Maria, an honor student at Suffolk County Community College, lives in fear of being thrown out of the country she knows and loves — the United States.

Coming here was not her choice. Her father came in 1996, leaving a troubled Argentina. His lifelong dream was to come to “America which he saw as the place you could become a better person.” Here “he’s worked in construction — dedicated to building homes and renovating kitchens,” said Maria. She and her mother followed five years later. Maria was 9.

“I’ve grown up in the United States. This is the home I’ve known,” she was saying last week. She has done splendidly here. She has a 3.6 GPA at Suffolk Community — a 4 GPA (an A in every course) in her major of psychology. Her goal is to work “with children. I want to give back to children who need psychological help.”

But she lives in dread of “being taken away. I fear that strongly.”  And it’s no theoretical concern. Two months ago, her father went to pick up building materials. “He never came back.” He had a seizure and an ambulance was called. The Suffolk Police also came and arrested him. Upon finding out what happened, “my heart dropped,” said Maria.

“Now he’s facing deportation.” For the past two months, her father has been in a federal deportation facility in New Jersey.  Her four-year-old brother, born here and thus a citizen, can’t understand what has happened. “Yesterday he said, ‘My dad doesn’t want to see me.’”

Maria struggles on. Because she is undocumented, she can’t get a Social Security card, which means she cannot get a driver’s license. “I have to depend on someone to take me to school.”  Working is only arranged with great difficulty. She has two certificates in cosmetology from Suffolk BOCES, but has been told by beauty parlors that they won’t hire her without a Social Security number. She works at a pizza parlor, “serving customers, making pizza, doing the cleaning.”

She needs the money badly to pay for college. Suffolk Community and SUNY colleges on Long Island accept undocumented students, but they’re not eligible for financial assistance.

Meanwhile, Maria aims to “reach a Ph.D. level.”

Maria — and I am not using her real name — is one of many undocumented students on Long Island facing a nightmare of a life. Suffolk-based Long Island Immigrant Students Advocates seeks to help them.

Osman Canales, its co-founder and leader, notes there are an “estimated 2.1 million undocumented students” now in the U.S., some 10 percent in New York State.

The organization also works for the passage of the DREAM Act, federal legislation that would help undocumented students like Maria. The DREAM (for Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) Act applies to undocumented young people who came to the U.S. at 15 or younger, graduated from a U.S. high school or received a GED, then graduated from a two-year college or completed two-years towards a four-year degree, or served in the military for two years. If they fulfill those requirements and “maintain good moral character” they would be eligible for permanent U.S. residency. In 2010, the DREAM Act passed the House of Representatives and came within five votes of passage in the Senate. (The votes were largely partisan: Democrats for it, Republicans against.) Also, a New York State DREAM Act was introduced last year that would allow undocumented students access to state-funded college financial aid programs.

Visit the website of the Long Island Immigrant Students Advocates — at http://liisaedu.blogspot.com — to learn more about the group and its activities and how you might help. Its phone number is 631-888-4300.

“I wish more people would see us as human beings, not as criminals,” Maria said last week. “No matter what our skin tone, we all come from the same base.”

For her, “I refuse to give up.”

The United States was built on the energy and talents and intelligence of folks like Maria and her father. What a shame for them to be rejected from a country whose attitude toward immigrants is supposed to be memorialized by those words of compassion and welcome at the base of the Statute of Liberty.

The late Suffolk County Legislator John J. Foley was a model for compassion in government. He was dedicated to the care of the ill. And thus it was fitting that the historic Suffolk County infirmary was renamed the John J. Foley Skilled Nursing Facility.

It was Mr. Foley of Blue Point — a county legislator for 18 years — who, in 1990, fought the plan of fellow Democrat, then County Executive Patrick Halpin, to close the infirmary and  won bipartisan support to build a replacement $34 million facility.

The Foley facility is important for being the nursing home in Suffolk that will accept those that other nursing homes won’t  — notably poor people with serious illnesses requiring long-term care that private nursing homes shy away from because of financial issues.

In recent years, there’s again been a call for the county to no longer run it. Former County Executive Steve Levy conducted a major campaign to close or sell the facility.

