FW: Manoj Bhargava now owns the former Levytown site

http://www.newsday.com/long-island/suffolk/suffolk-closes-on-land-sale-for-rail-hub-1.5362461

Suffolk closes on land sale for rail hub

Originally published: May 29, 2013 2:33 PM
Updated: May 29, 2013 2:53 PM
By RICK BRAND  rick.brand@newsday.com

Photo credit: Joseph D. Sullivan | Brookhaven Railroad Terminal in Yaphank, which opened in September 2011, has two diesel trains, and one railcar alone can carry four truckloads’ worth of freight. (June 22, 2012)

Suffolk County has closed on the $19.4 million sale of 230 surplus acres in Yaphank for a rail hub even though a lawsuit seeking to block the deal is pending in State Supreme Court.

The county filed the sale to Oakland Transportation Holdings LLC on May 20 after several delays since late last year. The deal closed less than two weeks after county Comptroller Joseph Sawicki cited the delayed sale as part of the reason the county ended 2012 with a deficit of $155.5 million, which was higher than expected.

"We gave it several months, but we were at a point if we waited much longer we would put the deal into jeopardy," said Deputy County Executive Jon Schneider. The deal was approved by the county Legislature last summer and will put the property back on the tax rolls, generating $3.1 million in new revenue annually, Schneider said. Much of the money will go to the South County andLongwood School Districts.

But Reggie Seltzer, the attorney representing the four local residents seeking to block the sale, sale the county's action showed "total disrespect for the court and the judge hearing the case." The case is pending before Justice Martin Smith in Riverhead.

County Attorney Dennis Brown said there was nothing to prevent the county from moving ahead because the plaintiffs never sought a temporary stay. Brown said the county is "very confident" it complied with county and state law.

In their suit filed last September, the Yaphank residents claimed the county did not undergo a public bidding process to get the highest price for the land. They said the rail hub would jam local roads and threaten the Carmans River waters, and that the buyers have failed to disclose their plans for the tract.

The hub started in 2011 with 30 acres and expanded to another 88 acres where construction has begun on a 60,000 square foot warehouse to store building products for Home Depot. Officials say the hub so far has brought 1,400 rail cars carrying materials including flour, building supplies, stone aggregate for roadwork, biodiesel fuel and bentonite used for landfill liners, removing the equivalent of 5,600 tractor trailer trucks from the highways.

Daniel Miller, chief executive of Oakland Transportation Holdings, said, "I'm pleased to have completed the land purchase with Suffolk County and we look forward to further development of the railroad."

 

 

 

 

A Brief Hisatory of Squassux Landing

A Brief History of Squassux Landing
© Marty VanLith, Brookhaven Village Association Historian, and Chair of the Fire Place History Club
This history was originally published in the Brookhaven Village Association Spring 2013 Newsletter.  Used by permission.
For more on Squassux Landing, visit http://brookhavensouthhaven.org/history/HNDistrictsInventoryForm.aspx?InventoryCode=Br16

Perhaps the most beautiful place on all of Long Island is Squassux Landing, the Brookhaven Village Association’s 13-acre site along the longest and most ecologically productive river on Long Island, the Carmans River. Surrounded by the 2,600-acre Wertheim National Wildlife Refuge, it has been owned and operated by the BVA for the enjoyment of the community since 1945.

The history of Squassux Landing goes back thousands of years to a time when the Delaware Algonquins moved northward following the retreating glacier. The Carmans River is unique among all the rivers on Long Island in that it starts in the middle of the island and flows through the Ronkonkoma Moraine. This is because it was a tunnel valley created while the glacier was still here and the ice melt ran under the glacier.

The name “Squassux” is said to originate from an Indian potter named Wessquassucks, who lived here when the first Anglo settlers arrived in the late 1600s. Squassux Landing and all the land that includes today’s South Haven, Brookhaven and Bellport was purchased from the Unkechaugs in 1664. 

As the first bit of high ground encountered when entering the Carmans River from the Great South Bay, Squassux Landing has been a port of entry for both Indians and Anglo settlers for centuries. The local band of the Long Island Algonquins were known as Unkechaugs, their main village located along Unkechaug Creek just east of Smith’s Point. Archeological digs indicate human habitation along Carmans River for thousands of years.

