Amy's Perspective - Watermill Caterers' Proposal A Four Story Hotel

By Amy Fortunato 

The proposed special exception required by the Watermill Caterers to build a 4 story hotel is a risky construction gamble that threatens to comprehensively change the quality of life in Smithtown.  This project sets a new height precedence with the potential to completely alter the town’s character and negatively impact property values.  The Watermill is well known as a favorite venue of the Smithtown Republican party, just check the website!  The special exception exceeds the current code regulation in Smithtown for 2 story buildings.   This height code ensures a limitation to overbuilding and over-development in our town.    (Smithtown’s town code is 2.5 height restriction for residential or business or a 35 ft. limitation.)

As candidates for Town Supervisor and Town Council, Ed Wehrheim, Lynn Nowick, Tom McCarthy and Tom Lohman all campaigned for transparency along with the promise to complete  adopt a Comprehensive Master Plan for Smithtown’s future.  It seems that our elected town officials are moving ahead without fulfilling either of those campaign promises.  Each candidate referred to a commitment to transparency and the value of a Comprehensive Master Plan.  These campaign promises are not being considered when outside a contractor with huge construction projects have recently been presented for special exception and concession rather than defend current height restriction in Smithtown.   

The proposed special exception to permit the Watermill Caterers to build a four (4) story hotel has caused concern on the two Smithtown social media groups where I posted a response to the proposal.  There were more than 200 replies to my post for responses from Smithtown residents.  I posted some basic information about the special exception proposed.   Almost immediately after posting, the comments appeared.  The posts described the various concerns with traffic, environmental impact to sensitive land, impact to the nearby neighborhood homes, height issue – 4 story precedence, parking limitation, and the lack of available space for the proposed hotel.  Some comments mentioned disappointment that the 2 pm hearing time is problematic because many residents were not able to attend.

My purpose for posting on social media was to simply check the climate of the Smithtown community’s response to the proposed 4 story hotel.  Smithtown tax paying residents are invested in their property values and quality of life.  The precedence set by approving a special permit to allow the construction of a 4 story hotel would support future approvals of special permits.  Smithtown’s elected officials need to know the concerns.  The prevailing consensus from our town’s community is serious apprehension.  The negative impact to our environment and quality of life is threatened by this special exception.  A town-wide survey would clarify Smithtown’s residents’ concerns and aspirations.   

Amy Fortunato is a Smithtown resident who ran on the Democratic line for Smithtown Town Council in 2017.

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP - Spring Is Coming So Are The Leaf Blowers

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

What noise-makers! And what health threats!

Gas-fired leaf blowers are under attack regionally—and way beyond.

In January, East Hampton Village Mayor Paul F. Rickenbach Jr. and the East Hampton village board brought up the possible regulation of leaf blowers. “I think the intent is there that we want to move ahead vis-à-vis the environment and the ecology of our wonderful village,” said Mayor Rickenbach.

Board member Arthur Graham called gas-leaf blowers “something that drive residents of this village crazy” and “a self-created problem by the landscape community…And there’s a fair amount of sentiment in the village to ban them outright.”

Over in Greenport, its village board, also in January, voted down proposed limits on the use of gas-powered leaf blowers. Backers of restrictions cited both noise and health risks including the spreading of airborne particulates. Opponents of limits in Greenport claimed this could increase the cost of yard clean-ups.

Restrictions have been advanced for gas-fired leaf blowers all over the area—and far afield.

In Huntington a group called Huntington CALM (Citizens Appeal for Leafblower Moderation) has been challenging them for years. Huntington CALM advocates “sustainable landscape maintenance practices and the elimination of the use of gas leaf blowers.” It states on its Facebook page that it “educates citizens of Huntington about the harm caused” by them. 

Dr. Lucy Weinstein, M.D. and MPH, chair of the New York Chapter 2 of the American Academy of Pediatrics Environmental Health Committee, and Dr. Bonnie Sager, founded Huntington CALM.

When it comes to gas-fired leaf blowers, a vested interest has been created by the landscapers who use them. They have been lobbying—as they did in Greenport—to insist the machines continue to be used. 

But as it goes in the pushing of all sorts of polluting processes and products, the claim that there is not a suitable alternative is not true. Up in New England, George P. Carrette, owner and founder of Ecoquiet Lawn Care of Concord, Massachusetts, emphasizes: “We use only zero emission, gasoline-free lawn maintenance equipment.” 

There is the alternative of battery-powered leaf blowers, he emphasizes. “There are several things to consider when converting from gas to lithium battery equipment. A huge advantage to using battery equipment…is how easy it is to market and sign up customers. The idea markets itself.”

