Suozzi Ad Tries to Flush Away the Past - Nassau families deserve to hear the truth

Shortly before the September 10th Democratic Primary, Suozzi released a television ad wrought with patent inaccuracies. The ad is indicative of the way Suozzi ran the county -- with murky truths, fudged budget numbers and hiding the reality of his fiscal ruin.

“This historical revisionism is a sad example of a candidate who can’t tell fiction from reality. Suozzi is trying to pull the wool over voters’ eyes and flush away his record,” said Spokesman Galen Alexander. “Nassau’s Democratic voters deserve to hear the truth – after draining the county’s reserves Suozzi moved on to pawning county assets, racking up charges on the county credit card and ignoring his taxpayer-funded job while running for the next political office.”

Nassau’s Democratic voters deserve to hear to truth on Suozzi’s revisionism. A breakdown of Suozzi’s ad follows.

Claim: “A fiscal sinkhole. By 2001, Tom Gulotta had Nassau billions in debt, and Albany was taking over.”

Truth:

Suozzi came into office under a financial control board, left under a financial control board and destroyed county finances between.
County debt soared under Suozzi. By the time Suozzi left office in 2009 he increased county debt by $449.5 million.
Claim: “We had to make drastic changes.”

Truth:

Suozzi hiked taxes a drastic 23% and gave himself and his buddies massive raises.
Suozzi repeatedly created budgets based on unrealistic growth assumptions.
Claim: “Tom Suozzi had a plan, and helped rescue Nassau from the brink of bankruptcy, cut the county workforce, and streamlined the bureaucracy while also balancing the budget.”

Truth:

Suozzi created a $123.8 million structural gap in the Nassau budget by 2008 after inheriting a structural surplus of $12.5 million in 2001.
The Nassau County Interim Finance Authority repeatedly cited unsustainable financial practices. According a May 2009 NIFA report: “NIFA’s assessment [was] that the FY 2008 surplus included the use of a significant amount of non-recurring revenues and bond proceeds as operating income, thereby contributing to a large and growing structural deficit.”
After Suozzi enacted his plan a major credit rating agency gave Nassau a “negative outlook.”
Suozzi handed out over a hundred million dollars in county contracts to campaign contributors.
Claim: “We reduced the borrowing, and we cut the debt.”

Truth:

County debt soared under Suozzi. By the time Suozzi left office in 2009 he managed to increase county debt by $449.5 million.
Suozzi created a $123.8 million structural gap in the Nassau budget by 2008 after inheriting a structural surplus of $12.5 million in 2001.
Claim: “Thirteen bond upgrades, from the ‘Wall Street toilet’ to A ratings.”

Truth:

Suozzi created a $123.8 million structural gap in the Nassau budget by 2008 after inheriting a structural surplus of $12.5 million in 2001.
After Suozzi enacted his plan a major credit rating agency gave Nassau a “negative outlook.”
Claim: “Now with all the new borrowing, and the new debt, we’re headed towards another fiscal sinkhole. And our kids just can’t afford that.”

Truth:

Suozzi’s borrowing and fiscal shell games created mountains of debt leaving Nassau County the most indebted county in all of New York state, excluding NYC, by a huge margin.

By Jerry Sharp, Ph.D.

Nassau County - under County Executive Ed Mangano - is offering cutting-edge type initiatives to battle the substance abuse scourge, and try to stem the flow of overdose deaths - but bias in the mainstream media has caused these facts to practically be ignored.

We have not been given any substantial information about the nearly 1,000 mothers, fathers, siblings and other “ordinary citizens” who have been trained by Mangano’s staff on how to save a life, and how they have been equipped with the life-saving instrument to do that.

Do residents even know that Mangano made Nassau the first County in New York to become state-certified, and operate  a program that trains people to administer a life-saving medication called Narcan; this medication saves the life of someone overdosing?

Are  people aware that Nassau has a former Narcotics detective assigned to bring age-appropriate drug education and prevention programs into all the County’s elementary, middle and high schools? Or, that under the current administration, many  drug addicts are being rehabilitated instead of jailed(which is tremendously less expensive for tax payers), and are able to go on and become responsible and productive members of society?

Know it or not, Nassau has been working in a multitude of ways to cut through the denial and shame of family members, and bring critical awareness to these individuals about substance abuse, how to spot it and where to find help for the addict, as well as for the entire familial system.

Nassau is a model for other counties and states throughout the country for its drug abuse prevention efforts.  Nevertheless, most do not even know of this, except  for those who have been informed  from someone who attended one of the panel discussions and/ or training sessions Mangano has facilitated across the County for more than a year now.

