Smithtown Town Board Unveils Renovated Board Room

Victor Liss Town Board Room After RenovationVictor Liss Board Room Before Renovations(SMITHTOWN, NY:)  Town of Smithtown officials unveiled the all new Victor T. Liss Board Room during the April 9th Town Board Meeting. Prior to start of the meeting, Supervisor Wehrheim led the Town Board in commending those responsible for the renovations, recognizing their outstanding craftsmanship.

“The craftsmanship and detail that went into remodeling the people’s boardroom is a true testament to how devoted our parks and public safety staff is to the community. They worked weekends and nights to get this job completed on schedule and they did it for a third of the price, had we have hired an outside contractor.” - Supervisor Edward R Wehrheim  

Renovations to the boardroom included completely gutting the walls and ceiling to insulate the room and install a white coffered ceiling, LED energy efficient lighting, custom built wood dais and podium with white granite top, handcrafted wood panelling, flooring, an updated HVAC system, state-of-the-art live streaming camera and cyber security systems. The renovations were made for approximately $80,000; with a quarter of the cost covered by proceeds from outside funding.

Theatre Review - Theatre Three's 'Second Stage'

Theater Review - ‘Second Stage’ Review by Jeb Ladouceur - Produced by Theatre Three, Port Jefferson

Since 1998 Theatre Three in Port Jefferson has conducted an annual festival consisting of five or six one-act plays, all of which are presented in a roughly two-hour period in the ‘Ronald F. Peierls Theatre‘ section of the 160-year-old Main Street playhouse. The festival serves a number of purposes: it offers live professional entertainment for the theater-going public, functions as an outlet for the talents of playwrights who might not otherwise be so accommodated, and provides local actors a convenient conduit for their talents.

For those who might be unfamiliar with Theatre Three’s intimate ‘Second Stage,’ it is ‘in the round’ and is located on the building’s lower level, immediately beneath the broad ‘Main Stage,’ with its familiar proscenium.

This year’s half-dozen brief dramas and comedies were chosen from among four hundred submissions world-wide, and in keeping with Theatre Three’s festival regulations, are all being produced here for the first time on any stage.

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While the six presentations understandably vary greatly in style, pace, and message, two of the productions stood out for this critic … and they are worthy of highest accolades for both writing and acting. Significantly, one (For a Moment in the Darkness We Wait) is a heartbreaking treatment of loneliness as experienced by two men, strangers unknown to one another, and separated by age, background, and status. They show us in piercing detail the universality of man’s need for affection and understanding. Veteran Douglas J. Quattrock and newcomer Ryan Schaefer are remarkable in this poignant vignette.

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The other standout, (The Unforgivable Sin of Forgiveness) a comedy and a good one, is so rat-a-tat funny that the audience virtually pleads for the two actors, an improbably married couple, to slow down and let us catch our breath between belly laughs. Of course they do not … and we are all the more victimized by the side-splitting hilarity from the pen of playwright Rich Orloff. Antoine Jones and Tracylynn Conner drew the assignment from Director Jeffrey Sanzel (who directed all the plays) and they couldn’t have been funnier.

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The Festival, which features thirteen admirable actors from Theatre Three’s ranks, runs thru May 5. All tickets are $20.    

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 newly completed thriller, THE SOUTHWICK INCIDENT, was introduced at the Smithtown Library on May 21st. The book involves a radicalized Yale student and his CIA pursuers. Mr. Ladouceur’s revealing website is www.JebsBooks.com 

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP - Environmental Battle To Save Fire Island From Robert Moses

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman 

 “Saving Fire Island From Robert Moses, The Fight For A National Seashore” is the title of a just-published book by Christopher Verga. It is about the battle to prevent public works czar Moses from building a four-lane highway the length of that ribbon of sand, paving over a paradise just off Long Island’s southern coast. 

The other evening, reading the book by Dr. Verga, who teaches Long Island history at Suffolk County Community College, brought memories back of a long time ago.

I’m a part of the book, but it’s a story that goes far beyond me—a tale of environmental success that has since served as a model for other environmental battles. To stop the would-be Moses highway, the National Seashore was created—and Fire Island was saved. It’s a story, too, of how three relatively small newspapers that challenged the Moses highway had a big part in this success.