In 2008, a year before he died at 90, Mr. Foley wrote a letter to Newsday noting that its “masthead says: ‘Where there is no vision the people perish,’” yet “the paper’s editorial board says, ‘Suffolk should get out of the nursing home business.’ But that is the point here—we are not in a business. The poor will perish if we do not keep our commitment to deliver quality of care via the John J. Foley Skilled Nursing Facility at Yaphank; not a business, but a commitment to deliver quality of care to the poor.”

“Let us preserve our vision, our commitment to the poor,” wrote Mr. Foley. “Let us also realize that the county executive’s [Mr. Levy’s] game plan is to take Suffolk out of health services, and by so doing, penalize the poor.”

The future of the Foley facility is at a crossroads again. Under the budget for county government for 2012, its 250-person staff faces lay-off on June 30 — causing a closure of the nursing home — unless that is changed.

Legislators Kate Browning of Shirley, a Working Families Party member who runs with Democratic cross-endorsement, and John Kennedy of Hauppauge, the Republican leader of the legislature, have been in the forefront in seeking to save Foley.

“I don’t think Steve Bellone is of the same mindset as Steve Levy,” says Ms. Browning.

“I think he has a heart.” The new county executive, she acknowledges, “is dealing with a tough financial situation.” Still, the county’s nursing home “has been there for 100 years. It survived the Depression.” And it is critically needed. It’s the nursing home in Suffolk that “accepts those others will not.”

She and Mr. Kennedy want to work with Democrat Bellone in developing a “public-private partnership” for the 264-bed facility. Ms. Browning speaks of the “compassionate side of me… We are not commodities but human beings. It takes only one health-related emergency to put you at the bottom — and with no place to go.”

After reimbursements from federal and state governments, Foley has been costing the county $6 million a year. Ms. Browning says  “I am not going to say Foley will be a profit-maker, but we can get it to operate as close to the black as possible and have it sustain itself — if we have the opportunity to do that.” She doesn’t want to see it closed “to fill a budget hole.”

Foley provides excellent care. It’s “the jewel of Suffolk County and should remain a facility that is under the control of Suffolk County government,” testified Cheryl Felice, then president of the Suffolk County Association of Municipal Employees, before the legislature in 2010. She also asked: “Does the Suffolk County jail make a profit? Do [the Departments of] Social Services or Health Services make a profit? Why is it that Foley is being held to a different standard of having to make a profit?”

The Foley facility, like the man it is named after, is about compassion and helping those who desperately need it. This is a vital mission of local government. It is beyond partisan politics. We must continue the legacy of John J. Foley.

As Legislator Kennedy said as the legislature voted 11-to-6 in 2010 against a Levy resolution to close Foley: “I have always been impressed with the resourcefulness of my colleagues and of this body….That resourcefulness has been the impetus for some great legislation that has impacted not just this county, but this nation. I refuse to accept that we have only a choice to sell or a choice to close.”  Neither can we accept that.

A giant in the publishing field — and a man who loved the East End — died last week. Barney Rosset, as his Page One obituary in the New York Times said, “changed the course of publishing in the United States, bringing masters like Samuel Beckett to Americans’ attention under his Grove Press imprint and winning celebrated First Amendment slugfests against censorship.”

Barney also published little me — and, characteristic of Mr. Rosset, it involved an uphill challenge: a book investigating the dangers of the Shoreham nuclear power plant and laying out the overall scheme to build many nuclear plants on Long Island.

The telephone call came at night from his home in East Hampton. It was 1985 and Hurricane Gloria had hit Long Island. The Long Island Lighting Company had failed to restore electricity (and wouldn’t for more than a week). “And this company would run a nuclear plant!” exclaimed Mr. Rosset, sitting under the light of a kerosene lantern, he related.

He proposed I write a book for Grove Press on the Shoreham plant. A few days later, he provided its title. In his living room in East Hampton, I explained that LILCO intended not only to build Shoreham — then nearly completed — but two more nuclear plants at the Shoreham site, four more at Jamesport (two of these received U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval) and still more in between, also along the Long Island Sound.

