A new bill authored by Rep. Lee Zeldin that would put the brakes on the sale of Plum Island — at least temporarily — will be passed by the House Homeland Security Committee this week, the congressman announced at a press conference in Riverhead this morning.
“This is a critical next step in the effort to preserve this precious resource,” Zeldin said a press conference at Reeves Beach in Riverhead, on a bluff overlooking the Long Island Sound.
The new measure is a markup of a bill Zeldin introduced last April that would have repealed a 2008 law requiring the federal government to sell the 840-acre island to the highest bidder.
“In 2008, they viewed this as no more than a chunk of real estate,” said John Turner, a spokesperson for the Preserve Plum Island Coalition, who attended the press conference along with representatives of Save the Sound and Citizens Climate Lobby and local elected officials.
The 2015 version of his bill did not gather support because it didn’t answer the question, “What next?” according to the freshman Republican legislator.
He said this morning he has bipartisan support for the amended bill, which, instead of appealing the 2008 law outright, stops any effort to sell the island while a study of alternative uses is completed and assessed by the U.S. comptroller. The comptroller would be required to fully assess the current study’s methodologies and findings and to provide a report of that assessment within six months of the completion of the study, which is now underway and due in June.
If the comptroller finds the study inadequate regarding exploration of possible alternatives — including transfer to another federal agency, a state or local government, a nonprofit organization (or some combination thereof) for the purpose of education, research, or conservation — the governmental accountability office, which the comptroller heads, is required to conduct its own study and report to Congress within a year.
Assessment and follow-up by the comptroller provides assurance for local residents concerned that the Department of Homeland Security, which operates the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, and is conducting the study with the federal Environmental Protection Agency, will take a hard look at all alternative uses for the island, including preservation.
Meanwhile, current efforts to sell the island would stop, he said. Zeldin held aloft as an example of those efforts a printed email offering tours of the property to prospective buyers interested in a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
“The real estate brokers are serious— the GSA is doing its job,” he said.
“When Congress voted to sell the island, it was very disturbing to Southold Town,” said Suffolk County Legislator Al Krupski, who was a Southold Town councilman in 2008, when the vote took place. Krupski introduced a zoning code change adopted by the Southold Town Board in 2013 that greatly restricts development on the island outside of a research district, where the code sets a minimum lot size of 125 acres — ensuring that a substantial portion of the island can’t be developed. About 700 of the island’s 840 acres would be a preserve.
Zeldin said Southold’s zoning action was crucial and thanked town officials for “taking the lead in writing the next chapter” of Plum Island’s history, which has been in federal ownership since 1899.
Southold Supervisor Scott Russell recalled that when he heard Congress wanted to sell the island, “I thought, ‘Who would be crazy enough to buy Plum Island?’ It was around that time I got a call from Donald Trump’s representative.” Trump was interested in developing a resort and golf course there, Russell said.
“Zoning is the first line of defense, but definitely not the last line,” Russell said.
The restrictive new code definitely hampered efforts to sell the island, Zeldin said.
The federal government is looking to sell the island because it is building a more modern, more secure Biosafety Level 4 facility in Manhattan, Kansas and plans to wind down operations at the Plum Island Animal Disease Research Center. The National Bio- and Agro-Defense Facility in Kansas is scheduled to be fully operational in December 2022.
The Plum Island facility was established in 1954 to research animal diseases and has historically conducted much of the research that would be conducted at the NBAF as concerns agriculture, according to the Department of Homeland Security, which in 2003 took ownership and operation of the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, a BSL-3 facility. A new state-of-the-art, BSL-4 facility was needed to fill an “infrastructure gap” to combat bio- and agro-terrorism in the United States.
“Biosafety level” refers to the level of the biocontainment precautions required to isolate dangerous biological agents in an enclosed laboratory facility. More stringent biocontainment precautions are needed to work with agents known or believed to be more dangerous to the external environment.
The island was once the site of Fort Terry, which served as an anti-submarine base during World War II. The base was deactivated after the war. The U.S. Department of Agriculture established the animal disease research center and operated it from 1954 until it was taken over by the Department of Homeland Security in 2003.
Local residents generally would like to see Plum Island’s current mission — which has been a source of employment for decades — continue as is, see it replaced with another research facility or see it preserved in its entirety as a park.
The island, located about a mile off the tip of Orient Point, is situated where the Peconic Bay meets the Long Island Sound. Both have been designated by the federal government as estuaries of national significance under the National Estuary program. The Federal Government has invested hundreds of millions of dollars over the last two decades on conservation efforts to benefit the health of both estuaries, Zeldin’s bill notes.
The island itself is about 90 percent undeveloped and holds significant ecological and scenic sites, according to the Coalition to Preserve Plum Island. It is home to — or a vital stopover for — more than 200 species of birds, some of them listed as threatened or endangered, as well as Long Island’s largest seal colony.
Every town supervisor and village mayor on the East End, the County Legislature, both U.S. senators from New York and the Long Island delegation in the House of Representatives support repeal of the 2008 law mandating the sale of the island to the highest bidder.
“This is our top priority in 2016 and we can get it done in 2016,” Zeldin said.
