People In The News - Kings Park Graduates Class Of '68

Kings Park Graduates Class Of 1968

Kings Park Class of 1968 graduates gather at Nissequogue River State Park and celebrate frienship. Seated L-R Seated l-r Rose Ziella Maieli, Carol Nimmo Zorn, Catherine Gillespi Pine, Standing L-R Judy Robertson Callan, Jean Sakowitz Palladin, Carol Caulfield Watson

Suffolk Closeup - St James Resident Robert Lipp Retires From County Budget Review Office

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

Robert Lipp of St. James retired this month as director of Suffolk County’s Budget Review Office. It was created in 1976 following the establishment of a Suffolk County Legislature in 1970. It was seen as a Suffolk version of the U.S. General Accounting Office (now called the Government Accountability Office).

It was a brilliant concept for Suffolk. And Dr. Lipp has been a brilliant director of BRO. 

The GAO was formed in 1921 to be, as its history relates, “a U.S. legislative agency that monitors and audits government spending and operations. The GAO tracks how the legislative and executive branches of the government use taxpayer dollars…The GAO serves as a congressional watchdog over government spending.” It’s “an independent and non-partisan government agency.” 

Likewise, Suffolk’s BRO is as its “mission statement” declares “the professional, non-partisan” entity with a “civil service staff that assists in the function of legislative oversight by reviewing and monitoring the budget for the legislature.”

The BRO not only critiques the county’s recommended annual Operating Budget and its Capital Program and Capital Budget—and the BRO reports are hundreds of pages long analyzing details of these spending programs. It reviews, as well, other county financial plans from proposed labor settlements to the yearly budget of Suffolk Community College and requested fare increases on ferries that run within the county.

Of all the directors of BRO through its 43 years—and as a journalist I’ve dealt with all them—Dr. Lipp has had the strongest academic credentials. Indeed, he has been a visiting professor at Stony Brook University where he received a doctorate in economics. (At Stony Brook he received an “Excellence in Teaching Award.”) After graduating from Stony Brook, he was a professor at Adelphi University for more than three years before deciding to join BRO.

A call to Dr. Lipp on any county fiscal subject results in tapping into a Suffolk official with an encyclopedic knowledge of county finances—able to provide information in seconds. Moreover, he is a straight-shooter personifying the word “non-partisan” in the BRO’s description of itself.

When his retirement was announced at the bi-weekly meeting of the Suffolk County Legislature on September 4, he was given a standing ovation. 

He’s had a very hard year personally. His wife, Linda, died, and so did his brother, Michael, as did a cousin, too. At 68, Dr. Lipp decided to retire.

He was director of BRO for seven years, on its staff for 35.

Also, in doing financial analyses for Suffolk in recent decades, he has been faced with a conflict between what he terms the “analytical and the political”—analyzing a program and its need and what politically could be done. The key issue here is what has become the increasing dependence by Suffolk through the years on a sales tax—a variable source of government income. New York State first adopted a state sales tax in 1965. Then Suffolk began a county sales tax in 1969. Of Suffolk’s $3 billion annual operating budget, now half is dependent on sales tax money.

The sales tax rate in Suffolk now is 8.625 percent—which includes the state getting 4 percent and Suffolk 4.25 percent. (The MTA gets the remaining fraction.) 

In years that are flush, when business is good and there’s “a gravy train,” Mr. Lipp commented, all is OK. But that’s not always the situation. In “the last quarter of 2008 and all of 2009,” Dr. Lipp was noting last week, sales tax revenues didn’t come in as expected, Suffolk and the rest of the U.S. were hit by the Great Recession. And Suffolk had a “negative growth rate.”  Said Dr. Lipp about the ups-and-downs of sales tax revenue: “It’s a real problem.” And this “is not a recent revelation.” Decades ago there was the view that depending on a sales tax “was asking for trouble.” 

In response, the county has done borrowing, and the payments on millions of dollars in debt that’s due makes financing many new and important county initiatives difficult if not impossible.