The Brookhaven/South Haven area was originally settled by residents of Setauket and known as Fire Place. It is said that this was the Indian name because fires were made near the kettle hole along Beaver Dam Road to signal a gathering for the surrounding villages for cultural events. The settlement continued using the name Fire Place until 1871.

Initially the main interest of the Setauket settlement in purchasing land along the south shore was its meadowlands and salt hay. They didn’t have to clear natural meadowland for their cattle and other livestock, and they used the salt hay for insulation as well as bedding and feed. Fire Place Road, remnants of which are now Old Town Road, led directly from Setauket to Squassux Landing and the meadows.

Many also came from Setauket for clamming, oystering, eeling, fishing and whaling. Squassux Landing was a protected area near the bay, a perfect place to launch their boats.

In 1780, Samuel Carman Sr. bought the mills along the lower Carmans River and later opened a store, tavern and Inn. Over the course of the next century the Carman family became quite wealthy and influential, and, by the mid-1800s, owned much of the land on the west side of Carmans River. Sam Carman Jr. had 12 children; in the 1840s, one of them, Joseph Henry, was given about 30-acres that included Squassux Landing.

Throughout most of the first 250-years of settlement, people who lived in Fire Place were farmers and fishermen and Squassux Landing was one of few places available to launch and moor a boat. There weren’t many residents and Joseph Carman didn’t mind people using his property along the river. Joseph Carman died in 1894 and passed the land to his two sons, who also let local residents use the property for their boats.

With the arrival of the railroad in 1880 came major changes in the hamlet and at Squassux Landing. Beginning around the turn of the century many residents built extensions to convert their homes to boarding houses, and ferries began to run from the end of Beaver Dam Road to Fire Island.

In 1907, the Carman estate, including Squassux Landing, was sold to Carman Lush, who had retired there from Hempstead. He was not as accommodating to the community as the Carman family had been. James Post, whose family was here since before the Revolution and who was vice president of the Brookhaven Village Association at the time, quietly bought the 13-acre Squassux Landing site from Mr. Lush and let the community use it freely again.

James Post and his wife Elizabeth had three children – Jessie Wells Post, Helen Post Hubert and Elisabeth Post Morrow. After their father’s death, they officially donated Squassux Landing to the BVA on April 23, 1945.

The BVA board created a Squassux Committee composed of several directors, chief among them Bob Lyons Jr, who developed and ran the landing until 1954, when they hired William Engelhardt Sr. as their first dockmaster.

From about 1900 to WWII, ferries and boaters leaving from Squassux Landing had a place to go on Fire Island, the Smith Point House located next to the Coast Guard Station. It was a hotel, restaurant and bar, which had a nice dock and boardwalk to the ocean. It washed away in the Hurricane of ’38, then was rebuilt but burned down shortly afterward.

After WWII another beach house and hotel, called Paradise Beach, opened about a quarter mile west of the former Smith Point House, which lasted until about 1958. In 1959, then BVA president Bob Starke resigned to form a separate corporation to sell stocks and bonds to buy land on Fire Island for Brookhaven hamlet residents, which became the Fire Place Beach Club. This 5-acre parcel was located just west of Bellport’s Old Inlet Club and most Squassux boaters were members.

In 1964, legislation creating Fire Island National Seashore was enacted and both the Old Inlet and Fire Place Beach Club properties were condemned and purchased by FINS. However, two 5-year lease -back agreements were signed and the Fire Place Beach Club remained open until 1974. FINS then decided that they would demolish the Fire Place Club but leave the Old Inlet Club dock, boardwalk and buildings for public use until nature claimed more than 50% of it, at which time it would become part of the Otis Pike Wilderness Area. That event occurred last year on October 29, with Hurricane Sandy.

This will be the first boating season since the 1950s where Squassux boaters will again be challenged to find a way over to the ocean beach, but I’m sure they’ll figure it out.