“‘Power Crazy’ — that’ll be the title!” said Barney.

When people pass away, not infrequently it is said that they were “one-of-a-kind.”

Barney Rosset was truly one-of-a-kind.

He divided his time through the years between Manhattan and East Hampton. He relished eastern Long Island — indeed, his spread of about 40 acres in East Hampton was a world unto itself: with trees and other foliage Barney planted himself, and a large pond. Among his great pleasures was caring for it all.

But he would lose his East End Shangri-La — it would be foreclosed upon as he underwent severe economic difficulties — a crisis I observed because it came as “Power Crazy” was being published and I was in regular contact with Barney. He attributed his fall from the Grove Press helm, which led to the rough financial times, to an extension of the pressures he long faced because of his groundbreaking, courageous publishing.

Grove for decades was a trail-blazer in publishing. Barney published figures like Beckett and Eugene Ionesco, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, Pablo Neruda, Bertolt Brecht. He tested the limits of censorship with books like Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer” and D. H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” and films he distributed such as “I Am Curious (Yellow).” He published political books such as “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” He launched Evergreen Review, in which Grove Press authors and others, including poet Alan Ginsberg, appeared. As a result, he was targeted through the years by the FBI and CIA, as was confirmed in voluminous FBI and CIA documents he later obtained.

In 1985, he sold Grove Press to people, as he told me, that he thought he could trust. They would provide, at long last, he said, a solid financial base for Grove while he would remain in charge. Instead, in 1986 he was thrown out as president and chief executive officer.

He connected his ouster to the work he published, especially, in 1985, “The Pied Piper: Allard K. Lowenstein and the Liberal Dream” by Richard Cummings of Sag Harbor. The book was about the assassinated Long Island congressman having long been a CIA operative including when he was active in the civil rights and anti-war movements. It hit a raw nerve in exposing the covert life of Mr. Lowenstein, a liberal Democratic icon.

After losing Grove Press and his East Hampton home, Barney kept coming out to East Hampton. His marriage also broke up, but then he met and later married retired Southampton Elementary School teacher Astrid Myers, a former East Hampton Town Democratic chair. They stayed at what had been Astrid’s home in East Hampton where Barney replanted some of the trees from his old spread.

Barney had a full, highly-productive and active life. He died at 89.  He was, as the Newsday obituary put it, “a First Amendment crusader who helped overthrow 20th Century censorship laws in the United States and profoundly expanded the American reading experience.”

Barney had guts, intelligence, a great sense of humor, honesty and high ideals.

Leaders of environmental and civic organizations in Suffolk County, at the last meeting of the Suffolk Legislature, took on the bloc of Suffolk legislators who are highly critical of the county’s farmland, open space and drinking water preservation programs and are pushing for a moratorium on acquisitions.

“We taxpayers in Suffolk County have consistently voiced our opinion that we want preservation and not development,” said Bonnie Goebert, chair of the Southampton Citizens Advisory Committee. “Tourists don’t come here to shop in another national chain. Tourists come here to marvel and what we have…far-reaching vistas, the vineyards, the abundant waterways, the magnificent beaches…Tourism is our industry, if not our destiny, not more development and more office parks. Short-term fixes and knee-jerk reactions to the recession should not guide usage of our land preservation funds.”

Bob DeLuca, president of Group for the East End, said, “We’re at a very critical juncture here…Land protection in all of its forms is…infrastructure that supports our economy. It’s infrastructure that supports agriculture…When you look at this program, this isn’t just a land preservation program for something nice to drive by. It fuels our local economy.”

“I have the feeling the devil may be loose in the legislature!” Jim Gleason, vice president of the East Moriches Property Owners Association, declared.

The anti-preservation program bloc on the legislature, consisting of Democrats and Republicans and including the panel’s presiding officer, William Lindsay of Holbrook, cite economic conditions for their stance.

Highly critical of them is Legislator Edward Romaine of Center Moriches who after the testimony of the civic and environmental leaders at the legislative session February 7 in Hauppauge commented that “I’ve been here a long time and I’ve never seen anything like this. I always thought land and water preservation was part of Suffolk County government. This is what the people of Suffolk have over and over again said they want. I’m going to fight this like hell.”

