SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: Suffolk County's Immigrant Predicament

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

Recent headlines tell the story of Suffolk County and migrants being bussed to New York City, largely from Texas and mainly Latinos, and the city pursuing help from other areas of the state.  

These include: 

“Counties Snub Adams Plan To Put Migrants in Suburbs”

“Suffolk seeks plan to block migrants”

“New York Mayor Sues Suffolk, Riverhead for Action on Immigration”

“New York City and Suburbs: A Rift Widens”

“Migrant Crisis Highlights Political Divide”

A majority of members of the Suffolk County Legislature last month voted to hire an attorney to explore what can be done to block migrants sent to the city from being placed in Suffolk. That followed the Town of Riverhead declaring a state of emergency mandating that “all hotels, motels, bed and breakfast facilities, inns, cottages, campgrounds or any other transient lodging units and/or facilities allowing short term rentals do not accept said migrants and/or asylum seekers for housing.”

The chair of the Suffolk County Human Rights Commission, Lynda Perdoma-Ayala, meanwhile, has called on “lawmakers and other community leaders to work together to seek fair and reasonable solutions that do not encourage bias and discrimination toward immigrants. We know that when members of our communities are marginalized, hate and violence can result.”

She said: “Providing for people in need can be complicated, but protecting the vulnerable is a U.S. obligation. Despite the words on the Statute of Liberty, our country in the past has failed to be a refuge. We are haunted by memories of failures such as the St. Louis, which in 1939 was not permitted to dock in the United States and had to return to Europe, sending a quarter of the nearly 1,000 passengers [trying to escape from Nazi Germany] to their death.” 

“The county Human Rights Commission reminds legislators and County Executive Steve Bellone that seeking asylum is protected by international law,” said Perdoma-Ayala. “Those who’ve fled countries seeking refuge from war and violence have the right to ask for protection. Asylum seekers are not illegal immigrants but humans seeking a better life no different than many of our ancestors did many years ago. Safety is a human right.”

But Suffolk County Legislator Nick Caracappa, the legislature’s Republican majority leader, says: “This is mismanagement at the top level of government. They made false promises to these individuals and encouraged them to keep coming here to America with Sanctuary Cities and other policies. We simply cannot provide for them.”

“We are having enough trouble providing for our own tax-paying citizens, our veterans and people that have mental health issues,” said Caracappa of Selden. “They’re walking the streets right now. We have people starving, families, children, begging on roadways. There are just simply not enough jobs, there’s not enough housing, there’s not enough food, there’s not enough of everything to sustain such an influx of people.”

“I’m not a racist for doing my due diligence,” said Caracappa. “They’re allowing people to cross the border, unvetted, unchecked, unhoused, unfed, unclothed, unvaccinated. It is quite frankly a huge mistake.” 

As to the city’s lawsuit against Suffolk and Riverhead, he said: “We should sue them right back.”

Most interestingly, amid the intense differences on immigration—reflective of the polarities on so many issues in the U.S. today—the front-page headline of the just-published edition of this area’s leading business publication, Long Island Business News, is: “Immigrant Island.”

Its extensive article begins: “Unless you’re a Native American, you or your ancestors came here from somewhere else, making most of us either immigrants or a product of immigrants. Today there are some 550,000 foreign-born people living on Long Island, making up about a fifth of the population. And now, a new comprehensive study from the Immigration Research Institute examines how immigrants impact the Island’s economy, highlighting their contributions, career choices, compensation and challenges, while exploring their importance in the growth and development of communities throughout Nassau and Suffolk counties.”

It says: “The report, titled ‘Immigrants in the Long Island Economy: Overcoming Hurdles, Yet Still Facing Barriers,’ offers a detailed vocational accounting of those who have come to this region from other nations.” The research by the non-profit, non-partisan organization was funded by the Long Island Community Foundation. 

Long Island Business News quotes the report’s co-author and director of the group, David Dyssegaard Kallick, saying: “Immigration has been such a controversial issue that we often miss the forest for the trees. Long Island has been a place where immigrants come and much of the time thrive and it’s also been good for the communities where they live.”

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: Will There Be A Public Vote To Increase Suffolk's Sales Tax

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

A referendum on the November election ballot approving a Suffolk charter law increasing the sales tax in the county by 1/8^th of a percent for “water quality improvement projects” may or may not happen after two public hearings last week. Mainly along party lines, a legislative majority of 10 voted not to close the hearings, a move which could have triggered the referendum.