Could these efforts have any thing to do with the 19% decrease in fatal opioid overdoses in Nassau County from 2011 to 2012? No one can be certain, however, it is definite that the  numbers are moving in the right direction.

When former Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi closed down Nassau’s only 2 county-run drug treatment facilities in 2003,  most were understandably concerned, and angry -  he eliminated 144 treatment slots. As a result, he  eliminated opportunities that would have given hundreds of residents addicted to drugs  a chance to get clean, and be equipped with  ways to maintain recovery. How very unfortunate that Suozzi abolished these programs, which had helped 1000s of addicts, as well as their family members in the 3 decades of their existence.

Additionally, in his second term in office, Suozzi  ended the county’s Students Against Drunk Driving (S.A.D.D.) campaign; hundreds of young people's lives might have taken a different path. Nobody knows how many lives might have been saved, or how many young people might have gone in a different direction or stayed on the path to recovery. Nonetheless, what we do know is that there have been innocent citizens killed during robberies, and more than 925 residents have died of heroin or prescription painkiller overdoses in Nassau County,since those drug centers were closed.

The 2 New York State licensed, highly successful, nationally respected and well established  facilities (both lead by Mr. Kirby Thompson, LCSW, an exceptional Director of Services), provided quality treatment at a relatively low cost. One - Plainview Rehabilitation Center - was self-sustaining by way of Medicaid revenue. The other - Topic House (also in Plainview) - was largely state-funded. 

Suozzi stated at the time that the closures were done to save money, yet as the County Executive, he must have known that millions of dollars in Medicaid revenue and state funding were forever lost by closing the facilities. He also must have been aware that the County was held to retain every civil service employee working at both facilities due to civil service law.

Perhaps his fear of  the negative political and community consequences that  would most likely be attributed to his decision, lead  him to  use what many describe as a machine of propaganda, which spun highly  misleading and severely fraudulent information regarding the Plainview closings; this machine literally lied to the public regarding the necessity for and the success of these 2 facilities. Astonishingly, when people actually did complain, he dismissed their concerns as if they were irrelevant,and reported that he would open 2 new rehabs in the following year (something that never happened).

Fortunately, 2 years later  the public benefit corporation (a Non-County agency) that owns NUMC in East Meadow, did open a  wing for addicts. This was something with which Tom Suozzi had absolutely no involvement, but he misleadingly attempted to take at least partial credit for. Although this wing is obviously crucial, it  only is capable of treating a mere 20 patients at one time--  a miniscule amount compared to the 56 inpatient and 88 residential beds that existed in Plainview prior to 2003.It is simply not large enough to adequately provide for the addicted population. Furthermore, there is a long waiting list to gain admission , and there is a significant number of addicts who do not make it back when a bed does become available.

I hope that people realize the extreme importance of Ed Mangano, with respect to his acts of stepping in, and creating outside-the-box solutions to begin addressing the issue of substance abuse, reducing the number of non-recovering addicts, and consequently, reducing the crimes that they often commit against others.

As a concerned citizen, I – and many others - thank him.

Dr. Sharp is a Nassau County resident;  he counsels persons, most of whom  who have been diagnosed with drug dependency.

What exactly has Tom Suozzi accomplished, either as Glen Cove Mayor, Nassau County Executive or consultant to MSG High School Sports-television initiative?

Nothing.

While Suozzi headed both the City and County for 8 years each:

Glen Cove still doesn’t have a “cool downtown,” like then mayor Suozzi talked about creating in “visioning plans” and press conferences.

Nor have any of the transit-oriented cool downtowns he spoke about creating throughout Nassau materialized.

What’s more, Suozzi’s private sector venture – where Cablevision hired him to direct the company's most recent local television programming initiative, MSG Varsity High School Sports channels – failed miserably.

The MSG Varsity channel isn’t even on television any more -  closed down prior to the 2013-14 school year.

Don’t let Tom Suozzi do to Nassau County what he’s done – or actually not done – in Glen Cove and for MSG. 

By Karl Grossman
Will voter reaction to the U.S. government shutdown impact on Election 2013?
Democrats are lambasting Congressional Republicans for it. Representative Tim Bishop, a Southampton Democrat, last week blasted his GOP colleagues for being “deeply reckless.” National polls show citizen outrage towards the GOP regarding the shutdown.

It’s an off-year election; no federal or state posts are up. Still, might some voters take their frustration out on local Republican candidates?

