From the Long Island Advance
September 17, 2009

Concerns about a river and other Yaphank issues
Development troubling to some, others may need to prepare

By LINDA LEUZZI

About a half-mile into Park Street off Yaphank Avenue, past a few homes and an open field, the county land starts. A sign declares its jurisdiction, a hiker’s heaven with numerous trails and a treat here and there of wildlife sightings. A seven-minute walk north of the sign takes you to an access road that runs parallel to the Long Island Railroad tracks and ends at a DEC no-kill fishing spot by the Carmans River, about 50 feet wide, in all its running, clean glory.  Plans are underway that may challenge that.

About a mile up the road north of the Board of Elections maintenance yard, county land to the Long Island Expressway, is where the proposed Legacy Village is planned; a 5,500-seat indoor arena, a 5,000-seat outdoor arena and track, a 90-room hotel, four restaurants and a wellness center. The culvert sign for the Carmans River is on the expressway service road and a nearby Potters Field cemetery is also on the property.  On the west side of Yaphank Avenue, a 1,000-unit affordable housing development is proposed in back of the Mastic Soccer Club and Suffolk County Police headquarters.

“The biggest problem is that we have just prioritized the preservation of the Carmans River and there are scores of organizations and government at every level working on a plan to preserve it in ways we did not protect the Forge River,” said Pine Barrens Executive Director Richard Amper of the initiatives with Citizens Campaign for the Environment and the South Shore Estuary Reserve to protect the river. “So the plan would be to limit development, not to concentrate it in the corridor. All you have to do is do a Google Earth search to see its proximity.”

A Carmans River Watershed Study, in fact, was approved last November by Brookhaven Town, and included federal, state, county and civic leaders who took part in a number of meetings thus far, but according to John Turner, Brookhaven’s director of Environmental Protection, the town is waiting for Suffolk County Department of Health to assess the watershed boundaries. “We had hoped to get that by now,” he said. “I think the town is waiting on the boundaries, on how big it is, and then the rest of the work will follow.”

Suffolk County Commissioner of Environment and Energy Carrie Meek Gallagher said the town should have results by the end of the year or a month sooner. “The contract with that consultant is over by the end of the year and we would have to have the results in by then,” she said. “What they’re looking for specifically is the delineation of the groundwater contributing system, how far out do we think the area is that contributes groundwater into the Carmans water system.”

Even though the Carmans was recognized by New York state as a Wild, Scenic and Recreational river, Meek Gallagher said that at one of the meetings discussing what the participants thought where the watershed was, there were rough ideas, but no one map delineating it.

According to the Carmans River Environmental Assessment Report by the county issued in March 2002 and prepared by Cashin Associates, the Carmans River flows approximately 11 miles from its source near Route 25 in Middle Island to its mouth in Bellport Bay. The stream is almost entirely fed by groundwater from the uppermost of Long Island’s aquifers and the river falls approximately 50 feet in elevation along its course.

“We’re hearing the county model does not include anything north of Route 25 and that doesn’t make sense to us,” said Tom Williams, a member of the Carmans River Partnership, which is having its annual meeting next month.  “The project is clearly in the watershed.  The question of the impact is that there is a sewage treatment plant that will address that issue. Our concerns are the standards of nitrogen discharge and that they might be too high for the river.” Attorneys for the Katter and Beechwood developers were upfront at the recent South Yaphank Civic Association meeting regarding the installation of sewers and a SEQRA process that would address road and storm water runoff and their affect on the river. But Williams emphasized that the nitrogen discharge level allowed in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, their ideal, was .17 parts per million. “We’ve looked at that as something that should be established for the Carmans River,” he emphasized.  According to Amper, the state standard is 10 parts per million and the Pine Barrens Commission has the authority to limit the nitrogen discharge level to 2 parts per million.

Others like John Strickland, chairman of the board for the Brookhaven Fire District and former chief, who sat in on the recent South Yaphank Civic Association meeting as did Greg Miglino Jr., chief and president of the South Country Ambulance Company, talked about how they would have to prepare their lifesaving units for coverage.

The northern boundary lines for the Brookhaven Fire District run from the Suffolk Police Property section across Yaphank Avenue to Park Street. “We could get 50 calls to Crescent Street off Park, we get calls to the infirmary and police headquarters,” Strickland said.  “We average in the 600 call range annually for the whole district, this is fire related calls. “To say we get maybe 9 percent in this northern Yaphank greater area would be fairly accurate.” The calls vary from automatic alarms to MVA rescues and helicopter assists, he said.

“The response to the area now, candidly, doesn’t pose an overall threat because we’re responding to the same area and the access road is Glover Drive,” Strickland explained. “We are aware that if necessary, we may have to build a substation more geographically located to take on the additional exposure. If someone said, ‘We’re going to do this tomorrow,’ we won’t opt to go much forward than to see what happens because things have to be done that way. There’s land, appropriation of funds, public outcry. But unfortunately in the not-quite-18 miles we protect, a great deal is non-taxable land owned by Brookhaven Town or the county and the federal government. Not counting Post-Morrow, there are others that make their lands tax-exempt and schools, so the industry and residential properties are the ones that support the entire district. But if we do get a substation, where do we get the manpower?”