Mr. Romaine’s district includes Shelter Island, the North Fork, Riverhead and eastern Brookhaven Town.

MaryAnn Johnston, president of the Affiliated Brookhaven Civic Organization, held up a $10 bill and said: “We’re talking about our money, not yours. This is what we voted for you to do with our money. We want open space, we want clean water. This is the way you achieve it. You don’t achieve it by stealing from that fund to solve short-term problems.” Tourists come “to visit what we have in abundance because we had the vision to do it, to preserve open space, to protect our drinking water, which has never been in more peril, ever. And if we don’t do something now, it will be too late for us to do it later. So I ask you: keep your hands off my money.”

Richard Amper, executive director of the Long Island Pine Barrens Society, added: “The public put this money up for a specific purpose. It can’t be used for any other purpose.” He scoffed at the notion that “if we merely stopped protecting drinking water and preserving open space somehow or other the recession would miss us.”

Shelley Corman, political action chairperson of Encore Atlantic Shores in Eastport, said: “In these troubled economic times, borrowing from one program to help fund another is certainly tempting but borrowing from Peter to pay Paul is never really a good solution.”

Marilyn England, president of the Open Space Council, said: “Open space is critical to supporting not only our natural environments but our economy, our way of life. Please do not make a decision that we will all regret and that will burden future generations.”

Peconic Baykeeper Kevin McAllister said “open space and surface water quality…are intrinsically connected…Where goes our groundwater, there goes our bays.”

John Rooney, board member of the North Fork Environmental Council, said that on environmental protection “Suffolk County is a leader, not just in the region but in the nation. So I ask you, please, do not forget that.  Do not forget what the people have been saying over and over for 40 years…Do not divert from the very progressive and useful road that we’ve been on, and think of our grandchildren.”

And Adrienne Esposito, executive director of Citizens Campaign for the Environment, said: “It’s the public’s program, it’s the public’s money, it’s the public’s agenda, and the public loves this program. That’s why so many people are here today.”

Did the anti-preservation bloc of legislators listen? That remains to be seen.

Sag Harbor Express editor Bryan Boyhan asked me to write a piece, because of my island-wide experience as a journalist, about whether there are other communities on Long Island which might provide pointers for Sag Harbor as the village faces a future that could change it from being the beautiful and diverse place it is and has been.

There are things that might be learned from Sea Cliff, the best preserved village in Nassau County, where intense development pressure has been ongoing for decades. And, there’s Greenport which has undergone a renaissance in recent years from being a somewhat down-in-the-dumps village to, as Forbes magazine described it last year, one of 11 “prettiest towns in America.”

The issues for Sag Harbor — due to it being in such close proximity to the luxury housing and business markets of the Hamptons — make for a complicated situation. One need only look a few miles down the road at what’s happened to East Hampton to see the threat. A place once heralded as being not just one of 11 prettiest communities but the most beautiful village in America is now a monument to gentrification. Its vacation-time scene, a version of a busy night on the Upper East Side, combines with high-end stores one after another: Ralph Lauren, Coach , Tiffany & Co., etc.

Assemblyman Fred Thiele, Sag Harbor village’s attorney, believes it’s been Sag Harbor that’s been — and needs to continue to be — “the model” for preservation on Long Island. The keys, he says, have been “citizen activism” and “public and private sector” efforts. Critical, too, has been having much of the village in a federally-recognized historic district, village boards including a “very strong Architectural Review Board,” and laws and regulations (such as limits on footprints of new businesses) aimed at Sag Harbor retaining its “unique character.”

There are parallels to this in Sea Cliff and Greenport.

Sea Cliff emerged from what was a Methodist campground in the 1870s. The faithful pitched tents on close-together sites surrounding a tabernacle. Those sites became the building lots on which Victorian and Gothic homes rose. This “small-lot, narrow road lay-out didn’t lend itself well to typical development,” Eric Swenson, executive director of the Hempstead Harbor Protection Committee, explained last week. Further, Sea Cliff was an “out-of-the-way place when post-World War II development” began in Nasau.