In back of the shutdown -­ and being especially blamed for it ­- are members of the House of Representative who are supporters of the Tea Party movement. Thus GOP candidates identified as Tea Party supporters might be especially vulnerable.

In New York City, the campaign organization of Bill de Blasio, the Democratic candidate for mayor, has set up a website titled “Goldwater * Tea Party * Giuliani * Lhota.” It links de Blasio’s Republican opponent, Joseph Lhota, to the Tea Party as well as the late conservative Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona and the conservative former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani for whom Lhota was a top deputy. The website quoted Lhota as backing the Tea Party. Also, di Blasio charged his Republican rival, Joseph Lhota, as now having “amnesia” about his “support” for the Tea Party.

That came after Lhota tried to distance himself last week from the House GOPers who because of their opposition to the Affordable Care Act, known, too, as Obamacare, blocked passage of a federal budget. 

“The hang-up on Obamacare in this particularly case is wrong,” said Lhota. “Using it as leverage is wrong. Shutting down the government, in this case, is wrong.” He called those GOPers in the House doing this as “flat-out wrong.” Lhota further said: “I think they’re extremists and they’re moving the party in a direction that I think is wrong...There is a role for government in this world. They...basically don’t believe there should be government.”

In neighboring Nassau County on Long Island, the Democratic candidate for county executive this year, Tom Suozzi, is also linking his Republican rival, Ed Mangano, to the Tea Party.

“Ed Mangano, on the eve of the Tea Party shutdown of the federal government, continues to proudly proclaim that he’s a conservative Tea Party Republican,” charged Suozzi in a statement last week. It declared that Mangano “supports the conservative agenda in Washington, and he must be held accountable.”

`The Suozzii statement also criticized Mangano for not supporting the proposal of Representative Carolyn McCarthy, a Mineola Democrat, to toughen background checks for gun buyers, and Democratic New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo’s SAFE Act banning the sale of high-capacity magazines for guns. 

Brian Nevin, a spokesperson for Mangano, the incumbent county executive, countered that “Suozzi should focus more on his high tax-and-spend policies than his position on a matter that the county has no jurisdiction over.” 

Meanwhile, an October 1st  article in the New York Times reported that Mangano, in an interview, “said he welcomed Tea Party support” and “declined to distance himself from its positions on abortion, immigration and gun control.” The piece was headlined “Rematch for Nassau County Executive Could Be Bellwether of National Trend,

In Suffolk County, Republican leaders have been bullish about the GOP making inroads on the Suffolk County Legislature, the county’s governing body. Democrats now hold 11 seats on the 18-member legislature and Republicans five. The two remaining are held by Jay Schneiderman of Montauk who switched his enrollment from Republican to the Independence Party in 2008 and has been running, too, on the Democratic line, and Kate Browning of Shirley, a Working Families Party member who also runs on the Democratic ticket.

Among incumbents the GOP is making a heavy push to unseat is Schneiderman. a former East Hampton Town supervisor. The Republican candidate is Chris Nuzzi of Westhampton Beach, a term-limited Southampton Town board member very close to Suffolk GOP Chairman John Jay LaValle. When LaValle was Brookhaven Town supervisor, Nuzzi was his deputy chief of staff. The district includes Southampton, East Hampton and Shelter Island towns. Another race that GOP consider very competitive is in Huntington Town where freshman Democrat William Spencer of Centerport, a pediatric surgeon­the first doctor to be a member of the legislature­is being challenged by Robert Conte. Conte’s brother, James, was a 24-year veteran of the State Assembly who died last year. He resided in Huntington Station. The Huntington GOP leader, Toni Tepe, says Robert Conte, also of Huntington Station, has a “good shot particularly because of the family history.”

Will this GOP hopefulness be dashed by voters upset by GOP behavior in Congress?
A major GOP figure in the shutdown, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, rejects the possibility that­as CNN’s Candy Crowley asked­his actions have "hurt the Republican Party brand.” In the CNN interview Sunday, Cruz responded: “Not remotely.”

We’ll see.

By Karl Grossman

Some Long Island officials are betting that gambling will provide a big financial boost for the fiscally-pressed county governments of Nassau and Suffolk. Are they right or making a bad bet?

In June, in a surprise move, New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo­after months of saying no­suddenly agreed to the call from officials of Nassau and Suffolk to allow the two counties to set up facilities for video slot machines. Each could have a facility with 1,000 video slot machines.

