SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: The Year 2023

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

The year 2023 had a stormy ending in Suffolk County, a year of great storminess in which general violence in the world—war—colored life here and widely.

An “extreme weather event”—as they have begun to be called—happened in December in the form of a winter storm that behaved more like a hurricane. 

Brookhaven Town officials reported that Fire Island lost double the amount of sand in the storm then it lost during the whole previous year. 

Newsday, which through the decades has championed trying to fortifying Fire Island beaches by dumping sand on them, felt compelled to publish an editorial headed “Hard questions on beach erosion.” What happened to Fire Island “has inflamed the long debate over who should pay—and how often—for renovations doomed to eventually wash away,” it declared.

 “Hard questions must be asked and answered,” it said. “Government policymakers have to look open-eyed at the huge costs of battling Mother Nature while trying to maintain our shorelines. Should taxpayers living miles from the waterfront be asked to repeatedly fund expensive projects that rehab beaches and, not incidentally, protect private homes? Should beachfront property owners be required to pay for their own protection or move away from endangered areas? Now is the time to finally recognize the changing reality for Long Island’s shoreline and begin adapting to it. The answers won’t be easy, but they will define our region for generations.”

The fierce winter storm also caused the beach in Montauk to be stripped of the sand used to cover 14,000 giant sandbags placed on its coast in a multi-million project to try to protect a line of mostly motels. The “geotextile” bags, now naked, are an ugly site. 

Wiser paths for highly vulnerable coastal stretches are public acquisition—as has been happening in low-lying sections of Mastic Beach in a partnership between The Nature Conservancy and Brookhaven Town—and restoring wetlands. They provide a natural buffer from storms. Most important, however, is dealing with the cause not just effect of “extreme weather events”—climate change.

And the UN’s 2023 annual conference on climate change was not a sterling event in that regard. It was held in the United Arab Emirates, among the world’s leading producers of fossil fuels—oil and gas—the prime cause of climate warming. The conference president, Sultan al Jaber, is chief executive officer of the government-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. He asserted that ending the use of fossil fuels would “take the world back into caves.” There were 2,500 fossil fuel lobbyists reported in attendance. The final report issued at the conference  weakly recommended “transitioning away from fossil fuels”—far short of a phaseout that environmentalists sought.

Still, as the Associated Press reported last week: “Led by new solar power, the world added renewable energy at breakneck speed in 2023, a trend that if amplified will help Earth turn away from fossil fuels and prevent severe warming and its effects. Clean energy is often now the least expensive, explaining some of the growth.”

Back in Suffolk, the election of 2023 resulted in the election of a new head of county government, Ed Romaine, the Brookhaven Town supervisor and previously a county legislator and county clerk. There was the quite the mess in 2023 in the administration of the term-limited incumbent county executive with the county government’s hit in a massive hacking attack. 

In the election, voters continued the Republican majority on the Suffolk Legislature. With Romaine, the first Republican to be elected county executive of Suffolk in 20 years, the GOP is is in control of both the legislative and executive branches of county government. 

Women made substantial gains in the election, quite a contrast to before 1973 when Judith Hope became the first woman elected a town supervisor in Suffolk winning the supervisor’s post in East Hampton. This year, women elected to town supervisor spots in Suffolk’s 10 towns were: in Southampton, Maria Moore; in East Hampton, Kathee Burke-Gonzalez; in Islip, Angie Carpenter; in Shelter Island, Republican Amber Brach-Williams. As to the Suffolk Legislature, six of its 18 members will be female.

The lack of affordable housing remained a burning issue in 2023.

A bright technological event here was local action on cellphone use in class by students. On Shelter Island, its Board of Education prohibited it following teacher Peter Miedema instituting a cellphone ban in his humanities classes the prior year. He observed: “You cannot learn at the same time you are looking at other information.” Joining Shelter Island in banning cellphone use by students in 2023 were the Sag Harbor and Brentwood school systems. 

The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East affected life in Suffolk greatly in 2023. Russia’s continuing invasion of Ukraine and the attack by Hamas on Israel and the ensuing conflict dominated the news. Tie-ins here included the arrest in Montauk of a man who police said admitted to spray-painting swastikas on businesses he believed were owned by Jews. 

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.