And, crucially, there’s been “civic activism” including through groups such as a Beautification Committee and a Landmarks Association. Governmental panels including an Architectural Review Board, too, have kept Sea Cliff as “a waterfront community of older homes with many artists and writers like Sag Harbor.”

In Greenport, Village Clerk Sylvia Pirillo also cited “civic activism and political leadership” for the village’s rebirth. Much credit for the “huge changes” that have come about is owed, she said, to former Mayor David Kapell and the “follow-through” by the current mayor, David Nyce. A renovated marina and attractive waterfront park — featuring an antique carousel — have become the centerpiece of Greenport.

Businesses are locally owned. And Greenport, too, has a federally-recognized historic district and a mobilized citizenry including those working through an Historic Preservation Committee. “We’ve done all that and kept our quaint aura,” said Ms. Pirillo.

The threats to Sag Harbor have been building for years. I recall Arthur Spitz, a former village trustee related to my family, telling me in the 1970s that Sag Harbor was “off-the-beaten path” and this provided protection. No longer. The “Un-Hampton?” So far but…

“Saving Sag Harbor” was the title of a 2008 hour-long TV program I did for WVVH-TV. I open it standing on Main Street saying the Suffolk Planning Department had in the ‘70s issued a report noting that Sag Harbor “is as much a part of the national scene as the French Quarter in New Orleans or Greenwich Village in New York City.” Now threats to the nature of the village “have been getting so serious,” I go on. The program can be viewed online on youtube.com. Just Google my name and Saving Saving Harbor or go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daeKlZV5MEo

I interview Stephen Longmire whose book, Keeping Time in Sag Harbor, had just been published, along with leaders of the then newly-formed organization Save Sag Harbor, as well as people at a gathering at Bay Street Theatre it organized. The meeting featured representatives of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Folks interviewed emphasize, among other things, the importance of patronizing local businesses to keep them healthy.

What’s the future for Sag Harbor? The prospects can be good but needed will be the continuation of what seems to be the common successful Long Island recipe for preservation — civic activism and initiatives by the village government and business community — and this being done ever more intensely to meet the yet heightened threat.

She’s a highly unusual chief deputy executive for Suffolk County. Regina Calcaterra is the first woman to hold the post. She’s an East Ender and thoroughly appreciative of life in eastern Suffolk. And her background growing up in Suffolk is extraordinary – living in foster homes and homeless shelters and worse.

She was chosen by the new county executive, Democrat Steve Bellone, as his top aide after he was impressed by the work she did as co-chair of his transition committee.

Although Ms. Calcaterra, 44, had to give up a higher-paying job as managing partner in a 55-attorney New York City law firm, she did so in deep appreciation of what “public servants in Suffolk County did for me.”

“The social workers and teachers, the foster parents and crossing guards, the police officers and judges — they helped me so,” she recalled.

“I should have been a statistic,” she said.

Her single mother suffered from drug and alcohol abuse. There were five children, each with a different father.

“We lived all over Suffolk County,” she recalled.

This sometimes involved sleeping in a car and living “on the streets.”

Sometimes her mother “would leave us for a while.”

“The kids would be raising each other,” she added.

At 14, she petitioned a court for emancipation so she could stay in one high school, Centereach High, and graduate from it.

“All these people who touched us” helped enable her “not to fall through the cracks” and “understand that the only way out of poverty was education.”

Ms. Calcaterra put herself through college — graduating as a political science major from SUNY New Paltz. She worked for the Eastern Paralyzed Veterans of America advocating for disabled veterans and participating in the national drive for passage of the Americans with Disabilities Rights Act of 1990.

She served as legislative director for the New York City comptroller’s office promoting laws to prevent fraud in government. At 25, she began attending — at night after work — Seton Hall University School of Law.

The law firm she left to take the chief deputy county executive’s job, Barrack, Rodos & Bacine, is internationally recognized for going after corporate fraud. Among Ms. Calcaterra’s biggest legal victories there was representing the New York State Retirement Fund in a lawsuit against WorldCom, Inc. that resulted in a $6.13 billion recovery.