The Cuomo turn-around, according to well-informed sources, was linked to getting the Long Island delegation in the State Legislature to support his plan to turn the Long Island Power Authority into a shell and have a private New Jersey utility, Public Service Electric and Gas, be THE utility on Long Island.

Then votes on a bill expanding gambling in the state that included the video slot plan for Long Island and votes on a bill to drastically alter the utility structure on Long Island were taken in the State Assembly and State Senate­and both passed. “The governor horse-traded his support for the slots for votes to pass his LIPA bill,” said one source.

Long Island had not been included in Cuomo’s original gambling expansion bill.  Right up through early June, it would have authorized three gambling casinos and video slot machines but only upstate. “LI NOT IN GAMBLING PLAN,” was the headline of a June 6th Newsday article. It quoted Assemblyman Phil Boyle of Bay Shore saying “he’s ‘disappointed but not deterred’ by the island’s omission in Cuomo’s plan.” 

A week earlier, Nassau County Executive Edward Mangano and Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone, with the presidents of the two counties’ Off-Track Betting Corporations, had gone to Albany, meeting with state legislators and “doubling down,” said Newsday, in seeking  “potentially lucrative video gaming” on Long Island. But Cuomo still felt this would take away from his desire to assist upstate through gambling. 

Then, a week later, his gambling bill was expanded to allow video slot machines on Long Island and was voted upon simultaneous with Cuomo’s bill to drastically change the Long Island utility structure­which had faced stiff resistance from the Long Island delegation. The “opposition to the bill on LIPA fell apart with the addition of Long Island to the gambling plan,” said another source. “The two were linked.”

Is gambling the fiscal rescue some Long Island officials would believe? Consider the Page 1 story in the New York Times last month headlined: “Crowds Return to Las Vegas, but Gamble Less.” It told of a drop in gambling revenue with a “new influx of tourists, younger and less devoted to gambling.”

Or consider a Times piece a month earlier about gambling in decline in Atlantic City. “Revenues have fallen 40 percent since their peak in 2006 as new casinos in neighboring states have taken away gamblers,” it noted.

The video slot terminals in Nassau and Suffolk would be operated by the Nassau and Suffolk OTB Corporations­huge troughs for political patronage in both counties. And they have been in trouble. Suffolk OTB moved to declare bankruptcy last year (New York City OTB filed for bankruptcy in 2009).

The office of New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli in a 2010 report titled “Financial Condition of New York State Regional Off-Track Betting Corporations” spoke of the “financial condition of the state’s five regional OTB Corporations” having “substantially deteriorated.” It said “various factors account for the significant and continuing downturn in handle including a diminished interest in horseracing” and “competition from unregulated internet gambling sites.” This “general decline” in horseracing is “demonstrated by decreased attendance at most state racetracks.”  There are not only now many casinos all over the United States diluting the gambling industry, but “government-sponsored lotteries,” too, noted the report.        

The lure of winning hundreds of millions of dollars in the Powerball lottery, owned and operated by 33 state lotteries, towers over winning the tiniest fraction of that on a video slot machine.

Meanwhile, Congressman Peter King of Seaford, whose district includes parts of both Nassau and Suffolk, introduced a bill in June that would license online gambling at the federal level, further spreading gambling choices.

Is the pot of government gold from video slot machines a mirage? I bet it is.

                          
By Karl Grossman
   As the U.S. government moves to spend $700 million to attempt to shore up the Long Island shoreline from Fire Island Inlet to Montauk Point, Concerned Citizens of Quogue couldn’t have invited a more knowledgeable scientist to speak about the coast.
 “Alternatives For Protecting Our Dunes and Beaches” was the title of the talk last month by Dr. Robert Young, director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University in North Carolina.
A geologist, Dr. Young is a protégé of the program’s founder, Dr. Orrin Pilkey, a pioneer in the study of beach dynamics. Dr. Pilkey is now its director emeritus. The two co-authored the 2011 book The Rising Sea.

As former U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt said of the book: "A must read for all Americans. The authors are among our most eminent coastal scientists. They deliver, in clear and measured prose, an urgent message explaining how rising sea levels will affect New York, Miami, Houston, Los Angeles and every coastal community in our country."  

As a journalist on Long Island I’ve written about coastal issues for a long time­indeed, I go back more than 50 years in writing about that U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Fire Island to Montauk Point plan, long-stalled, mainly by objections, and now, in a modified form after Superstorm Sandy, to be implemented.  

