By:Carrie James
Proposed legislation comes after neighboring residents fight for preservation
Along Carman Avenue in Salisbury sits approximately 30 acres of mostly untouched open space filled with luscious vegetation, wildlife and a little bit of controversy.
Known as the Salisbury Storm Recharge Basin (Sump 51), a large portion of this land was recently put up for sale by the office of the Nassau County executive. This sparked residents neighboring the basin to call for its preservation from any sort of development.
"I was made aware that the land was for sale recently and had been up for sale three or four years ago also," said Lorri Bauer, who along with neighbor Joy MacLeod led a campaign to preserve the land backing her property. "We fought it then and it seemed to quiet down. When we heard about [the sale] this time, we called [Legis.] Dennis Dunne, asked him about it and got fired up when we heard the possibility of 100 homes coming in. We handed out about 700 fliers and went to the Legislature to express our opposition to it."
Now, a little more than a month since Bauer and MacLeod first visited the county Legislature, legislators Dunne (R-Levittown) and Norma Gonsalves, along with seven others, have introduced a bill that would permanently preserve the storm basin as open space. The bill went before the planning committee on Monday and will be discussed again in two weeks.
"We're hoping that [the legislation] will prevent the sale of the property and all development of the property," Dunne said. "It's a real precious part of Nassau County and I'm going to fight to keep it that way."
The county executive, Tom Gulotta, has also said he will not sell the property if the community doesn't want it developed.
The legislation would, in effect, preserve the land from being sold to a private company for development as residential, which is its current zoning, or commercial. The neighbors are still concerned, however, that the land could be used for public use, such as a government building or soccer fields, said Bauer, who has a petition with about 700 signatures that show the whole community is opposed to any development.
"As lay people, we see a lot of loopholes in the proposed legislation," Bauer said. "We have a lot of rarer birds and other possible species. Soccer fields will only bring in more people and disturb [the environment]. This is an issue. As a community, nobody wants anything going back there. We want to leave it as is and protect it."
The storm basin, which is considered part of the Hempstead Plains -- the only naturally occurring prairie east of the Alleghenies -- contains a large variety of native vegetation, Gonsalves said, including bird-foot violets, bush clover, blue-toad flax and sand-joint weed. She agrees the land should be untouched, but thinks it could be used for supervised class trips to observe the vegetation and wildlife.
"I'd really like to see this become an educational resource because of what's here," she said. "If we didn't do it, it would be a shame."
Neighbors don't object to supervised trips, Bauer said, but added that homeowners purchased there because they knew the land would be locked and want to keep it as untouched as possible.
"If hiking/walking is allowed, then the gates must be kept open," Bauer said. "This is unacceptable to the homeowners. We have beautiful town and county public parks for that purpose. We do not want more cars parked on our streets, from people visiting the recharge basin. People hiking through will also disturb much of the wildlife in the basin."
Legislators met Monday to discuss the legislation and made some changes that made the bill more protective of the land, but Bauer said she felt the Legislature would need to go further during the next planning meeting in a couple weeks.
Other county legislators have proposed creating legislation that would protect all remaining storm basins in Nassau from development, Dunne said. This would help preserve the little open space left in the county, Bauer added.
"We need to preserve this," she said. "While other counties have legislation to make sure their open space is protected, Nassau County has been selling it all away."
Gonsalves and other legislators also said they feel it is important to create some sort of plan to manage and preserve the open space left in Nassau County.
"Since we have such a small portion of the Hempstead Plains land left, we have to develop a Hempstead Plains management plan," she said. "It would also behoove us to approach the state about preserving this land as a piece of history."