Professor Verga writes, “When local politicians tried to block his projects, Moses used the media….Moses would silence any dissent that stemmed from rogue reporting, which could have threatened his power or overall vision.” He relates: “An example of Moses’ style of retribution was his retaliation against reporter Karl Grossman. In 1964, Grossman wrote an article in the Babylon Leader comparing Moses’ treatment of civil rights protesters at his World’s Fair to Bull Connors, and in response, Moses got Grossman fired from his job….” 

A central Moses ambition: highways and cars, although he didn’t drive—he was chauffeured. For years he sought a road on Fire Island although his “planning…remained secret.”  Then came a big storm in 1962 and Moses had his rationale: a highway would “anchor” Fire Island, he claimed. Media including “Newsday, The New York Times…and all other popular newspapers were under the influence of Moses and advocated support for his projects. The only local paper that had been strongly critical of Robert Moses was the Babylon Leader.” 

The Leader for decades had been taking on Mr. Moses, a resident of Babylon. In 1962, at the age of 20, I showed up at the Leader for my first job as a reporter and was assigned to go to Fire Island that weekend and write an article about the just-announced highway.

This front-page piece was to be the first of many articles. Professor Verga writes how I “became the first to report on the resistance” to the road and stayed on the story. He notes how the Leader was joined by Joseph Jahn’s Suffolk County News in Sayville and Paul Townsend’s Long Island Commercial Review. At times, we published the same article together.

  “These allies in the press soon began to make a difference. Babylon Leader’s Karl Grossman reported the story that made one of the biggest impacts by not just swaying mainlanders’ perspectives on the road through Fire Island but also challenging their trust in Moses. Grossman reported that during the twilight hours, Moses would routinely secretly replace sand that eroded along the Ocean Parkway [on the Jones Beach stretch to the west of Fire Island] after coastal storms. This story debunked Moses’ original claim that a parkway could anchor shifting and eroding dunes. The only problem was that Grossman’s story gained the attention of only the three papers that supported the cause.”

But then, Professor Verga goes on, attorney Irving Like, who with his brother-in-law Maurice Barbash were leaders of the Citizens Committee for a Fire Island National Seashore, brought a lawsuit to uncover how much money was being spent to keep Ocean Parkway in place. 

He describes how U.S. Interior Secretary Stewart Udall embraced the idea of a Fire Island National Seashore—and was Mr. Moses mad at him! Also, Laurance Rockefeller, founder of the American Conservation Association and chairman of the State Council of Parks, began speaking out about how a Fire Island highway “would conflict with conservation”—and was Mr. Moses mad at him!

“Moses demanded that Governor [Nelson] Rockefeller silence [his brother] Laurance’s criticism,” notes Dr. Verga. The governor would not. “Moses, the most powerful person in New York, had met his match.” He reacted by quitting state positions, although holding on to running the 1964-1965 World’s Fair. 

My article and photos taken on the World’s Fair opening day of its private guards brutally attacking Long Island civil rights activists protesting racism in hiring at the World’s Fair ran in the Babylon Leader, which months before been bought out by a chain, and also appeared in the chain’s other newspapers. But I was no longer protected by the Leader’s former editor and its publisher. Mr. Moses complained to the chain’s New York City-based management and I got fired. I’ve nicely survived and, most importantly, Fire Island remains a beautiful, special, magical place. 

This excellent book by Professor Verga documents the complete story. 

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 - 'The Miracle Worker'

Theater Review - The Miracle Worker’ by Jeb Ladouceur - Produced by Theatre Three, Port Jefferson

Our history is peppered with uncounted instances of accomplishments that are so complex they sometimes boggle the mind. Occasionally, these phenomenal successes are all the more compelling because they stem from symbiotic relationships … that is to say they could not have been achieved without an interdependent bond between a pair of participants.

In this regard, one thinks immediately of the indomitable Wright Brothers, sibling Inventors who seemed able to peer into one another’s minds as they went about breaking the chains that theretofore had bound them to Earth. In Music, Gilbert and Sullivan, The Gershwin Brothers, and Rogers and Hammerstein were visionaries in their own discipline, each pair’s partner feeding off of his artistic counterpart in order to produce works that likely would have been impossible were it not for their collaboration.