Meanwhile, what’s new on the subject­ also the theme of The Rising Sea and how Dr. Young began his talk in Quogue ­is an awareness of global warming and how it’s causing a sea level rise. It’s scary and sad, but a reality. And as Publishers Weekly said in its review of “The Rising Sea,” which it called “a rational approach to inevitably rising sea levels,” even with “a significant reduction in carbon emissions, sea levels will continue to rise and, combined with increasingly severe storms, force a retreat from the shore.”

Dr. Young told the 120 people who packed into the Quogue Community Hall on August 17th that “the planet is clearly warming, the sea level is clearly rising...It’s an indisputable fact...The Earth is talking to us.”  He said: “Every single alpine glacier on the planet with few exceptions is receding,” he said. “If you want to see the snows of Kilimanjaro, they’ll be here for 10 more years. Glacier National Park will not have any more glaciers by mid-century.” The rise in sea level is due to glacier melt and also because when water is warmed “it expands.”

Where does that leave the shoreline? It’s becoming increasingly impacted by the rising sea. What’s to be done? Dr. Young emphasized what Dr. Pilkey decades ago documented before rising sea levels exacerbated the situation­“hard structures” such as stone jetties called groins when they are built to try to deal with erosion only hold the shore where they’re located. At the same time (as we on Long Island have learned) they cause serious erosion on the coast  “downdrift” of them. He read passages from the Army Corps’ “Shore Protection Manual” showing even it acknowledges this now.

“Preferable to hard structures,” he said, is “beach nourishment”­the term used for dumping sand on the shore. But, Dr. Young warned, “you never do beach nourishment once.” It needs to be a “long-term commitment.” Problems with “beach nourishment” include how, he said, after the sand is dumped and a beach purportedly reinforced, that being used as “a guise to increase development.” Also, there is a new storm and “your [beach nourishment] project disappears in a year. That’s the risk.” Further, “sand is getting more expensive” and taken from a “borrow area” out to sea, it may be of poor beach quality. 

Dr. Young went through other “alternatives” with “the first choice” – “relocate and develop incentives for doing this.”  He commented, “I don’t say ‘retreat’ anymore.” That’s because Americans don’t like the sound of that word, he explained. “No, we say relocate.”  
Moreover, it needs to be understood that “coastal erosion does not destroy beaches.” Beaches remain although they get reshaped by nature. The issue is the “infrastructure” along the coast­and when their continuation is threatened, more and more now by a rising sea, relocation is key.
The Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines  (www. http://www.psds-wcu.org/) with excellent science takes an independent view on coastal issues. Its analyses should be heeded. 

By Karl Grossman
A terrible tragedy occurred days before this summer was to arrive.  A precious, brilliant, beautiful young woman, Anna Mirabai Lytton, 14, was riding her bicycle in East Hampton Village on a Saturday afternoon and was run over by a vehicle and died.
“Our hearts are collectively broken,” said Eric Casale, the principal of the Springs School, from which Anna, an eighth-grader, was to graduate the following week. “Anna was a bright and shining star who excelled in academics and leadership, and who was just an all-around good kid.”
The death of Anna, overflowing with talent, a writer and poet, cast a pall at the graduation ceremonies which included a special tribute to her. “Words cannot express the grief that we feel,” Mr. Casale said there.

At a subsequent memorial at East Hampton’s John Drew Theatre, which overflowed with people, Anna’s parents, Kate Rabinowitz and Rameshwar Das, her brother James, her two grandparents, and others, spoke about the devastating June 15th tragedy and Anna’s life.
I vividly recall a day-trip on our boat with Kate, Ramesh, James and Anna­and the excitement of these highly curious, ultra-intelligent youngsters sailing the waters of Little Peconic Bay.

What a loss!