It remains to be seen whether on July 25, when the legislature next meets, there is a majority vote for closure of the hearings and then enough time then to set the proposed referendum.

The sales tax jump would be predicated on a legislative declaration that Suffolk County “still relies on for disposal of wastewater more than 380,000 cesspools and systems which are not designed to actively treat wastewater” and “this has been widely recognized as a significant obstacle to sustainable economic growth.”

The objective is to deal with nitrogen pollution from cesspool use with a transition to conventional sewers and also a high-tech approach developed in recent decades called an Innovative/Alternative Septic Treatment System that can be installed at a single home or business. The raising of $4 billion over 50 years is sought. 

If there is a sales tax increase, the sales tax rate in Suffolk County would be the second highest in New York State exceeded only by that in New York City.

A companion resolution also under consideration at the hearings was the creation of one countywide sewer district to include a consolidation of the now 27 separate sewer districts. 

The problem cited by Kevin McCaffrey, a Lindenhurst Republican and presiding officer of the legislature, for not closing the hearings involved what he cited as a difference between state legislation authorizing the county’s actions and what the county would like. The state legislation, he said, provided mostly for financial support of Innovative/Alternative Septic Treatment Systems rather than conventional sewage systems.

Steven Flotterson, a Bay Shore Republican and deputy presiding officer of the legislature, said: “We want to maximize sewers” and a “much larger amount needs to go for sewers.”

Democratic legislators, meanwhile, pressed to close the hearings, 

As for conventional sewage systems, they are “not an answer to water quality,” testified Doug DiLillo of Huntington Station, urging the legislators to consider neighboring Nassau County, which is 85 percent sewered, and also “look to Nassau County in terms of quantity.” DiLillo noted his having served on panels in Suffolk for a Groundwater Protection Plan and a Pine Barrens Protection Plan. In Nassau, he said, saltwater intrusion has come to the underground water table, which it shares with Suffolk, because instead of treating wastewater and recharging it back into the ground, Nassau’s many sewage treatment plants send wastewater through outfall pipes into adjacent waterways depleting the “sole source” aquifer.

Regarding having a countywide sewer district, Maryann Johnston, long president of Affiliated Brookhaven Civic Organizations, testified that she was “concerned” about that considering Suffolk County’s record with its Southwest Sewer District. This was a $1 billion undertaking in which in the 1970s the county built a sewer system in its the southwest portion, a project mired in scandal. Also, she scored the Southwest district’s treatment plant, at Bergen Point in West Babylon, built to dump 30 million gallons of wastewater a day through an outfall pipe into the Atlantic Ocean, an amount in recent years raised to 40 million gallons.

Suffolk County is now 25 percent sewered. 

There were more than 40 speakers at the June 21^th back-to-back hearings in Riverhead.

Representatives of construction and labor interests stressed that sewers encourage economic activity, facilitate more residents and create jobs. Matthew Aracich, president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Nassau & Suffolk Counties, testified that sewers are important “if you want to get economic activity” and “are crucial to attract people.”

Elisa Kyle, a director for Northport-based Vision Long Island, said “sewers are critical for downtown revitalization.”

Among representatives of environmental organizations testifying, John Turner, senior 

conservation policy advocate for Islip-based Seatuck Environmental Association, called the initiative “incredibly significant.” He said that “the degradation of our water supply” is a critical problem and the legislators would “never cast a more important and consequential vote.”

Kevin McAllister, president of Sag Harbor-based Defend H20, said: “I think Suffolk County has constructed an excellent program. Good science has been applied.”

And Bob DeLuca, president of the Southold-based Group for the East End, said a referendum “simply places the decision in the hands of the electorate.”

Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone in his nearly 12 years in office—he departs at the end of the year because of term limits—has made sewering in Suffolk a signature goal of his administration. In 2015, Bellone, a West Babylon Democrat, appointed Peter Scully a deputy county executive, to be the county’s “sewer czar.”  Scully spoke extensively at both hearings saying the proposed program was the “culmination of a 10-year effort.” 

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: County Legislature Looks To Restrict Exotic Animals In Traveling Performances

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

It’s a bipartisan initiative on the Suffolk County Legislature to deal with an unusual issue for the county’s governing body—“A Local Law to Restrict the Use of Exotic Animals in Traveling Performances,” it’s titled. The measure has been on the legislative table for seven months. One of its co-sponsors, Jason Richberg, said last week that his hope is that it will pass “by the end of the summer.”