Battery-powered leaf blowers make a small fraction of the noise of gas-fired leaf blowers and they produce a fraction of the pollution.

“When I started I had five customers,” Mr. Carrette relates. “I put lawn signs out advertising clean, quiet lawn care. I immediately got 35 inquiries from neighboring properties and communities. I was a one-man operation at the time and I was terrified about how I could meet this instant demand.”

“My first year, I was so busy I had to work holidays [but] I had no…complaints from customers or neighbors since did I did not make noise or disturb their privacy….I did not come home reeking of gasoline fumes, my wife didn’t hate doing my laundry. I didn’t lug around heavy gas cans and deal with tune-ups, degreasers, belts, hoses, etc. A true pleasure,” he said.

“Running an all-electric landscaping company is a bit different and there is a learning curve involved…You will enjoy…very happy customers. They like the fact that they are choosing a better option for the environment, their families’ health, and get to enjoy their peace and quiet. The whole neighborhood appreciates it and business just keeps getting better and better.”

And Goerge P. Carrette is not just a green landscaper in New England. 

Among areas that gas-fired leaf blowers now are banned or restricted in the United States are (since 1977) Great Neck Estates on Long Island; Sonoma and Palm Springs, California, and Biscayne Bay, Florida (banned all-year round); Maplewood, New Jersey (banned in the summer) Palm Beach, Florida (banned year-round on property under an acre); Newton, Massachusetts (banned in the summer)—and “more than a dozen communities in Westchester County have restricted or banned gas-fueled leaf blowers without the demise of the lawn care industry. When will Long Island catch up?” asks Dr. Weinstein. Altogether, some 400 hundred communities across the U.S. have enacted restrictions on gas-fired leaf-blowers. Israel has banned them entirely.

Details on the noise racket and intense pollution gas-fired leaf blowers cause 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 - Former Congressman Forbes On The Gun Issue

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

Former Suffolk Congressman Michael F. Forbes has written a strong article, a “guest commentary” published in the The Kansas City Star on February 23, headlined, “I switched parties and lost my Congressional seat over the gun issue. Two decades later, what has changed?”

“As a Republican member of the Congress, I was compelled to abandon my party over the gun issue in 1999,” wrote Mr. Forbes, who represented the Suffolk’s lst Congressional district in the House of Representatives for three two-year terms from 1994 to 2000. The lst C.D. included most of Smithtown, all of Brookhaven town and the five East End towns during his tenure in Congress. Forbes resided in Quogue then. He and his family subsequently moved to Texas where Mr. Forbes is now an ordained deacon of the Catholic Church.

“American children had been murdered in their school in Columbine and my party, the party that controlled the fix to gun violence, did nothing about it,” he relates.

“I listened to the debate on gun control in the” in the House in June 1999, he goes on, alongside then Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy of Long Island “whose husband had been murdered and son wounded by a deranged gunman on the Long Island Railroad in 1993.”

But it was “the unspeakable tragedy of Columbine, outside Denver, in April of 1999 that had sparked the intense debate on the House floor about what could be done to protect America’s children, our children, our future. It could have been my child, or your child, so surely we would do something.”

“Then, however, the National Rifle Association unleashed its powerful army of lobbyists and millions of dollars to make sure that we did not,” Mr. Forbes goes on. ”I lost friends and supporters in my Long Island district when I became a Democrat, and I lost my reelection bid the next year.”

“In the 19 years since then, an untold number of children and adults have suffered wanton destruction in their schools, their churches, their neighborhoods and communities and the National Rifle Association is still making sure nothing meaningful will be done to stop the violence.”

”After Sandy Hook, and Virginia Tech, and Las Vegas, some of us continued to hope that the spectacle of all those coffins would surely prompt the Congress to act. Even when gun violence wounded our own, Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, badly wounded while meeting her Arizona constituents [and] Congressman Steve Scalise and others shot up during baseball practice, surely that would prompt Congress to act.”

“So why is the latest rampage with a gun any different? It is not, I’m sorry to say.”

“Very eloquent, impassioned teens are making an optimal case for action” in the wake of the Parkland, Florida massacre. ”And good for them. They have every right to expect our leaders to respond.”

“But, trust me. I was there. The politicians and their benefactor, the National Rifle Association, will still do nothing.”

The forum at the White House, a town hall gathering on cable television, a march on Tallahassee and another expected in Washington—all of these are worthy efforts, but efforts the NRA itself might encourage, as ways to ‘blow off steam.’”