Through the summer, in the wake of Anna’s death, here has been discussion about the lack of safety for bicyclists on Long Island. There have been other instances on Long Island of vehicles striking bicyclists including another fatal crash, this one in Terryville in July. Bradford Packer, 51, of Port Jefferson Station, was killed. A nurse, he had taken to commuting by bike after his car broke down a few months earlier. The motorist was charged with leaving the scene of a fatal accident. This month, bicyclist Ricardo Fernandez, 44, of Amityville of Dix Hills was run over and this motorist was also charged with hit-and-run.
To drive a bicycle on Long Island is taking your life in your hands­ and this must change. East Hampton Village, in the wake of Anna’s death, has moved to adopt a program called “General Principles for Introducing Bike Lanes in East Hampton.” Mayor Paul F. Rickenbach Jr. said it was “a first step.” Indeed, it is.
“We have to have a cultural change in which bicycles and pedestrians are seen as part of the transportation system, not just an annoyance,” comments Sinead FitzGibbon of Sag Harbor, an avid bicyclist and a leader of the five-year-old group Spokespeople.
The organization has been advancing numerous ideas­far more bicycle paths for sure, and also what has become common elsewhere around the world: sharrows.
Sharrow is a term coined by Oliver Gajda of the San Francisco Bicycle Program that combines the words share and arrow. It means shared lane marking. The pavement of roads that vehicles and bicycles share are painted with sharrows­which combine the shape of an arrow with a bike symbol. Ms. FitzGibbon says sharrows have been found to be an excellent and inexpensive way of getting motorists to be aware of bicyclists using the same roadway.
Will sharrows be widely implemented here?  Will other steps be taken to make bicycling and walking safe in an area in which, as Ms. FitzGibbon so accurately notes, “the car is king?”
Implementation of protective programs has been a big problem, says Ms. FitzGibbon.
She speaks of being for two years on an East Hampton Town committee on safety for bicyclists. “The town [government] seemed verbally committed,” but “the plans we drew up have not been implemented.”
Some good news: a three-mile bicycle and pedestrian path is now on its way to being built along the utility right-of-way paralleling well-trafficked Route 25A between Mount Sinai and Wading River. Congressman Tim Bishop of Southampton secured a $6.5 million federal Scenic Byways grant for it.  (A similar and longer path advanced years ago for the utility right-of-way between Southampton and East Hampton never, unfortunately, happened.)
At a press conference last month that included Bishop, Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone and Suffolk Legislator Sarah Anker of Mt. Sinai, Ms. Anker told about how “for over 10 years” the project “has faced obstacles and challenges.” She declared that it “will be a tremendous asset to our community as it will provide a safe outlet for people to run, walk and bike....The project will create a green transportation alternative.”
It, too, is a start.  So much more needs to be done to bring safety to bicyclists and pedestrians on Long Island.

By Karl Grossman
A couple of weeks ago, a celebration was held at the home of Lenny and Julie Ackerman honoring the staff at Stony Brook University Hospital Heart Institute for the care they gave when Ms. Ackerman suffered a heart attack and stroke last year.
At the event in East Hampton were 200 people including the doctors and other staff members of the Heart Institute who cared for Ms. Ackerman; other doctors and medical personnel from the hospital; the president of Stony Brook University, himself a physician; area doctors with links to the hospital; and just plain Long Islanders.      
Mr. Ackerman, an attorney, said he wanted to “introduce the leadership of Stony Brook Medicine to our community.” He declared, “Stony Brook was there for us and everyone who needs them...I was delightfully surprised to find this level of care so close to home.”

The Ackermans are not alone in being impressed by the extraordinary care they received at Stony Brook University Hospital. It’s been the experience of my family, too, and through the years I’ve heard glowing reviews about the hospital from many people.
And that has much to do with the man who founded the hospital and created the remarkably caring culture there­ which continues. Dr. Edmund Pellegrino passed away two months ago after great successes not only at Stony Brook but at Catholic University of America, where he later became president, at Yale’s Medical Center and at Georgetown University, where he was a professor for three decades. He taught up to his death a week before his 93rd birthday.
At Georgetown, too, Dr. Pellegrino established and directed the Center for the Advanced Study of Ethics. He was considered a founder of the field of bioethics which has been defined as the study of ethical questions arising in the relationship between medicine, life sciences, biotechnology, law, politics and philosophy. Nationally, he chaired the President’s Council on Bioethics and, internationally served on UNESCO’s International Bioethics Committee.
Dr. Pellegrino’s story is about what taking care of sick people and teaching medicine should involve, and about a highly spiritual individual­as the National Catholic Reporter noted in its obituary for him, he went to mass daily and saw his Catholic faith as the most “important unifying element in my whole life”­and also about prejudice.
I got to know Dr. Pellegrino after he was hired in 1966 to be vice president and establish what was to be Stony Brook University Health Sciences Center­a complex to include a hospital, dentistry school, nursing school, school of social welfare and a medical school, of which he would be dean. 
The top administrators of Stony Brook, its president and executive vice president, were physicists and not familiar with medical care or education, but New York State wanted the university to have these components. And what a person was selected for this job.
I still vividly remember Dr. Pellegrino recounting, as I wrote as a reporter for the Long Island Press about his plans, how he was refused admission to medical schools despite having excellent grades at St. John’s University. The son of Italian immigrants, he spoke of a letter he received from one Ivy League school complimenting him on his grades but saying he would be “happier” with his “own kind.” Italian-Americans, he was told by his academic advisor, were not welcome at major medical schools and suggested he change his last name. He refused.
His father, who was in the wholesale grocery business, serviced a restaurant near NYU at which the dean of NYU Medical School was a regular customer. Its owner introduced him to the dean, young Pellegrino applied to the school and was accepted.  
Dr. Pellegrino’s dream of what the Stony Brook Health Sciences Center­its hospital and educational components­ centered on it integrating medical sciences with the humanities and social sciences. Moreover, the hospital was to be was patient-centered, personal, nurturing and caring. He maintained that medicine is a moral enterprise with a doctor having a “covenant” with his or her patient. Well before the rise of “managed care” and its bean counters, Dr. Pellegrino was dissatisfied with the direction medicine was taking, turning health care, he told me, into a commodity, a business. Stony Brook, he said, would be different.
Dr. Pellegrino, the author or co-author of 23 books, left a legacy there. Stony Brook in a statement last month about Dr. Pellegrino’s death described him as a “visionary.”  And his vision lives on­to the great benefit of Long Islanders and other people.

