Valley Stream cleaning up park’s trash

Years after a mechanism was installed to collect debris from the county’s storm-water drainage system on the north side of Hendrickson Park, village officials are stepping up maintenance of the device, which they said requires constant upkeep.

“It’s the best it’s been — and it’s still not right, but we’re on it,” Mayor Ed Fare said.

In 2009 the village took advantage of a Nassau County grant program to install a barrier that allows rainwater to flow through while preventing debris from draining into Hendrickson Park Lake. The installation was part of the second phase of the county’s Environmental Bond Act, according to Village Treasurer Michael Fox, which allocated Valley Stream $1.87 million with the aim of cleaning up the entire waterway, which runs from the north end of the village to Jamaica Bay.

Now, dirt, sand and debris from the storm-water system collects at the mouth of the waterway, at Hendrickson Avenue, which necessitates periodic maintenance.

“We clean it out once a week,” Fare explained. “Typically on Thursdays and Fridays, all summer long, we have a crew down there.”

Residents who frequent Hendrickson Park have complained about trash piling up at the park’s north entrance, but village officials say that the presence of trash indicates that the device is doing its job. “Its whole job is to trap it,” Fare said. “It’s something that we’re going to constantly have to keep up with.”

Brian Howley, the village’s electrical and buildings supervisor, said that he has contacted the state Department of Environmental Conservation to request special permits needed to maintain the area. “There’s a whole cinderblock floor under there,” Howley said of the drainage area under Hendrickson Avenue. “There’s three feet of sand there on top of it, which there’s not supposed to be any.”

If the sand were classified by the DEC as hazardous waste, he said, the removal process would be costly and require additional permits. Currently, the village is authorized only to perform basic maintenance of the area, and he said the sand removal would require more specialized machinery.

According to Howley, the trash is mostly plastic bottles and aluminum cans. However, he noted that syringes were also recently recovered at the site. “We did find syringes, but they didn’t have any needles in them,” he said, adding that they were disposed of separately, treated as hazardous waste by the county health department.

“The Department of Health responded to a complaint of medical waste,” department spokeswoman MaryEllen Laurain wrote in an email to the Herald. “We inspected and removed two syringes.” She added that the department responds to any improper disposal of regulated medical waste.

Resident Mary Diodato said she was concerned about what could happen if the debris weren’t cleaned up. “It’s a breeding ground for the Zika virus,” she said.

Diodato said she walks in the park every night, and doesn’t believe the village is doing enough to keep the area clean. “There’s no way that amount of water bottles can collect there in a week,” she said, and added that the trash doesn’t look recent. “These water bottles look like they’ve been there for five years.”

“It’s such a shame,” Diodato said. “It’s such a nice park.”