“In 1999, the Senate passed background checks for purchases at gun shows, but the House refused to act. That was all.“

“And in 2018, Congress will I predict attempt to appear to be doing something by passing a few feel-good measures such as a ban on bump stocks, raising the age at which one can purchase certain firearms, or a cosmetic fix to background checks with the private assurance that the Senate will not pass a similar bill.”

“Then the U.S. Senate, particularly to offer political cover for Senators Marc Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas, will pass its own cosmetic fix to appear in an election year to be doing something, anything—again, with the private assurance that the House of Representatives will not pass a similar bill.”

“Lawmakers will say they tried, and Donald Trump, who received $30 million from the NRA, will have earned his take.”

“That’s because as one of the nation’s wealthiest, most influential and most mobilized lobbies, the NRA is integral to any Republican politician’s financial lifeblood, and that of some Democrats, too. Their death grip on our culture will not be easy to loosen, and if we’re to have any chance of doing so, we must not underestimate what we’re up against.”

What an indictment of the NRA and the gun lobby in the U.S. by Mr. Forbes!

Theater Review – ‘Nunsense’

Theater Review – ‘Nunsense’

Produced by Theatre Three – Port Jefferson Reviewed by Jeb Ladouceur  A hilarious combination of singing, dancing, and slapstick

Photo by Brian Hoerger, Theatre Three Productions, Inc. When in real life Dan Goggin first created a line of clerically skewed greeting cards featuring one-liners delivered by a witty nun, he probably had no idea where the concept would take him. But the idea proved so popular that his resulting 1985 Off-Broadway musical titled ‘Nunsense’ (for which Goggin wrote the book, music, and lyrics) ran at new York’s Douglas Fairbanks Theater for an astonishing 3,672 performances. Only the indefatigable ‘Fantasticks’ has had a longer run (42 years) in Off-Broadway musical theater history.

Anyone who has ever been disciplined in school by those remarkable women attired in black and white, will recognize Don Goggin’s zany clerical on-stage quintet. As interpreted by five Theatre Three standouts in Port Jefferson (Phyllis March, Linda May, Sari Feldman, Tracylynn Connor, and Jessica Contino), the madcap Little Sisters of Hoboken that they portray are respectively: Sister Mary Regina-(Mother Superior,) Sister Mary Hubert-(Mistress of Novices,) Sister Robert Anne, Sister Mary Amnesia, and Sister Mary Leo.

The superb group, currently starring under the direction of Jeffrey Sanzel, incredibly joins a sorority of some 25,000 women who have once played in ‘Nunsense’ productions worldwide (the musical has been translated into 26 languages). Some of the American notables who’ve contributed to the ‘Nunsense’ nonsense are, for example: Edie Adams, Kaye Ballard, Peggy Cass, Phyllis Diller, and Sally Struthers. Among the characters they have played in this show are nuns who have been … a circus performer … a streetwise Brooklynite … a Novice who longs to be a ballerina … and an amnesia victim whose been conked by a tumbling crucifix. Ouch!

This group decides to combine their talents in order to raise cash for the unlikeliest of reasons. It seems the convent cook, Sister Julia Child of God (who else), has inadvertently poisoned all but 19 of the order’s 71 members with her tainted vichyssoise, and with four of the convent’s deceased still on ice in the fridge, Mother Superior has run flat out of burial money. What’s an impoverished convent supervisor to do?… let’s see … hey, why not tap all that pent-up show biz savvy and run a talent show?… that should provide the needed cash, by golly!

What follows is a hilarious combination of singing, dancing, and slapstick that doesn’t let up for a minute. 

Musical Director, Steve McCoy and Choreographer, Sari Feldman couldn’t be more in sync if they were Siamese twins. Scenic Designer, Randall Parsons has the show’s trickiest assignment because the Good Sisters are putting on their creation in a school theater that’s still decorated from a recent 8^th grade performance of ‘Grease.’ Naturally, the stage has to look like that … and it does. Likewise, Robert W. Henderson, Jr.’s lighting must have presented a major challenge. Anyone who thinks it’s easy to light a show that’s basically a black and white production … and still keep it ‘colorful’ … hasn’t tackled the challenge. The same goes for those habits provided by costume designer Teresa Matteson. Costumes play an extremely important part in this musical, and Lord knows, they’d better fit properly.

This is the fourth time I’ve seen ‘Nunsense’ and my third review. One might think the show would get stale after so many exposures to it, but that’s far from the case. Indeed, the current incarnation of Don Goggin’s rollicking invention is the most entertaining I’ve ever taken in. It’s even got a dozen or so Jeffrey Sanzel-style variations that look like the maestro could have borrowed them from my old Catholic school.