By Karl Grossman
If you’re going to eat a lobster on Long Island, it’s highly unlikely these days that it came from the waters of the Long Island Sound, ­long a huge source of lobsters. That’s because the lobster fishery in the Sound has been decimated.
In Connecticut, the die-off has been blamed on the spraying of toxic mosquito pesticides. Clinching the case was the finding last year of the pesticides methoprene and resmethrin in lobster tissue. Thus the state passed a measure, signed into law in June, banning the use of methoprene and resmethrin in coastal areas of Connecticut. An exception can be made if there are documented instances of mosquito-borne disease notably West Nile Virus.

Now, Suffolk County Legislator Jay Schneiderman has introduced a bill to restrict the use of methoprene in the estuaries of Suffolk. An exception is provided if there are, as his bill states, “one or more disease threats, including, but not limited to West Nile Virus and Eastern Equine Encephalitis...positively identified in local mosquito populations” and “two or more bacterial larvicide treatments have been unsuccessful.”

Schneiderman, who before getting into government was a science teacher, says Suffolk “should be doing everything it can to limit the unnecessary introduction of toxins into our environment” and “there are alternatives to methoprene that have not been shown to be harmful to our crabs and lobsters.” Of resmethrin, “right now,” said the Montauk lawmaker, he is not including it in legislation.

Methoprene is sold under the name Altosid and is a “larvicide” designed to upset the growth pattern of infant mosquitoes. Resmethrin, sold under several trade names including Scourge, is an “adulticide“  that kills grown mosquitoes. The huge problem is that they also impact other life­including lobsters.

At a press conference in Connecticut held with the law’s passage there, State Senator Bob Duff said: “The fisheries of Long Island Sound have been devastated by this lobster die-off.”

Some 3.7 million pounds of lobster were caught in Connecticut waters in 1998 and 142,000 pounds in 2011, the date of the most recent tally. “We’ve seen a 98 percent decline in the lobsters we catch,” said Roger Frate, owner of Darien Seafood.

John Shaban, a member of the Connecticut House of Representatives, said: “For several years we have listened to the experts who told us that these pesticides could not harm the lobster population.” Last year, however, with the finding of methoprene and resmethrin in dead, dying and some live lobsters “we learned that the experts may have been wrong.”

Earlier, the state of Maine, Legislator Schneiderman noted in a statement, became “the only East Coast fishery where methoprene has been banned” and its “lobster population...is at acceptable, sustainable levels.” Indeed, if you are eating a lobster nowadays on Long Island, it likely came from Maine or Canada.

In 2007, four members of Suffolk’s Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ)­established to be the environmental watchdog for county government­resigned after a large majority on the Suffolk Legislature approved a county mosquito control plan providing for heavy use of methoprene and resmethrin. The plan had been rejected by CEQ.

One of the four, Dr. John Potente, told the legislature then that “we did our research and homework” and found “damning evidence’ that the die-off of Long Island Sound lobsters was connected to methoprene and resmethrin.

Dr. Potente now comments: “In the name of mosquito control, the Suffolk County Department of Public Works [DPW] has a history of aggressively spraying chemicals that it has known little about.” Schneiderman’s bill to restrict the use of methoprene “would put Suffolk County in the right direction in terms of being precautious about spraying chemicals that have too many associated hidden health hazards.”

