Town supervisor meets with voting league

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Town of Hempstead Supervisor Anthony Santino met with representatives of the League of Women Voters of Nassau County and addressed their questions and concerns about diverse issues during a Dec. 1 forum at Hempstead Town Hall.

Among the planned or completed projects that Santino discussed and updated attendees on were:

•A $230 million coastal protection project being undertaken by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to help reduce damage during major storms such as Hurricane Sandy. In August, the corps broke ground on the project, which will “harden” the Long Beach barrier island shoreline, from the East Rockaway to the Jones Beach inlets. "Hempstead Town is excited to be the location where the Long Beach Island shore protection project will kick off," Santino said in a release at the time. "Our municipality was the first to authorize the plan in 2013, and we are eager to have this coastal hardening project move forward."

•Reopening of the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Uniondale. The project is now under way. Construction on the $260 million project is expected to wind down in the spring. Billy Joel will play the first concert there in April.

•Construction of a new $130 million Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center near the Nassau Coliseum, which the Town Board approved in August.

•A recent donation of 50 automated external defibrillators, or AEDs, to the town by Mercy Medical Center in Rockville Centre for use at parks, beaches and pools, at no cost to taxpayers.

•Replacement of traditional town streetlights with energy-efficient light-emitting diode, or LED, lights. “Hempstead Town taxpayers will be the direct beneficiaries of a major project that is replacing 50,000 high-pressure sodium streetlight elements with energy-efficient and cost-effective LED units,” Santino said in a release in August. “The conversion of these lamps will result in a net $43 million savings over the next 20 years.”

• Recent town legislation requiring banks to put up security deposits when they foreclose on homes to ensure that those properties are maintained over the long term.

Santino next opened the floor to questions. Paula Blum, who serves on the East Nassau LWV Board of Directors and is vice president of the Nassau County LWV, raised concerns about water quality. “We have a water crisis on Long Island,” Blum said, “and one of the problems is that no one is really minding the store. There is no agency, entity or whatever that really has the ability to do much about this.”

Blum represented the LWV along with Rachel Krinsky, who is president of the Central Nassau LWV; Nancy Rosenthal, who is president of the Southwest Nassau LWV; and Barbara Epstein, who is redistricting co-chairwoman of the Nassau LWV.

Blum said that two-thirds of local waters are polluted. She also said she’s part of a group called Water for Long Island, which works with government and other entities to advocate for clean drinking water and effective protections for groundwater.

Santino said the town and Nassau County spend a great deal of money to make sure the water is safe and clean, and answered another attendee who wondered about the town’s interest level in protecting local water supplies.

“We would obviously be interested in being involved to make sure there’s a coordinated effort in this regard,” Santino said, “because obviously water is one thing you can’t do without. It’s a vital commodity that you have to have, and obviously even if it’s something that doesn’t affect us today, we have to do the right thing for generations to come.”

Another issue raised was a proposed outfall pipe from the South Shore Water Reclamation Facility (formerly known as the Bay Park Sewage Treatment Plant) to the Atlantic Ocean to treat effluent — a topic that has been heavily discussed for years.

Santino said that he’s “always been an advocate” of building an outfall pipe. He also addressed recent news that the County Legislature’s Rules Committee approved a contract with a New York City-based engineering firm to review and inspect a 110-year-old water pipe that runs underneath Sunrise Highway as a possible conduit to transfer waste to the Cedar Creek Sewage Treatment Plant in Wantagh, where it would sent roughly three miles into the Atlantic Ocean through an already-existing outfall pipe.

“To me, it just doesn’t make any sense,” Santino said of the plan. “The federal government and the state need to just bite the bullet and come up with the $800 million, $900 million or whatever it is, and let’s build that pipe right there from Bay Park” into the ocean.

One woman voiced her displeasure over road conditions in Hempstead. Santino explained that the town maintains roughly 1,200 miles of roads, and it costs about $1 million per mile to repair them, so the town has a priority-based system to decide which roads are redone and which are not.