Dr. Lipp and his late wife had three daughters—two of whom live on the island of Maui in Hawaii. He enjoys visiting them, one a high school mathematics teacher, the other the director for a health care provider—which connects to the subject of his doctoral thesis at Stony Brook: health economics. He mentions that an “interesting aspect” of the findings in his thesis was that “in any single-payer health care system there is a safety valve and people who have the money can get to the front of the line.” A third daughter has remained on Long Island and is an art school director.

At Stony Brook his courses have included Health Economics, Public Finance, and Regional Economics. He has taught what he very much knows. 

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 - Green Energy Future Is Before Us

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

Substantially reducing climate change is technologically feasible. What’s needed? Action. The main cause for climate change and global warming and consequent sea level rise is the burning of fossil fuels—oil, coal and gas. Technologies are available today to replace oil, coal and gas with non-carbon emitting green energy.

Suffolk County has been a trailblazer. In 2014, the East Hampton Town Board voted unanimously “to establish a goal to meet 100% of the town’s community-wide electricity consumption with renewable energy sources for the year 2020.” Also, the town would “meet the equivalent of 100% of…energy consumption…in all sectors…including heating and transportation with renewable energy sources by the year 2030.” In doing this, East Hampton became the first municipality on the East Coast of the U.S to set a 100% renewable energy goal.

The Town of Southampton in 2017 followed with its100% renewable energy goal.

In Brookhaven Town, Ed Romaine, among the most environmentally committed Suffolk officials as a county legislator and now town supervisor, has led in green energy initiatives.

In 2019 “100% clean energy mandates have swept the nation with many passed in the last six months,” reported PV Magazine in June. The article pointed to the New York State Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act enacted in June aimed at a “100% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions…by 2050 with the stated goal of ‘exercising a global leadership role on greenhouse gas mitigation and climate change adaption.’” The word “Leadership” in the act’s title is telling. As Governor Andrew Cuomo said in signing the measure: “As Washington turns a blind eye and rolls back decades of environmental protections, New York turns to a future of net zero emissions.” 

President Trump calls climate change a “hoax.” But that hasn’t stopped government action through the U.S. As the Sierra Club states on its website: “Over 90 cities, more than ten counties and two states, have already adopted ambitious 100% clean energy goals.” U.S. cities include Chicago, Los Angeles, Cincinnati, Denver, Cleveland, St. Louis, San Francisco, Orlando, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, Santa Barbara, Atlanta, Amherst, Gainesville, Madison, Milwaukee, Palo Alto, Aspen, San Jose, Spokane, St. Petersburg. Santa Barbara, Sarasota, Burlington, Cambridge, St. Paul, Tallahassee. 

There is action at the grassroots. Google “100% Renewable Energy” and there is website after website of Non-Governmental Organizations and environmental groups laying out where 100% renewable energy is happening and the mix of green energy being used in reaching the goal. “The Solutions Project” (solutionsproject.org) declares: “A world powered by the wind, water, and sun is not only possible—it’s already happening.”

There’s deep involvement by religious leaders with Pope Francis in an important role.

A top analyst in detailing the abundance of green energy alternatives is Dr. Marc Z. Jacobson, director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program at Stanford University. This includes solar photovoltaics, concentrated solar power, wind, hydroelectric, wave-power, tidal-power, geothermal and the list goes on.  He appeared last month in the national TV program I’ve hosted for now 28 years, “Enviro Close-Up.” You can view this show—the title is “The Hoax That Nuclear Power Is Green”—online at www.envirovideo.com  

There’s more political and media attention to climate change than ever. Notable this month was CNN’s Climate Crisis Town Hall with 10 leading Democratic presidential aspirants. In coming days there’ll be a Global Climate Strike led by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg. On September 23 a Climate Action Summit will be held at the UN organized by its secretary-general, Antonio Guterres. He says: “We are in a battle for our lives. But it is a battle we can win.” The Inconvenient Truth of Al Gore is center-stage.

The oil, coal and gas industries and their cronies in government will keep trying to stop the momentum. Their strategy is exposed in the book Merchants of Doubt by science historians Naomi Oreskes of Harvard and Erik Conway of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They document how the climate change-denial strategy is modeled after the decades-long tobacco industry strategy of casting doubt over the link between smoking and cancer.