Marty Van Lith
BVA Historian

Pictures from Brookhaven's Memorial Day Parade and Ceremony

In the 45 years we’ve gone to the Memorial Day Parade and Ceremony in Brookhaven Hamlet, little has changed.  In looking back over photographs we’ve taken, it is often hard to distinguish them year-to-year, except the some people get noticeably older or no longer appear, some new facing gradually fill in, and plaques for new wars are placed in the small hamlet Memorial Park.  Yet each year is still meaningful, as Brookhaven in the tradition of small towns across the country, pauses to honor and remember those men and women who have sacrificed themselves for their country.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aerial photos of New Inlet

From: Martin VanLith [mailto:vanlith@optonline.net]
Sent: Saturday, April 13, 2013 11:40 AM
Subject: Aerial photos of New Inlet

 

Dear All,

 

Tuesday morning I left MacArthur Airport on a Southwest Airline flight headed for North Carolina, flight has a traditional flight path of turning south over Carmans River. I was waiting by the window with my camera:  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here's the above picture with some text: 

 

 

Welcome to Fire Place, four rivers run through it:

 

 

  --Marty

'Tis Spring, the bird is on the wing! Kevin of River Rd., Brookhaven NY

About Kevin of River Rd., Brookhaven, NY

 

Marty Van Lith writes:

 

He's been here for the past two years, don't know who dumped him.  He stops in once a day to visit everyone on the street, never turns down an offer of food. He lets out a blast every now and then that rattles the windows.

 

--Marty

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FW: New York Times: Breach Through Fire Island Also Divides Opinions

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/06/nyregion/at-fire-island-officials-weigh-filling-a-breach.html?_r=0

Breach Through Fire Island Also Divides Opinions

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Christopher Soller, superintendent of Fire Island National Seashore, left, and Ranger Steve Olijnyk walking on Fire Island near Old Inlet, now 856 feet wide.

By LISA W. FODERARO

Published: April 5, 2013

 

FIRE ISLAND, N.Y. — If on some stretches of this barrier island the scars of Hurricane Sandy are fading, at a spot called Old Inlet, a physical reminder of the storm remains: a channel, now 856 feet wide, through which seawater pours into the Great South Bay. The breach, in a federal wilderness area at the eastern end of the island, has already helped clean the much-compromised bay.

 

Now the question being debated by local residents, scientists, environmentalists and government officials is what to do about it: leave the gap as it is for the time being and see what happens, or close it up?

Among those calling for its immediate closing are residents in communities like Babylon and Lindenhurst on Long Island’s South Shore, who say that since Fire Island was breached they have faced increased flooding. Their pleas are being echoed by some elected officials, from village mayors to Senator Charles E. Schumer.

On the other side are environmental groups and other residents who see the introduction of ocean water as an opportunity to remedy decades of degradation of the Great South Bay from storm water runoff, lawn chemicals and septic leaks.

Channels have opened before in the length of this 32-mile-long island. As its name implies, Old Inlet, which is in the Fire Island High Dune Wilderness about a mile and half west of Smith Point, has provided a channel to the sea in the past. According to Charles Flagg, a marine scientist, the area was open for 60 years, until sometime in the 1820s.

“Inlets close on their own, but the timing is uncertain,” said Dr. Flagg, a research professor at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University.

The National Park Service, the Army Corps of Engineers and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation will ultimately decide the breach’s fate, having already followed a mandate not to take any action for 60 days in wilderness areas. Hurricane Sandy carved another channel through Fire Island at Smith Point County Park, and the Corps of Engineers closed that in the fall.

In mid-March, the Department of Environmental Conservation directed the Army corps to take the initial steps to prepare for filling the Old Inlet breach. The process involves dredging sand and essentially pouring it in the gap; a low steel wall may be required under the sand initially to contain the water. “This will allow expedited closure of the breach in the event that the breach does not close naturally or if the Breach Contingency Team determines closure to be necessary,” the agency said in a statement. In its decision, the agency said, the potential for improved water quality will be weighed, as will any impact on communities; it said the breach had not caused additional flooding on Long Island. Any decision, it said, will be “based on science.”

But some residents in the Long Island villages of Babylon and Lindenhurst, more than 20 miles away from the breach, say they have noticed the bay creeping up on their streets more frequently since Hurricane Sandy.

“I’ve never seen this much flooding,” said Pat White, a lifelong resident of Lindenhurst. “Now it’s scary living on the water.”

Scientists attribute increased flooding to a series of storms and unusually high tides that have affected the entire Eastern Seaboard this winter. But some residents insist that the Old Inlet breach must be partly to blame.

“It’s the common-sense experience of people looking out their windows,” said Richard Harty, a retired construction electrician in Babylon. “We’ve lived in our house 35 years on a canal off the Great South Bay. At least four times since Sandy, we’ve had heavy street flooding — even when the sun is shining.”