Richberg, a West Babylon Democrat and former chief of staff and also clerk of the legislature, says “we’re working on the right language—making sure that all the i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed.”

The Republican co-sponsor of the bill is Trish Bergin of East Islip, a reporter and anchor for News 12 Long Island, elected to the Islip Town Board on which she served for 12 years and then elected to the Suffolk Legislature. She says she is especially concerned about such animals brought to birthday parties. “It is important that children attending birthday parties are kept out of harm’s way,” she said. “These encounters with exotic animals that have large claws and large teeth, and may also carry diseases, pose a hazard to small children.”

The measure begins by declaring that “this legislature hereby finds and determines that for profit traveling performances, shows or zoos that involve exotic, wild and/or non-domesticated animals are detrimental to animal welfare due to the adverse effect of severe confinement, lack of free exercise, physical coercion and the restriction of natural behaviors.”

It adds “this legislature further finds and determines that exotic, wild and/or non-domesticated animals pose an additional risk to public safety because such animals have wild instincts and needs and have demonstrated unpredictability.” 

Further, these “traveling performances increase the possibility of escaping exotic, wild and/or non-domesticated animals which can wreak havoc, seriously harm workers and the public.” And, to justify the Suffolk Legislature approving the measure, it says that “county government has broad powers to enact legislation relating to the health, safety and welfare of citizens.”

At one of the public hearings on the bill, John DiLeonardo, president of Humane Long Island, a wildlife rehabilitator and a Riverhead resident, testified: “My organization has long opposed the abuse of wild and exotic animals and traveling acts” and has been involved in “convincing Suffolk County venues to stop allowing exhibitors to”—as an example—strapping “toothless monkeys to the backs of dogs.”

Moreover, said DiLeonardo, with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus now moving to shows “without animals, and more than 150 cities and counties across 37 states having restricted or banned the use of wild animals in circuses and traveling shows, it has never been clearer that the public has turned its back on cruel and dangerous animal acts.”

Also testifiying, Joann Cave of Nesconset, representing the Humane Society of the United States, told the Suffolk Legislature that the society is “thoroughly in support of this resolution. There has definitely been a growing public awareness about the miserable lives that are endured by animals that are used in traveling shows. The animals spend most of their time in extreme confinement, and they are deprived of everything natural to them.

Spurring the introduction of the measure has been Sloth Encounters, a business in Hauppauge that has people hold, feed and pet sloths—slow-moving tree-dwelling tropical animals—and, according to an article in Newsday, offers “home visits.” 

On its website, Sloth Encounters declares: “We are an animal loving company. We love all of our furry to scaly friends. From regular household pets to exotic animals.” It goes on: “We are New York’s Premier location for Sloth Education as well as all animals at our location. The only place anywhere on Long Island that literally puts you in direct contact with our sloths.”

It adds: “Many states have laws that specifically prohibit individuals from keeping certain exotic animals—including sloths—as pets in their households. New York is not one of those states. In New York….you’re only prohibited from owning wild animals. Specifically, it’s a crime to own, possess, or harbor ‘a wild animal or reptile capable of inflicting bodily harm upon a human being.’ A sloth is NOT a wild animal.”

Bonnie Klapper of Sag Harbor, a former assistant U.S. attorney and legal counsel and a board member of Humane Long Island, said in an interview last week: “The proposed law seeks to protect both humans and animals from zoonotic diseases and injury such as bites. Currently, these wild animal acts are both under-regulated and under-inspected. They move from place to place making inspection almost impossible. The last thing the world needs now is another pandemic resulting from the interaction between humans and wild animals.”

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: Legislators Vote To Hire Attorney To Block Migrants

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

 The Suffolk County Legislature at a special meeting last week passed a measure authorizing the county to hire an attorney to explore what can be done to block migrants bussed to New York City, mainly from Texas and predominantly Latino, from being placed in Suffolk. 

The vote Thursday was 11 to 6.

“Every day we receive hundreds of additional asylum seekers and we are out of space,” the city said in a statement last month. “New York City has done and will continue to do its part, but we need counties, cities, and towns across the state to do their part as well, especially when New York City is willing to pay for shelter, food, and more,” it said. “In most cases, we’re not even asking localities to help manage a quarter of one percent of the asylum seekers that have arrived in New York City.”

There are communities in the state accepting migrants from New York City. More, however, are not.