Others are trying to sabotage what’s happening. These include the anti-environmental president of Brazil giving his go-ahead for the burning of Brazil’s rain forest which supplies 20% of the world’s oxygen. And “the Indian industrial giant Adani” which after “lobbying and politicking,” as the New York Times recently reported on its front page, was given the OK by Australia to extract coal from the “vast, untapped coal reserve in Northeast Australia” to be burnt in Adani power plants in India. This “despite warnings by scientists that reducing coal burning is key to staving off the most disastrous effects of climate change.”

Nevertheless, the road to a green energy future is before us—to be taken. 

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.   

Theater Review – 'Jekyll & Hyde’ The Musical'

Theater Review – ‘Jekyll & Hyde’ The Musical’

 Produced by: Theatre Three – Port Jefferson Reviewed by: Jeb Ladouceur

 

Half the English speaking world is at least familiar with the existence of Robert Louis Stevenson’s horror story, ‘The Strange case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde.’ Indeed, along with ‘Treasure Island’ and ‘Kidnapped,’ the novella is one of the most widely read of the Victorian writer’s dozens of works. So esteemed is Stevenson internationally in fact, that he still ranks as the 26^th most translated author in history.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that in 1997 New York’s theatergoing public was eventually treated to a musical version of ‘Jekyll & Hyde’ when the show of the same name opened at Broadway’s Plymouth Theatre and ultimately completed an almost-four-year run there. The hit thus became the longest-running production in the history of the renowned Plymouth at the time, and closed in January, 2001, after an impressive 1,543 regular performances. 

Co-produced by Jerry Frankel and Jeffrey Richards, and directed by Robin Phillips, the original cast featured the Tony winning Robert Cuccioli in the dual roles of Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde, Linda Eder as Lucy Harris, and Christiane Noll as Emma Carew. When all was said and done, the hit musical was rewarded with no fewer than thirteen Tony, Drama Desk, and Outer Critics Circle nominations.

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Long Islanders have come to expect a number of exquisite period pieces from Theatre Three and its guiding light, Director Jeffrey Sanzel (‘A Christmas Carol’ for example, will likely remain permanently synonymous with the vintage 160-year-old Port Jefferson playhouse) and the addition of ‘Jekyll & Hyde’ to such recent productions as ‘Sweeney Todd’ and ‘Les Miserables’ won’t disappoint even the most ardent history purists.

In Stevenson’s gripping tale wherein the brilliant Dr. Jekyll’s medical experiment backfires and spawns Edward Hyde, his evil counterpart, Alan Stentiford amazingly takes on the divergent roles as if the assignment were a simple one. Furthermore, Stentiford adds a clear, well-polished singing voice to the lyrical proceedings. He is skillfully supported in that assignment by Douglas Quattrock (playing Sir Danvers Carew) and Steven Uihlein (Simon Stride).

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Among the distaff players, incomparable veterans Linda May and Tracylynn Conner are featured in the roles of Lady Beaconsfield and Lucy Harris respectively. That duo alone is well worth the time and price of admission we have wisely invested in attending this remarkable event. When one adds Tamralynn Dorsa’s sweet soprano to the mix in the role of Emma Carew, the trio becomes truly unforgettable.

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Chakira Doherty’s Costumes and Randy Parsons’ Scenic Design are impressive as always … as are Jeffrey Hoffman’s Musical Direction and Robert W. Henderson, Jr.’s Lighting (so important in a dark story like this one). As for the show’s overall Direction, let it be said that the name ‘Jeffrey Sanzel’ on a playbill is akin to the word ‘Sterling’ on silver. Largely because of Sanzel’s leadership it is small wonder that Theatre Three on Port Jefferson’s Main Street has become the chief drawing card in a town so replete with charming attractions.

This musical version of ‘Jekyll & Hyde’ runs thru October 26^th … and, because it is faithful to the Broadway production, management advises that the show contains adult themes and situations. 

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Award-winning writer, Jeb Ladouceur is the author of a dozen novels, and his theater and book reviews appear in several major L.I. publications. His recent hit, THE GHOSTWRITERS, explores the bizarre relationship between the late Harper Lee and Truman Capote. Ladouceur’s topical thriller, THE SOUTHWICK INCIDENT (introduced at the Smithtown Library recently) involves a radicalized Yale student and his CIA pursuers. Mr. Ladouceur’s revealing website is www.JebsBooks.com

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP - Was Hurricane Dorian Just The Beginning?

