To borrow from “Caesar’s Commentaries,” as with all ancient Gaul, our East End’s maritime legacy is divided into three parts. First there is the Atlantic Ocean, then our Peconic Estuary’s bays and creeks, and finally, the Long Island Sound. And so the Sound has just earned headlines again, this time about where to dump dredge 
spoils, and how to build bridge and tunnel systems from here to Connecticut (and back).
Dredging of waterways swirls with controversy, chiefly because it takes so long to get done as waterways clog. It has become a pattern no matter who – the county, the state, or the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers – performs the dredging. Add to that the use of the material dredged to enlarge beaches and waterfront, with competition among property owners.
Nowadays, everyone wants dredging, and then everyone speaks up with anxiety about the dredge spoils. It’s not unlike the joy of catching a blue fish, followed by the drudgery of removing the hook. Dredge spoils, and their increasingly toxic composition, are more recently seen to pose a serious threat, not only for the environment but also for public health.
This is especially the case with L.I. Sound, a place taken for granted as so much else, but now recognized as a spectacular ecosystem, at the same time fragile, colossal, dead in some places and teeming with life in others. Thus has the disposal of dredge spoils become so problematic all around the Sound’s communities. And the sensitivity of these communities does not stop there.
For the better part of 80 years, like cormorants popping up in the salt water, all manner of ideas jump into view on how best to cross the Sound by car, bus or rail, from or into Connecticut.
One of the first proposals was to build a bridge from Orient Point, through Plum Island, then Gull Island to Fishers Island, finally all the way to Groton, Connecticut, or even Watch Hill, Rhode Island. This was no casual, pipe-dream sort of idea. It came from the U.S. Senate in 1938, at a time when the federal government got things done. But where some politicians felt this proposal made sense, others craved the cents, and maneuvered to spend this project’s bucks in other parts of the United States. When it came to crafty power politics, these were the guys who wrote the book.
These Depression-era projects put many desperate Americans to work. And as was then so common, job seekers would migrate nation-wide to the work site, as for example thousands did to Washington’s Grand Coulee Dam. The proposed Long Island to Connecticut/Rhode Island project, a relatively modest combination of bridges and highways, 18 miles in all, would have been our answer to the southernmost extension in 1912 of US 1 through the Florida Keys. That 113-mile project, by the 1930s, evolved from a rail to a scenically awesome auto and bus route, and has all to do with the thriving tourism of the Keys today.
Then there was New York Gov. Rockefeller’s 1960s bridge idea from Rye to Oyster Bay. In spite of his crafty power politics, the project perished in the flames of a windstorm of community opposition at both ends of the bridge that was never to be.
With ideas for Sound crossings peppering the regional planning agenda time and again, enter the current governor’s $5 million study of a cross-Sound tunnel. Long Island’s largest organization of business firms and groups, the Long Island Association, has quickly urged the governor and legislature to consider enlarging this study to be for a cross-Sound bridge-tunnel combined project. And if the LIA has its way, the study will look at not only Shoreham, but also other sites for a deep water port.
Back to the lesson learned from our hypersensitivity about dredge spoils in the Sound: the study groups, the LIA, and the governor for that matter, and all the construction trades, banks, developers and others, suffer one huge oversight. Community and citizen groups on Long Island will never accept bridges and tunnels across the Sound, for compelling reasons.
The changes that a more accessible Long Island will create may help western Suffolk business, but those same changes would rapidly urbanize eastern Suffolk. Pressures to build out farmland and open space would intensify. The enormous aggregate of properties used as second homes, an often underestimated but major player in our economy, would be jeopardized, and most if not all that makes Long Island such a popular, sustainable tourist destination would soon die out.
Let’s watch out what we wish for – we are not the Florida Keys. Maybe we should thank those ’38 Washington, D.C. politicians who stole away for their own regions the monies that would have paid for that Orient Point to Connecticut (or Rhode Island) cross-Sound bridge. Had that gone through, the East End, and our North Fork in particular, would be a far different place. It’s as true now as it ever was.
Greg Blass has spent his life in public service since he enlisted in the U.S. Navy as a teenager. He has worked in the private sector as an attorney and served six terms representing the East End in the Suffolk County Legislature, where he was also presiding officer. Greg has worked as an adjunct professor at Suffolk County Community College, as Greenport village attorney, as N.Y. State family court judge and as Suffolk County social services commissioner. Now retired, Greg is active in volunteer work and is a member of the board of directors of several charities. A resident of Jamesport, he and his wife Barbara have two grown children.
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