Sciences Consortium and also the Suffolk County Wetlands Management Work Group.

Horseshoe crabs, despite their name, are not crabs but more closely related to spiders and scorpions. They “survived five mass extinction events” that have occurred on Earth through their hundreds of millions of years of existence, said Dr. Tanacredi. But what now of their future?

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.