In conclusion, each of the ‘Good Sisters of Hoboken’ provides a unique version of hilarity in Theatre Three’s current riotous proceedings. Accordingly, it’s impossible to determine which of the five is funniest. Suffice it to say the rambunctiousness builds without letup until veteran hoofer Linda May (Sister Mary Hubert) belts out the gospel-style showstopper, Holier Than Thou. It’s a fitting conclusion to this inimitable show. By all means, see it … you’ll be glad you did!__

______________________________________________________________

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 in May. The book involves a radicalized Yale student and his CIA pursuers. Mr. Ladouceur’s revealing website is www.JebsBooks.com

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP - Seven Dems Ready To Challenge Zeldin

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

Suffolk County’s lst Congressional District—made up of all the five East End towns, all of Brookhaven Town, two-thirds of Smithtown and a slice of Islip—has been designated one of 101 “battleground” districts by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee

This means the committee will provide campaign workers and fundraising.

The incumbent in the lst C.D. is Lee Zeldin of Shirley who won the seat in 2014 by defeating Tim Bishop of Southampton, previously provost of Southampton College. Two years later, he defeated Anna Throne-Holst of Noyac, the former Southampton Town supervisor.

Mr. Zeldin, an attorney and former state senator, is a conservative Republican, politically and personally close to President Donald Trump. Mr. Zeldin’s spokesperson, Jennifer DeSienna, says that while “several Democratic Party candidates” will be “trying to out-liberal each other for the Democratic designation, Congressman Zeldin will remain completely focused working harder than anyone else to deliver positive results to grow our economy, protect our security, and improve in many other ways our community, state, and nation.”

There are seven Democratic rivals to Mr. Zeldin, an unprecedented number of would-be Democratic candidates historically in the lst C.D.  

Indeed, if the crowded field doesn’t thin out and most of the candidates continue on and wage a Democratic primary challenge, Mr. Zeldin could be at an advantage.

In the 2016 primary, Ms. Throne-Holst defeated David Calone of East Setauket, former Suffolk County Planning Commission chair, by 260 votes, splitting the Democratic vote. Ms. Throne-Holst spent $1.73 million and Mr. Calone $1.3 million in the primary, money lost for the general election fight against Mr. Zeldin. Suffolk Democratic Chairman Rich Schaffer has said that while he will work to avoid a primary by getting an agreement on one candidate, “based on the number of candidates, that’s unlikely.”

Moreover, because Ms. Throne-Holst was a longtime member of the Independence Party until a year before the primary, she was accused by Mr. Calone of not being a “real Democrat”—and this could reoccur this year. One hopeful this year, Kate Browning of Shirley, term-limited after 12 years as county legislator, was a long-time member of the Working Families Party until last year (although she ran for legislator, as Ms. Throne-Holst had for supervisor, with Democratic cross-endorsement).

It’s not just the money expended on a primary and creation of a division among party voters, but also the lost time campaigning as a general election nominee. The date of the primary in New York State this year is June 26. Election Day is on November 6—a little over four months later.

Those seeking the lst C.D. Democratic nomination in addition to Ms. Browning are:

*Vivian Viloria-Fisher of East Setauket. Like Ms. Browning she also was term-limited after 12 years as a county legislator. For six of those years she was deputy presiding officer of the legislature. She came to the U.S. at 16. She is strong on many matters including social issues and the environment. She has been a long-time teacher.

* Perry Gershon is extraordinarily tough on the connection between Messrs. Zeldin and Trump. Nearly every other day he’s out with a strong statement. A businessman in Manhattan, he and wife bought a home in East Hampton 22 years ago.

* Elaine DiMassi of Lake Ronkonkoma was a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory for 21 years until she decided to make the race and thus, because of the Hatch Act, had to resign from BNL. Her campaign slogan is “Scientist for Congress.”

*  David Pechefksy grew up in Patchogue and went on to became a staff member for the New York City Council. He worked for a non-profit in the city promoting civic engagement among the young. He is in the process of moving with his family back to Suffolk, to Patchogue. 

* Brandon Henry of Center Moriches was a teacher and is now a bartender. “I got involved in this because I felt our votes aren’t being heard,” he said at a recent Democratic candidates’s forum. “When it comes to the struggle of living on Long Island, I don’t have to relate to it. I am in the struggle of living on Long Island.”

* Just announced is Bruce Miller of Port Jefferson who declares on his campaign leaflet that he is “A Democrat with…An Appetite for the fight!” He is a Port Jefferson village trustee, a former teacher and ex-Port Jefferson school board trustee, and says “I can help reinvent the party.”

Ms. Browning is originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland and was a school bus driver for the William Floyd School District before being elected a county legislator. She notes that one of her student passengers was Lee Zeldin.