She has been very active in helping young people who are in situations like the one in which she grew up. She is a board member of You Gotta Believe, a group which works to get older foster children adopted.

Ms. Calcaterra returned to Suffolk from New York City in 2006 and settled in the North Fork hamlet of New Suffolk — buying “a cottage I fell in love with. I love the farmland, the vineyards, the waters, the beaches.”

Coming home is like “being on vacation.” She lives with two cocker spaniels, Maggie and Oscar, and a cat, Milo.

Her mother died of cancer in 1999. Only in recent times did she meet her father after having brought and won the first case of its kind in the U.S. allowing an adult child to determine parentage through DNA testing.

She met Mr. Bellone in 2010 when she was nominated as a Democrat to run for the State Senate. He was Babylon Town supervisor then and she was “tremendously impressed with what he accomplished in Babylon, his vision, his ethics.” She considers her main role as “implementing Steve’s agenda.”

She’s excited to be in the middle of Suffolk County government. “When you work in public service, you have the opportunity to make significant changes for the better.”

And she is thrilled to work for a county that has given her so much.

Last month, with the news about Samantha Garvey, the homeless Brentwood High School senior becoming a semi-finalist in the Intel Science Talent Search, she instantly and most happily worked with Mr. Bellone in organizing a rent-subsidized home for the Garvey family.

By Karl Grossman

More than a century ago, my father’s father came from Hungary to America and worked at the watchcase factory built by Joseph Fahys in Sag Harbor. Engraving was a major art among Hungarian Jews and Fahys and his agents would seek out Hungarian Jewish engravers when they arrived at Ellis Island and take them by boat to Sag Harbor.

It was in Sag Harbor where my grandfather met my grandmother. She lived with a sister who married into the Spitz family, several of whose members also worked at the watchcase factory.

We have a photo in our house of my grandfather and grandmother in Sag Harbor after they met — he sporting a straw skimmer hat and she in Victorian Era dress, gazing at each other appearing very much in love.             On one side of the photo is an engraving by him, probably done in his off-hours at the watchcase factory. Etched in metal with flourish: “Stephanie Spiegel, Sag Harbor.” On the other side is a photo of him on a ship on one of his several trips back to Hungary to see his family. They would all be murdered in the Holocaust.

My father and I were born and raised in New York City where my grandparents later moved. My grandfather died before I was born; my grandmother when I was two. Nearly 40 years ago, I ended up settling with my family in Sag Harbor.

Tens of thousands of times since I’ve passed the watchcase factory, the biggest building in Sag Harbor and still in operation when we got here (then owned by Bulova). Last week, for the first time, I went into the four-story building which is being expertly and creatively restored, being converted into a luxury condominium apartment complex.

What struck me immediately were the windows — hundreds upon hundreds of them. You see them from the outside, of course, but only when you get inside the 1881 brick structure can you appreciate what all 700 were for. “Light,” explained my guide, David Kronman, project manager for Cape Advisors. “The factory opened with no electricity.” The windows, each topped by a graceful arch, provided illumination for the workers at benches next to them. Their machines ran on steam power generated at the factory.

Moreover, it’s not a big box of a structure, but built around a huge courtyard. This allowed for many more windows to provide light from the courtyard.

Then there are the beams! The building’s ribs, its skeleton, are of wood — beautiful beams and very large (many 18 by 10 inches). “Southern Yellow Pine,” said Mr. Kronman about what they’re made of. Cape Advisors had them expertly analyzed and the conclusion: they’re in superb condition. Indeed, the building itself, as I heard through the years, is solid.

As we weaved through it, with workers busy all over, Mr. Kronman spoke about the plans for the 65 apartments. The building’s special features — interestingly shaped little rooms here, sweeping spaces there — will be fully utilized, he emphasized. Beams will be left exposed. Even the old factory chimney will be put to use, linked to a fireplace in the lobby. There’ll be underground parking and a recreation center with a pool. We went up to the roof for the best view in Sag Harbor. There was Shelter Island and the waters of the East End and the North Fork, and unfolded below, in seeming miniature, the picturesque village of Sag Harbor. Manhattan-based Cape Advisors specializes in restoring historic structures like this one. The project is in good hands.

