Suozzi delivers government funding for L.I. Sound

U.S. Rep. Tom Suozzi gave residents an Earth Day present. At a press conference on Friday, he promised $33 million in federal funding for environmental projects. He was joined by public officials and representatives from local environmental groups at Sea Cliff Municipal Beach to deliver the welcome news. Included amongst them were Sea Cliff Mayor Elena Villafane and Bruce Kenney, the village’s administrator, as well as Karen Papersergiou, Carol diPaolo, Michelle Lapinel McAllister and Martha Braun, members of the Coalition to Save Hempstead Harbor, a nonprofit committed to identifying and eliminating threats to the environment in and around the harbor.

Suozzi said environmental conservation is important to him, as it should be to all Long Islanders. It has been a key goal of his work in Congress for years.

“The Sound is a very big part of all of our lives,” Suozzi said. “I always talk about how Long Island Sound is our national park, and that’s how we should think about it. It’s this great natural resource that really uplifts our lives just by being around it.”

The majority of the funds, roughly $31 million, is targeted to restore Long Island Sound. Adrienne Esposito, executive director of Citizens Campaign for the Environment, accepted the check from Suozzi. It wasn’t easy, she said, to raise the federal funds.

“This does not happen by chance,” Esposito said. “This is a lot of hard work, a lot of organizing. We would get up at two in the morning, we would travel down together by bus to go to Congress. Why? When we improve the quality of Long Island Sound, we improve our homes.”

Suozzi also announced that $300,000 of the money would be going to shellfish seeding in Hempstead, Oyster Bay and Huntington Harbors. This project will seek to seed 10 million clams across the three harbors, in the hope that the clams will both expand their population and filter the water in the areas.

Accepting the money were representatives from the Hempstead Harbor Protection Committee, a watershed based municipal coalition. The committee is comprised of representatives from eight Long Island cities, towns and villages, including Sea Cliff. It was founded in 1995, partly in response to the creation of the Coalition to Save Hempstead Harbor, as a mechanism to facilitate a more organized government approach to addressing harbor-related issues.

Carol DiPaolo, programs director and water monitoring-coordinator for the coalition, spoke to the crowd about the importance of the funding for Hempstead Harbor and the Sound in general.

“With this project, with this kind of funding, it will increase habitat, it will sustain this incredible resource, which is such an economic driver for the entire region,” DiPaolo explained. “So, it’s not just important to Hempstead Harbor, and the other North Shore bays, but the entire region.”

Speaking several days after the event, Villafane and Kennedy reiterated the importance of this and other initiatives to improve water quality and provide environmental protections to the Sound. Villafane spoke of how positive Suozzi’s work for the environment has been for the area.

“We were very happy to have Congressman Suozzi there because he really does a lot of good work for the environment,” Villafane said. “This does benefit Sea Cliff, since anything that benefits the harbor benefits my residents.”

Kennedy recalled how drastic local waters were during the last several decades and said that the Sound has come back from the dead.

“I had a buddy who, when we were in our twenties, used to keep his boat in Hempstead Harbor, since the water was so polluted barnacles wouldn’t grow on it,” Kennedy recalled. “It was taken from, you know, basically a dead body of water, and brought back to life. And we’re seeing the benefits to our wildlife, with even whales and dolphins coming back to the harbor.”