“Which counties are closing their doors to asylum seekers?” was the headline last month on the website City & State NY. The subhead: “More than 30 counties around the state have taken steps to block New York City from sending migrants to local hotels and shelters.” 

In Suffolk last month, the Town of Riverhead declared a state of emergency ordering that “all hotels, motels, bed and breakfast facilities, inns, cottages, campgrounds or any other transient lodging units and/or facilities allowing short term rentals do not accept said migrants and/or asylum seekers for housing.” As Newsday reported, “Riverhead Supervisor Yvette Agular contends an ‘influx’ of asylum-seekers would overwhelm schools and stretch town resources.” 

The difference between Suffolk and other areas in the state that are not accepting migrants from the city is that Suffolk has a very long anti-immigrant history—and in recent decades antagonism toward Latinos.   

Professor Christopher Verga who teaches Long Island history at Suffolk County Community College comments the situation today “is reminiscent of a not too-distance past” also involving “thousands of people escaping government instability, crippling poverty and pleading for asylum.” He speaks of “one historical group of migrants” blamed for, among other things, “taking jobs from U.S.-born locals,” and of “conspiracy theories that this migration influx was a plot to overthrow, to colonize the U.S.” 

In the 1920s, “Hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan enrolled membership of one out of seven Long Islanders,” said Verga. In addition to the KKK’s virulent racism, “the biggest issue on Long Island was immigration.” A major foe of the KKK here was the Catholic Church, and he notes an anti-KKK demonstration a century ago, in 1923 in Bay Shore, organized by the Holy Name Society of the Catholic Church bringing together 40,000 people.

“Who,” asks Verga, “was this despised group of migrants? Answer: the Italians, and one of those many feared migrants was my great-grandfather Frank Verga.”

“Italian heritage takes pride in family history, but these humbling experiences always seem omitted or left out of day-to-day discourse,” says Verga. “The same biases and anti-immigration sentiment of a century ago are playing out again for this next generation of migrants. Knowing your history is having a sense of awareness and empathy for others with similar historical and contemporary struggles. Building on this forgotten past should develop solidarity among Italians with the busloads of new asylum seekers.”

Indeed, except for its original Native American inhabitants, this is a country based on immigrants. All should feel empathy. 

When Latinos came in any numbers to Suffolk in the 1980s, there was controversy over the demands by members of the Suffolk Legislature that all county publications be in “English language only.” In the 1990s, migrants from Mexico came to Farmingville for work in the landscaping, construction and restaurant industries and faced great hostility. A nationally-aired documentary, titled “Farmingville,” was made about the conflict. A Suffolk legislator, the late Michael D’Andre, said at a legislative hearing that if his town of Smithtown was similarly “attacked” by Latino laborers “we’d be out with baseball bats.”

In 2008 Ecuadorian immigrant Marcelo Lucero was attacked in Patchogue by seven teens led by a 19-year-old sporting a Swastika tattoo who stabbed him to death. The group, it was revealed, had for some time, as The New York Times reported, prowled the streets of Suffolk “engaged in a regular and violent pastime hunting for Hispanics to attack.” 

In 2015 a lawsuit was brought by the organization LatinoJustice accusing the Suffolk County Police Department of widespread discrimination against Latinos. It included shakedowns of Latino motorists by a Suffolk Police sergeant, later jailed for it. The suit was settled and a variety of reforms instituted.  

 
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. 

Michael Pepa And Raymond Hubbs Receive Top Honors In MGA Senior Net Four-Ball

Pepa, Hubbs Capture 30th MGA Senior Net Four-Ball

CORTLANDT MANOR, N.Y. (May 9, 2023) —

Michael Pepa of Smithtown Landing Men’s Club and Raymond Hubbs of Kings Park Golf Association earned top honors Tuesday at Hollow Brook Golf Club, posting a net 7-under 64 to win the 30th MGA Senior Net Four-Ball by two shots.

Pepa and Hubbs bested a trio of tandems that tallied net rounds of 5-under 66. Past winners Ralph Lombardi and Richard Koshar of Neshanic Valley earned second place by way of the team age tiebreaker, while Ralph Scocozza of Somers National and David Vermilyea of the Links at Union Vale took third.

The Long Island duo played consistently, carding four net birdies on the opening nine before adding three more on the way in for their 7-under 64. They had no net bogeys on the card for the day. Their best stretch came between Nos. 9-14, as natural birdies - one for each player - on Nos. 9 and 14 bookended the span that also included net birdies - again,