It was with a warm feeling I walked the stairs that my grandfather tread many years ago. America has been good to his family. His engraving tools are with my cousin, Dr. Martin Grossman, professor of business management at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts. Stephanie’s name lives through my brother, Stefan, and our cousin Steve, world-class musicians. Stefan is a blues guitarist, this week performing in Norway under sponsorship of the U.S. State Department. Steve is a Julliard-educated jazz saxophonist whose career has included playing with Miles Davis.

My grandparent’s great-grandson, our son Adam, graduated from Pierson High School, also an impressive brick structure, a few blocks from the watchcase factory. A lawyer, he is vice chairman of the Southampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals and previously Riverhead Town attorney. I remember, just after we moved to Sag Harbor, the call by some to raze the historic high school (which opened in 1907). Happily, instead it was restored — as the watchcase factory is in the process of being now.

“It’s like back to the past—let the bulldozers roll,” says an outraged legislator Edward Romaine about the negative stance of some members of the Suffolk Legislature towards the county’s farmland, open space and drinking water preservation programs. “We have legislators who would shut down our preservation programs.”

The legislators, who include Democrats and Republicans and include the presiding officer of the legislature, Bill Lindsay, cite the economic situation.

Suffolk’s nationally-noted open space program was begun by the first county executive, H. Lee Dennison, in 1961. The farmland preservation program— based on the then new idea of purchase of development rights from farmers and since replicated through the U.S.—was launched in 1974 by his successor, John V.N. Klein. In 1987, County Executive Michael Lo Grande initiated the Drinking Water Protection Program to safeguard Suffolk’s sole source of potable water. The programs have been credited with preventing the sprawl that covers much of western Long Island from enveloping its east. Still, through the years a few Suffolk legislators have been critical of them, despite continued and strong support by the public countywide.

Legislator Thomas Barraga of West Islip said at a legislative meeting last month: “If anything, this should be stopped, at least for the present time until things improve, improve economically. Sure, the scenario is, well, this is the right time to buy, because land is cheap. But most of the constituents that I have are really hurting financially. They don’t understand what we’re doing.”

Before the panel December 20^th were two ostensibly routine resolutions: dispersal of funds in the Drinking Water Protection Program raised through the county sales tax and restricted to program use for a 57-acre second phase of preserving the Sylvester Manor farm on Shelter Island and also purchase of 150 acres in Riverhead.

“I’m very concerned about the amount of money that we have going forward and we just continue to buy these huge, huge parcels,” complained Mr. Lindsay of Holtsville as the $4.8 million Sylvester Manor development rights purchase, a joint effort by Suffolk and Shelter Island, came up.

Mr. Romaine of Center Moriches, whose district includes Shelter Island and Riverhead, explained how Sylvester Manor “has tremendous historical significance, and has been the subject of many years of archaeological digs. This is an active farm that has been actively farmed for over 300 years. This goes back to the very history of Shelter Island.” With the second phase, the 241-acre farm would be saved. Moreover, Mr. Romaine spoke about how in eight separate referenda Suffolk voters had approved “what we’re doing here today.”

The legislature approved the Sylvester Manor resolution, but then the $8.8 million purchase of the land in Riverhead, with the title Long Island Beagle Club, was called. “This is a lot of money here again,” protested Legislator Wayne Horsley of Babylon.

Mr. Romaine noted that the property has been rated “a high priority acquisition not only by the Town of Riverhead but by a number of environmental organizations…We have…money that’s existed for a special purpose that’s been designated not once, but eight times, by the voters…to acquire open space.” He spoke of people not wanting “to see the march of development that has started in the west and marched east continue to the two points of the island.”

A new legislator, Sarah Anker of Mt. Sinai, with background as an environmentalist, reinforced his plea—and sounded a positive economic note. Ms. Anker declared: “In looking at the broader perspective at land preservation, the voters voted to put money aside to buy open space….When we preserve open space we…maintain the character of our communities and we have farmland, we have vineyards…People go there, they come from all over the world…and they spend money…And the people and the county benefit from that.”