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

Global warming is producing atom bomb versions of hurricanes.

That was the case with Hurricane Dorian and other Category 5 (winds at 157 miles per hour or higher which is the most destructive level on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale) and Category 4 hurricanes (winds of 130 to 156 miles per hour) that have been developing with frequency in recent years. 

Long Island avoided a Dorian direct hit. But as U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer declared last week at a press conference in Island Park in Nassau County, major hurricanes are in the offing. He held up in one hand a photo from space of Dorian and in his other one of Sandy, a hurricane which switched to being a “super-storm” when it struck Long Island with 80 miles per hour winds in 2012 and still did enormous damage. The senator declared: “This was Sandy…This is Dorian. We’re not saying Dorian will hit but in the next few years there will be more hurricanes like this. We got to make sure that if, God forbid, they come our way, we’re protected.” He advocated an extension of an Army Corps of Engineers “Back Bay Study” in Nassau on which $3 million has already been spent looking into bulkheading, tidal gates and other measures.

Long Island needs to “be protected” but, to be realistic, “protection” from a Category 5 or 4 hurricane is illusory. Consider the video out of the Bahamas last week—wreckage, mile after mile, houses and businesses torn apart. It was complete devastation. Could the folks of the Bahamas have been “protected” from Dorian with its sustained winds of 185 miles per hour (and gusts up to 220)? 

Regarded as the worst hurricane to hit Long Island is what subsequently was called the Long Island Express and also Great New England Hurricane of 1938. Hurricanes then were not given human names. And there was no Saffir-Simpson Scale then, but it has since been considered as a Category 3 (winds between 111 and 129 miles per hour). 

We need to put our full energy into strongly reducing the causes of global warming and climate change which have heated the waters on which hurricanes feed thus producing super-hurricanes.

As The Atlantic magazine said in a headline last week: “Hurricane Dorian Is Not A Freak Storm. Its record-breaking power is in line with recent, worrisome trends.” The article noted that “since records began in 1851, only one storm in the Atlantic had more powerful winds.”

As the headline in The Guardian newspaper stated: “Global heating made Hurricane Dorian bigger, wetter—and more deadly.” The sub-head: “We know that warm waters fuel hurricanes, and Dorian was strengthened by waters well above average temperatures.” 

This article related how the Bahamas is seen as “a dream vacation spot. But Hurricane Dorian turned that dream into a nightmare. And the worst part is this is only the beginning. Because unless we confront the climate crisis, warming will turn more and more of our fantastic landscapes, cities we call paradise and other dream destinations into nightmarish hellscapes.”

The Army Corps of Engineers has believed that sea walls, rock groins, revetments, bulkheads and other “hard structures” will “fortify” the shore and fend off hurricanes.

A major Army Corps scheme I first started writing about when I began as a journalist on Long Island in 1962 was its then new plan to provide for “hurricane and storm damage reduction” for 83 miles of the south shore from Fire Island Inlet to Montauk Point. The plan is still on the books, more than a half-century later, with today a price tag of more than $1 billion.

Seeing the terrible impacts of Dorian—the way it left Hope Town in the Bahamas in shambles—is personal. Years ago, fellow journalist Andrew Botsford, who had captained a fishing boat down there, recommended Hope Town as a marvelous vacation destination. Hope Town is skirted by coral reefs—snorkeling is sublime—and there are beautiful beaches. There’s the red-and-white candy-striped Elbow Reef lighthouse. And a remarkable history. English loyalists migrated to Hope Town after the American Revolution bringing with them colonial architecture—and in Hope Town these buildings are painted in bright Bahamian pastel colors. The royalists mixed with the black inhabitants to create an integrated society. 

Last week, there were photos on the Internet of where we stayed, Hope Town Harbour Lodge—before and after Dorian. The damage is severe. 

For Hope Town and so much of the rest of the Bahamas, it is paradise lost, at least for a time. And, as Senator Schumer said, more bad hurricanes can be expected. We could be hit next. I’ll conclude this series of columns on climate change next week on how we can and must challenge the causes of climate change and global warming. 

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.