We recognize the phenomenon in the field of Exploration too (Stanley and Livingston, as well as Lewis and Clark are examples) and in Literature … consider the unusual twosome of Truman Capote and Harper Lee. Indeed, few areas of interest to us as observers are without one or more of these famed sets of dual colleagues.

But perhaps the most unique team embodying synergetic interaction that we’ve encountered in our time is that of an 8-year-old child named Helen Keller who was blind and deaf, and the 20-year-old woman who became her teacher. The tutor’s name was Annie Sullivan, and her heroic story is as familiar as it was improbable.

To this day, incredulous observers ask themselves, “How does one teach a pupil to communicate when the prospective student has been deprived of three of her five senses since early childhood?” That was the challenge Annie Sullivan faced (and accepted) when in real life she agreed to instruct obstreperous Helen by ‘writing’ in the letters of the Manual Alphabet on the child’s palm … and then by insisting on her obedience.

Veteran Theatre Three director, Bradlee Bing, must have faced a stern and similar test when confronted with the prospect of finding a child young enough to play a convincing little Helen, while possessing the innate maturity to interpret such a demanding role effectively. But fortune smiled on Bing in the person of 11-year-old Cassandra LaRocco, a sixth grader with all the stage presence and instincts of an actress twice her age.

However casting Cassandra in ‘The Miracle Worker’ was only half of Bradlee Bing’s test. Now he had to find his title character … an early-twenty-year-old ‘Annie Sullivan’ who is a no-nonsense, second-generation Irish-American lass … with a touch of brogue, and the patience of Job. I have it on good authority that at her initial audition, Jessica Mae Murphy read five lines … and Director Bing announced that he had found his ‘Miracle Worker.’

This thrilling play by William Gibson premiered at Broadway’s Playhouse Theatre in 1959 with Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke playing Annie and Helen respectively. Not only did ‘The Miracle Worker’ win four Tonys, the eventual film also produced Academy Awards for Bancroft and Duke in their leading roles. 

Interestingly, the play as it’s staged at Port Jefferson’s 160-year-old Theatre Three is not without its rare comic moments. This is largely because of Jessica Mae Murphy’s instinctive awareness of precisely when the audience is dying for a chance to laugh … even if only briefly. Murphy never overdoes it, mind you (she’s too much the consummate professional to commit such a gaffe) but by the same token the supremely talented woman never fails to respond appropriately when her patrons send their silent but unmistakable signal for comic relief. It’s grand to watch her work.

As the whole world knows, Annie Sullivan was ultimately successful in making Helen Keller the notable international celebrity that she became, but there’s a back story in this play, and Bradlee Bing makes sure it is properly presented. While little Helen is the primary focus of everyone’s concern, her father, Captain Keller (Michael Newman), has his own problem putting up with Helen’s disability. Annie quickly realizes that the doctrinaire Captain, too, needs her counseling … and she’s just the person to dish it out.

Susan Emory plays Helen’s sympathetic mother to perfection, and Eric J. Hughes (as brother James) provides a truly memorable culminating scene to balance his otherwise understated role. 

This fine production runs thru April 28th.

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 newly completed thriller, THE SOUTHWICK INCIDENT, was introduced at the Smithtown Library on May 21st. The book involves a radicalized Yale student and his CIA pursuers. Mr. Ladouceur’s revealing website is www.JebsBooks.com 

What's New In Smithtown Government? RAISES

By Jerry Cimisi

The Town of Smithtown has signed new contracts with the Smithtown Administrators Guild (SAG) and the Civil Service Employees of America (CSEA). The town’s employees, from board members to blue collar workers, will receive a pay raise retroactive from January 1, 2018. 

The new SAG contract run from Jan.1, 2018-Dec.31, 2020. The CSEA contract runs from Jan.1,Town Supervisor Ed Wehrheim 2018, to Dec. 31, 2022.

Salaries of town council members’ salaries will increase from $65,000 to $72,316 in 2019, eventually reaching $75,000 by 2020.