Suffolk County has a long history of using pesticides in a big way. Suffolk had a role in the banning of DDT in the U.S. The publication in 1962 of Rachel Carson’s landmark book “Silent Spring” was key. But another factor was a lawsuit challenging the spraying of DDT by the Suffolk County Mosquito Control Commission which preceded DPW in doing pesticide spraying in Suffolk. The DDT spraying resulted in the egg shells of the area’s signature bird, the osprey, to become paper-thin and break when  sat on in nests resulting in a sharp decline in the osprey population. Then and now, here as in Connecticut, we’ve been told by “experts” who push pesticides that they are safe.

By Karl Grossman
The vote last month in the House of Representatives on reining in the National Security Agency’s dragnet approach to collecting data was extremely close­ 205-to-217.
In the battle over the bill, “Conservative Republicans leery of what they see as Obama administration abuses of power teamed up with liberal Democrats long opposed to intrusive intelligence programs,” reported The New York Times. “The Obama administration made common cause with the House Republican leadership to try to block it.”

However, for Long Island the pattern was different.

The vote, in fact, joined relatively liberal Democrats, Representatives Tim Bishop and Steve Israel, with a conservative Republican, Peter King. All three were in the narrow majority voting against the measure. 

Bishop’s district includes Brookhaven and the five East End towns of Suffolk County. Israel’s takes in northwest Suffolk through northern Nassau County into Queens. King’s district covers southwest Suffolk and southern Nassau.

The bill was written by Representative Justin Amash, described by The Times as a “libertarian Republican” from Michigan, and John Conyers, Jr., a “veteran liberal Democrat” also from Michigan. Its main focus was on blocking the NSA from its collecting of vast amounts of phone records. Only phone surveillance of specific investigative targets would be allowed.

It was triggered by the revelations of NSA leaker Edward Snowden. 

In the debate on the bill, Representative Jerry Nadler of Manhattan spoke about the NSA gathering “megadata.” Amash held the NSA surveillance flies in the face of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure. Meanwhile, NSA officials and others in the Obama administration held that program is necessary to counter terrorism.  

Investigative journalist James Bamford, who has long probed the NSA, authoring three best-selling books about it, “The Puzzle Palace,” “Body of Secrets” and “The Shadow Factory,”  compares­as do many others ­NSA activities with the surveillance portrayed by George Orwell in his book “1984.” It “described a fictitious totalitarian society where a shadowy leader known as ‘Big Brother’ controls his population through invasive surveillance...Today, as the Snowden documents make clear, it is the NSA that keeps track of phone calls, monitors communications, and analyzes people’s thoughts through data mining of Google searches and other online activity” wrote Mr. Bamford recently in the New York Review of Books. 

With a secret yearly budget estimated at now $10 billion, the NSA “is a huge agency, very, very large, about three times the size of the CIA,” said Mr. Bamford.

A wrinkle to this is that much of the NSA’s budget ­some 70 percent of it, according to the non-partisan group MapLight­ goes to private defense contractors that work for the NSA. MapLight (www.maplight.org ) has analyzed the July 24th vote in the House on the basis of political contributions to members of Congress and found “representatives voting to continue the NSA’s dragnet surveillance programs received, on average, 122 percent more money from defense interests” than those who voted against it.

Brian Beedenbender, district director for Congressman Bishop, said that Bishop voted against the bill because it “would have suspended data collection from places like Yemen and Afghanistan and other countries known to harbor anti-American and terrorist elements.”  The vote of Bishop, of Southampton, was “in the interests of national security.”

Congressman Israel, of Huntington, although saying he favors “an open debate and review of our policies,” stresses that the NSA “system worked” in averting terrorist plots.

Congressman King, of Seaford, calls the NSA surveillance program “absolutely essential” and says Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who broke the Snowden story at The Guardian, should be prosecuted for reporting on leaks. King would thus challenge the Constitution’s First Amendment providing for freedom of our press.

Forty years ago another Long Island congressman, Otis G. Pike of Riverhead, investigated the U.S. intelligence establishment as chairman of a special House committee. It was a frustrating experience. The House refused to allow his committee’s report to be released. The report, detailing all sorts of outrageous activities by the U.S. government, finally did get out­ The Village Voice got hold of a copy from CBS journalist Daniel Schorr. But the intelligence empire held sway. Soon after, Pike after 18 years left the House rather disgusted. Four decades later, will things be different?

Maybe.

The Times, in a front page story last month, reported on the “movement” in Congress “to crack down” on the NSA’s widespread surveillance and said “what began on the political fringes...has built a momentum that even critics say may be unstoppable.”