Miglino’s ambulance company tackles 2,700 to 3,000 calls a year; about 300 originate in the South Yaphank area, he said. “We would clearly have to look at the potential of putting a substation in the area to handle the increased call volume in that sector of the community,” he said of the project. “It’s not that we’d have to put it there tomorrow. There are standards for response time and it would be the far north section of our community. This development isn’t happening in a vacuum. The community has been expanding for the last 10 years. The county is expanding with a larger jail; we have 800 to 900 inmates with the current one and the new jail will increase that number substantially.”

The ambulance company is a private not-for-profit, therefore a referendum wouldn’t be needed. “It would just be a matter of finding land,” he said. “Our board would have to allocate resources to construct a substation. We do have paid staff that maintains the building and equipment but otherwise, it’s all volunteers.”

Miglino said the ambulance company has 100 active members. “We’re in a very fortunate position in that we’re not in need of volunteers. But just because you’re strong today in 2009, you can have a couple of members move and others who have children. If it goes through, we need to be prepared.” ■

by Martin Van Lith
Marty Van Lith lives in Brookhaven Hamlet, where he chairs the Fire Place History Club and serves as Brookhaven Village Association Historian. The Brookhaven National Laboratory retiree is also Secretary of The Open Space Council.

In 1655, a group of English settlers created Brookhaven Town’s first settlement in Setauket, and two years later, their next purchase was a 256-acre salt marsh parcel along the lower Carmans River called Narcomac Meadows. Before long, these settlers purchased the whole river as well as all the wetlands along the bay. Then, as now, but for different reasons, this was the most valuable and productive land that nature had to offer.

For the next 300 years, the Carmans River was considered the best and most abundant piece of nature money could buy, and almost the entire river was owned by only a few of the wealthiest people. One, Maurice Wertheim, eventually left 1,700 acres to “the people of America.” This became the Wertheim National Wildlife Refuge in 1947, which, over time and through the efforts of Dennis Puleston and others, has expanded to 2,600 acres, protecting almost the entire lower river watershed. Wertheim has also been made part of the state Pine Barrens preserve.

In more recent years, history saw continued efforts to protect the treasured Carmans River at the county and state levels. In 1964, Suffolk County government saw the need to set aside this “best of nature” for posterity, so it purchased from the Hard family three miles of the Carmans River and the 1,000 acres straddling it just north of the Wertheim Refuge, creating today’s South Haven Park. Ten years later, armed with the scientific knowledge of ecosystems and the web of life, students from Bellport High School rode their bicycles to Albany with bottles of water from the Carmans River to urge our lawmakers to protect the river under the Wild, Scenic and Recreational Rivers Act.

In the 1980’s and 1990’s, Suffolk County’s suburban sprawl began taking its toll on the surrounding estuaries as well as drinking water, open space and wildlife. Taxpayers approved programs through which millions of dollars were spent to acquire the most environmentally important land, resulting in hundreds more acres of Carmans River watershed being protected. The land conserved along the Carmans River includes the 90-acre Robinson Farm, purchased in 1991, the 128-acre Southaven Properties (1998), and the Fox Lair/Timber Ridge/Greenbelt acquisitions that together became the 700-acre Dennis Puleston Warbler Woods Preserve in 2006.

Other parcels along the Carmans River include the former Camp Olympia, the Novak Property, and many smaller parcels. In the thirty years since the students’ successful ride to Albany, conservation efforts in this area have resulted in the Carmans River being the most pristine and important tributary on all of Long Island. For the past 350 years, we’ve done the right thing for the right reasons, and our reward is that the Carmans River is alive and well, providing the Great South Bay estuary with an average of 46,500,000 gallons a day of clean pine barrens water. One need only look to the east of the Carmans to see what the alternative would have been—an essentially dead river.

So it seems inconceivable now that there is a government-based effort underway to undermine all of the efforts to protect the Carmans River by proposing new intensive development along its banks. But County Executive Steve Levy appears to have a vision to urbanize Suffolk County, and his dreams include a new “subway stop” at LIE exit 67 for his proposed 80-acre industrial park and mini-city, “The Villages at Carmans River.” Realization of this vision also entails giving away 250 acres of our public watershed land for an affordable housing project.

The propaganda Levy uses to sell this death sentence for the Carmans River is “smart growth.” In the Queens mentality of Steve Levy “smart growth” is taking a currently non-destination place, like Yaphank, and making it a target for thousands of cars a day. For the past two years, the County Executive and his development aides have been using this misleading term and the elusive promise of “affordable housing” to justify a new housing and transportation “hub” on the Carmans River.

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