SAG employees—board members, highway superintendent and the like—will receive a 2 percent retroactive raise for 2018, and a 1.5 percent increase for each of the following two years. There is a retroactive cost of living increase for 2018 and for 2019-’20. SAG members will receive a cost of living increase in July. That cost of living increase will be determined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The CSEA agreement calls for a two percent retroactive pay raise for 2018; in the years 2019-2022, a 1.5 percent raise will be given on Jan. 1 and July 1 of each year. 

The raise puts town council members more on par with council members of neighboring towns. Brookhaven council members are paid 72,316; Huntington will be at $76,841 in 2020, Islip is $77,200.

Smithtown Public Information Officer Nicole Garguilo, said that in keeping town council members’ salaries “comparable with other towns, we will also attract younger people for government service. Traditionally many board members are older, often retired, and town council was more or less a part time position. We are trying to change that, have candidates look at these positions as a career. It seems younger people have become more involved in politics now. There is more information out there, digital media is playing a bigger role in politics. There are more younger elected officials.”

Supervisor Edward Wehrheim added, “We have to offer competitive salaries for elected officials. Our board members are now working at least 30-35 hours a week.”

Garguilo is the town’s very first public information officer. She received $74,206 in 2018; in March of this year she was given a $5,000 raise.

Supervisor Wherheim has given Town Councilman Thomas Lohmann a new position, in addition to his duties and salary as councilman: he is a part-time executive assistant to the supervisor at $30,000 per year. 

Wehrheim’s salary will be raised from $112,000 to $115,000. Brookhaven’s supervisor is salaried at $119,132; the Huntington supervisor is at $140,000, Islip supervisor at $102,500.

A native of Kings Park, Wehrheim has been working for the Town of Smithtown since 1971. He worked for the Department of Parks, Buildings and Grounds, became its director in 1989, retired from that department in 2003 and became a town council member. He was elected for his first term as supervisor in 2017.

(Wehrheim’s predecessor, Patrick Vecchio*, served for forty years as town supervisor. Wehrheim defeated him in the Republican primary for the nomination.)

In addition to signing new contracts for its employees, the town has also undertaken extensive renovations, at town hall, specifically to the town board room.

Wehrheim said, “It was a complete renovation, from the ceiling to the floor, the heating and air conditioning. The last time work had been there was in the 1950s, so it really needed it. We look at that room as the people’s room. The renovation was just completed and we had our first meeting there after the renovation on March 21. The public was very appreciative of what was done.”

The town spent $80,000 on the renovations, which included an update of its live streaming equipment. The town live streams its work sessions, on FIOS and Optimum. 

Wherheim said that $60,000 of the monies for the renovations came from the parks budget, with the other $20,000 funding from cablevision. By law, cable companies must carry local government meetings on its public access channels.

When asked what he would like to see improved in the town, the supervisor said he would be focused on downtown revitalization for the three business districts in the township: Smithtown, Kings Park and St. James. His administration intends to make use of the monies the state has designated $40 million to sewer Smithtown and Kings Park at $20 million for each.

The town has also secured $3.9 million in DASNY (Dormitory Authority of the State of New York) funds from State Senator John Flanagan and bonded approximately $4 million for sewers on Lake Avenue in St. James.

The supervisor said this would enable the town to increase its water usage capacity to host larger restaurants “and with apartments above them, meeting the standards of the Board of Health.” The sewer project for Kings Park will begin in spring 2020; sewers for downtown Smithtown and St. James are not yet scheduled.

Wehrheim added, “We are actively improving our parks and recreation areas. In 2018 we renovated three parks, two in St. James and one in Nesconsett, as well as the golf course and catering facilities at the town’s Landing Country Club.

“We are also beginning this year to restore the Flynn Memorial Park, which is a four-ballfield complex. In the mid-1980s the USSSA (United States Specialty Sports Association), which features adult softball, had its seven-day tournament there; but apparently it was not kept up to their liking, and they’ve been having the tournament in New Jersey now for many years. We’ve been having discussions with the USSSA to get them back here. It would be a major financial boost to the town, with not just the players coming out, but their families—a boost to our hotels, restaurants, delis. We hope to have that restoration completed in 2020.”

See Town Adopted Budget

* Edit for name correction. Patrick Vecchio was mentioned as Ed Vecchio.