SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: Gov. Hochul To Decide LIPA's Fate

 SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

 By Karl Grossman

With the New York State Legislature and Governor Kathy Hochul to decide in coming months whether to accept the recommendations of the state’s Legislative Commission on the Future of the Long Island Power Authority, it would be instructive to consider how LIPA began—and the work of two people instrumental in the creation of LIPA in 1986.

The bipartisan eight-member legislative commission has just concluded that LIPA should be a full public utility and operate the electric system on Long Island itself, not contract out the work to PSEG, a New Jersey-based utility. Its just-issued report says that cutting out PSEG—which former Governor Andrew Cuomo in 2011 arranged to get a contract to run the Long Island grid—would provide a saving of $50 million to $80 million year, “the fee paid to PSEG.” And, the report projects, it would result in an improvement in service.

Instrumental in the establishment of LIPA were the late Murray Barbash of Brightwaters, and Irving Like, his brother-in-law and a Bay Shore resident.

What they did was flip the strategy they had used decades before to block the four-lane highway Robert Moses sought to build the length of Fire Island and, instead, create a Fire Island National Seashore. Barbash, who died in 2013, and Like, an attorney who passed away in 2018, were both strong environmentalists.

I got a phone call from Barbash in 1962, the morning after my first article was published in the Babylon Town Leader on the plan of Moses, who lived in Babylon, for a highway on Fire Island. My piece quoted numerous people on Fire Island telling how it would have a devastating impact on communities and nature of Fire Island.  

Barbash knew there was no way to stop Moses on the state level. Moses, who lost a race for New York governor in 1934 by a then record margin, amassed huge power by heading commissions and authorities—becoming as Robert Caro would relate in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Power Broker,” a power broker in the state. Needed to stop Moses and his highway was federal clout.

So, Barbash and Like created the Citizens Committee for a Fire Island National Seashore. And they and others involved in it, including famed Suffolk naturalist Robert Cushman Murphy, campaigned for the Seashore. They received the support of U.S. Interior Secretary Stewart Udall.

With federal power, Moses was overridden governmentally and President Lyndon Johnson in 1964 signed the legislation creating a Fire Island National Seashore.

Two years later, in 1966, LILCO announced its plan to build the Shoreham nuclear power plant. In the language of the nuclear promoters of the time, Long Island would be turned into a “nuclear park” with LILCO seeking seven to eleven nuclear plants all in Suffolk County.

The impetus for this nuclear development on Long Island was the fight Con Edison lost when it sought to build a nuclear power plant in Ravenswood, Queens, in the geographic center of New York City. Key to blocking that project: opponents getting a bill introduced in the City Council banning the placement of a nuclear power plant within the boundaries of the city. Thus, Long Island was seen as an alternative location for siting nuclear power plants in the New York Metropolitan Area.

Barbash and Like jumped in to battle against nuclear power on Long Island. But how could this fight be won considering the federal agency that approved nuclear plant construction and operation, the then Atomic Energy Commission, consistently approved construction and operating licenses for nuclear plants? The AEC was abolished by Congress in 1974 and replaced by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, but it also continued to consistently approve nuclear power plant licenses.

When nuclear power development began in the U.S., nuclear promoters got the federal government to pre-empt most local and state controls. But Like knew that a local or state government’s power of eminent domain still existed.          

There were other ways in which nuclear power plants sought by LILCO were opposed including a demonstration in 1979 of 15,000 people at the site in Shoreham in which the first of the proposed LILCO nuclear plants had begun construction. It was the biggest demonstration ever on Long Island to date.

But grassroots and Suffolk County government opposition were, in the end, not what stopped Shoreham and LILCO’s plans for other nuclear power plants. It was the flipping of the Fire Island highway strategy and using state power—its power of eminent domain (used to condemn land that an owner will not sell, for example) – to stop Shoreham and the other nuclear plants LILCO sought.

 A model for Citizens to Replace LILCO was the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD), in an area of California that also had a nuclear power plant that was shut down and SMUD has gone on to emphasize green energy.

Will the New York State Legislature and Governor Hochul in the coming year support the legislative commission’s report and have LIPA be, like SMUD, a full public utility—a full public utility.

As State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele, Jr. of Suffolk, co-chair of the legislative commission, said last week in his winter bulletin to constituents: “The third-party management model that the Long Island Power Authority has used for decades…has failed time and again. Making LIPA the transparent and accountable public utility that the ratepayers have long deserved has been one of my top legislative priorities…After extensive public hearings and independent professional investigations, the commission’s final report returns to the original vision of public power when LIPA was created by the legislature in 1986.”

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.