Dr. Flagg said he was neutral on the issue of whether the gap should be closed. “The major benefits of leaving it open are clearly water quality,” he said. “There are very few fish in the Great South Bay in general except at the inlets, and the sea grasses vanished from the eastern Great South Bay when we first moved here 25 years ago.”

“The water is already cleaner,” he continued. “It looks positively tropical. It’s blue.”

Christopher Soller, superintendent of the Fire Island National Seashore, which is managed by the National Park Service, agreed that “there is some flushing of the bay that is occurring.” But the ocean water also has a potential down side. “Will it change the nature of the bay,” he asked, “by bringing in new predators like starfish? There are trade-offs in all of this.”

Kevin McAllister, president of the Peconic Baykeeper, which is part of the national Waterkeeper Alliance, is urging officials to take advantage of the hurricane’s gift. “To close that flush off would be a colossal mistake,” he said. “Is Senator Schumer ready to spend billions of dollars on storm water infrastructure and septic remediation as opposed to leaving this open?”

Even Will Veitch, the mayor of the upscale village of Bellport, north of the inlet, has called for the breach to remain open, saying that he had seen no evidence of worsening flooding in recent months. “I think at this point it’s something that we should wait on,” he said.

But a wait-and-see approach poses its own challenges.

Joseph R. Vietri, director of the National Planning Center for Coastal and Storm Risk Management with the Army Corps of Engineers, said that as the breach had grown — it was just 276 feet wide a week after the storm — so too had the cost of plugging it. “What could have been done for a couple of million dollars is now approaching $20 million,” he said.

Environmental officials said that money might not have to be spent — there’s a chance that the breach will close on its own this summer.

 

 

 

Petetition (New Fire Island Inlet, now a.k.a. Fire Place Inlet)

Quoted from the link below–

 "The new inlet at Otis Pike Wilderness Area has demonstrated absolutely no effect on increasing tidal ranges or flooding anywhere on the bay. At the same time it appears to be clearing out the highly polluted water from the bay, giving the hope that we might avoid future algal blooms and give the bay fauna a chance to recover. Closing the inlet has been estimated to cost between $6 million and $15 million, and would likely have to be repeated in the future as a result of increasingly intense winter storms. Closing the inlet is a decision based on fear, not facts; it is expensive, harmful to the environment and will not mitigate flooding."

Hamlet Reporter

 

From: Justin Flagg [mailto:flaggjn@aol.com]
Sent: Sunday, March 17, 2013 10:19 AM
Subject: Petition

LINK - http://www.change.org/petitions/do-not-close-the-breach-at-old-inlet

TO: 

Sen. Charles Schumer, NY
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, NY
Rep. Tim Bishop, NY-01
Steven Bellone, Suffolk County Executive
Rob Calarco, Suffolk County Legislator
Joseph Martens, Commissioner, NYS DEC
Wayne Horsley, Suffolk County Legislator 

As concerned citizens we urge you not to close the inlet at the Otis Pike Wilderness Area on Fire Island, commonly known as Old Inlet. We understand your concern over increased flooding as a result of numerous storms this winter; many of us have experienced flooding and sympathize with our friends and neighbors who are afraid for their property. But there is absolutely no evidence linking the inlet to increased tidal ranges or flooding anywhere on the bay. Flooding has been occurring up and down the East Coast, from Virginia to Massachusetts – it is a regional phenomenon, not a local one.

Estimates for closing the inlet have ranged between $6 million and $15 million. These costs would likely have to be incurred again in the future as increasingly intense winter storms cause the inlet to reopen in a weakened beach. Given that there is no evidence this expenditure would reduce flooding, we suggest that such a large amount of money would be better spent protecting the communities that are most at risk. In these cash-strapped times it is incumbent on you as our elected leaders to make responsible, evidence-based financial decisions.

Finally, while the inlet is having no effect on water levels, it does seem to be having a positive effect on the water quality in the bay. Increased water exchange with the ocean appears to be clearing out the highly polluted water of the Eastern bay, providing hope that we might avoid future algal blooms and give the bay fauna a chance to recover. A healthy bay leads to healthy people, as well as thriving tourist, fishing, shell-fishing and other industries.

Again, we urge you to make this decision based on facts, not fear. The inlet is a silver lining amidst the devastation of Sandy; please do not waste millions of taxpayer dollars by closing it.