Personal attacks against critics of EPCAL deal are a shameful distraction

A recent attack letter, followed quickly by long, obviously coordinated, nasty comments aimed at myself and my wife, Barbara, including remarks on local radio, all from the tag team of Mason Haas and the Giglios, cannot go unanswered.

I don’t want to distract further from the vital issue facing our great town, as this crew attempts to do. So I’ll divide what I write below into two parts. First, I’ll answer some of their empty accusations and fiction, and then conclude with what’s terribly wrong with this EPCAL sale. If you want to get right to that current, pressing issue, please skip about halfway down. Otherwise, read on.

This crew has appeared to go from opposing to strongly pushing for this giveaway EPCAL deal. And when someone raises constructive objections to a “deal” that’s full of holes, as I have, they launch clumsy attacks to discredit me and shamefully throw my wife into the mix as well. These tactics would be OK, of course, if what they had to say was at all relevant or true. Mason Haas visited our home, not once, but a number of times after I retired, to discuss – quite cordially – a number of town issues, and never once raised any of the complaints he now harbors.

Carping about my “silence” during various issues that have confronted our town in the past is deceiving. The tag team forgets that for much of that time – 12 years to be exact – I was a state judge. By law, to preserve judicial independence, I couldn’t participate in or even comment on public issues.

And while serving as Suffolk County social services commissioner, one of the most complex problems we faced was that agency’s responsibility to house the homeless in a miserable economic climate. Still, we stopped the heavy concentration of homeless housing in Riverhead by opening reasonably sized, supervised shelters in other communities. Homeless shelters in the county changed from cruel warehousing to shelters that were staffed with dedicated professionals. Contrary to what an uninformed Mike Giglio would have you believe, code violations plummeted. Thirty to forty families per month were able to move out of shelters into permanent housing and productive lives by the time I retired.

And now to these despicable lies about the infamous homeless sex offender trailer. After it was placed at the Riverhead jail (before I was DSS commissioner), the plan was to rotate it to other towns on a regular, 30- to 60-day basis, in order to share the burden. But when, as commissioner, I prepared to rotate it out of Riverhead, the county legislature passed one resolution after another stopping such action. My repeated, forceful, on-the-record objections, and those of the East End county legislators, were futile. It was a terrible injustice to our community to keep that trailer here. Fortunately, working with the newly elected county executive, we developed an alternative that is still in practice today that closed the trailer while still providing these individuals with overnight sheltering, as state and federal law require.

And we have to set the record straight on the scapegoating myth about the Riverhead landfill mess. The town’s decades-long mismanagement of its unlined landfill began many years before Barbara Blass’ commendable tenure on the town board. After defying the state’s 1993 L.I. Landfill Closure Law, Riverhead continued to accept waste. Then, Riverhead found itself under a DEC Consent Order which, among other stipulations, required the town to remove close to ONE MILLION cubic yards of garbage because, over its long operating history, Riverhead had illegally expanded the landfill onto neighboring properties. This begs the question: in a community of Riverhead’s size, with a population of about 20,000 at the time, and whose primary industry was agriculture, where in the world did all this extra garbage come from that caused the illegal expansion? It certainly was not all home grown, and the landfill records significantly underreported (deliberately?) the amount of garbage that was actually dumped there. In fact, years later it was learned that some of it came, ironically, from the Grumman Corp.

In a future column, or maybe a series of columns, I’ll get into the fascinating dynamics that emerged, involving a handful of local players who created scapegoats and perpetuated myths about the landfill reclamation “disaster,” all to advance another agenda. Hold onto your hats, but for now, that “tune” by Mason and the Giglios is nothing but an off-key distraction!

But all this diverts attention from the issue at hand: the sale for a song of Riverhead’s most valuable asset to a just-assembled group among whom a seriously discredited entity plays a serious role. And if this mystery man does not play a role, as we are led to believe, how and why does this new group get the benefit of his status and previous negotiations? Why shouldn’t they start from scratch and put in their own offer, competing with other potential bidders? How did they actually piggy-back onto this in the first place?

Further, at the heart of their disturbingly vague development plan is a collection of start-up companies. Wouldn’t it make sense to find space at the incubator facility, already at the EPCAL site, for these unproven unknowns, so we can see what they’re made of? And the questions don’t stop there.

Other than the town’s proposed 50-lot subdivision map, the only map which has undergone environmental review, we still do not know what this group is buying, what they are building, and where on the site they plan to construct. And why is the town selling approximately 1,600 acres when only 600 can be developed?

The unique, invaluable runways at the site, a key to the revival of aviation manufacturing at EPCAL, crumble further into disrepair and are clearly not even an afterthought to these buyers.

Nothing prevents them from flipping the property to yet another group, leaving the question of housing still on the table. After all, why wouldn’t they look to flip the property, for a quick profit, given the discount for which they are purchasing it?

Further, have these buyers ever put together a manufacturing operation of any real significance, or any business activity outside of building shopping malls, that produced jobs beyond construction and low-paying retail work?

Finally, how can we say this will be so gosh-darn good for the taxpayers when the buyers speak openly of their plan to seek every possible tax break from the town and the giveaway IDA? This only highlights their history of walking away from development deals where local municipalities failed to meet their demands for huge tax relief packages.

Let me close with a final thought: what lies at the root of this sudden and recent turnaround with the in-crowd’s support for this sale? How did Jodi Giglio go from actively opposed to the deal over a considerable length of time to its champion cheerleader, after a single afternoon meeting? Commendably, in December, didn’t she try to stop the old board from making this deal binding on the new board? Why did she keep her NYC meeting secret from her fellow town board members, even from the town attorneys, but yet bring along an ex-employee of the town who has also emerged as a remarkably outspoken proponent of this sale?

I only write as I do for RiverheadLOCAL to invite readers to think. There are too many holes in this contract. We have to get this EPCAL deal right. Our town board has to keep a weather eye on the issues and not get distracted. All of us need to encourage them in that crucial direction.