Still, Mr. Lindsay spoke of how “I’m seriously considering putting before…the voters, because of the very tough fiscal condition…suspending the land acquisition program and using it to keep the county afloat.”

A vote on the Riverhead resolution was tabled. Mr. Romaine intends to bring it back in coming weeks. “There are people who want to over-develop this county—to build, build, build. I will fight this!” he says. He could use your assistance. A letter, phone call or email to your Suffolk legislator would help a lot.

It was a whopper of a mistake made by the Suffolk County Legislature as last year ended — elimination of the Suffolk Department of Environment and Energy.

It was done for economic reasons. Suffolk government’s tight financial situation required cuts, it was said. But in eliminating the department, the Suffolk Legislature lost sight of what we have grown to understand: for Suffolk, the environment is the economy.

And if the environment is allowed to degrade, the survival of the industries that depend on this being a green, sustainable place will be threatened. The tourism and second-home industries, which bring in billions of dollars a year, agriculture and fishing—all will be in jeopardy. As environmentalists have long emphasized, people don’t vacation in sprawled-over Nassau County.

But to keep Suffolk the special place in the New York Metropolitan Area that it has been, to save Suffolk, requires continued, intense, directed effort — and the Department of Environment and Energy in its five years had been demonstrating its strength at that.

Not too incidentally, one doesn’t need to point to western Long Island as a lesson of what could happen here. Last week my wife and I returned from a trip to the South Pacific on which we celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary. What a vision: flying into Tahiti. But once on the ground, it is outrageous to see what has happened to this island to which the artist Gauguin and others fled. Tahiti is now full of ugly sprawl.

Other islands of French Polynesia which we visited were as exquisite as ever: Moorea, Bora Bora, Huahine, Taha’a.  But not Tahiti. Indeed, the guide books suggest that because of what has occurred, after landing on Tahiti you take leave as soon as possible. If people can screw up Tahiti, they can screw up anyplace.

And eastern Long Island, just east of the biggest concentration of population in the United States, is especially vulnerable. We’ve known that for years—and that’s why we’ve created here what are now nationally-heralded programs to preserve open space and farmland, and then a Department of Environment and Energy. It was a major accomplishment of the Steve Levy administration.

Eliminating the department saves relatively little money. Yes, the job of its commissioner is gone. But its 57 employees have been simply spread around to other county departments.

Lost has been the high-level access of the department’s commissioner to the county executive.  The office of the environmental commissioner was just two doors down from the county executive’s office on the 12th floor of the H. Lee Dennison Building—and the commissioner was in the loop daily as governmental decisions were made, representing our environment.

This is what the bill creating the department said the county needed—an “independent” Suffolk agency as the protector of the environment. Such an agency would also include those who’d challenge dirty doings of some Suffolk agencies.

For example, the Department of Environment and Energy has had staffers monitoring the county’s pesticide-spraying program—and pushing for safer alternatives. They have now been transferred to the county’s Department of Health Services which has always supported the pesticide-spraying.

The measure creating the department declared that Suffolk’s “environmental resources constitute an inheritance that must be passed on intact to succeeding generations.”  It spoke of Suffolk’s “unique environmental and ecological character…which make Suffolk County attractive to those who live, work and raise a family here; to businesses that are located or relocating here; and to thousands of visitors and tourists each year, whose presence generates enormous economic benefits for the residents of this county.”

The Suffolk Legislature in the waning days of 2011 forgot about all this as it eliminated the Department of Environment and Energy. Fortunately, some governmental mistakes can be corrected. Bringing back this county department can be accomplished, and should be, quickly.

My wife and I have taken drives in recent days to enjoy the lovely, warm weather we’ve been having and the beautiful place where we live. You don’t have to go to paradise in the South Pacific to find beauty on this planet. We have it on eastern Long Island. It’s as fine as any place on Earth. Our great challenge is to keep it that way.

Twenty-twelve marks my 50th year as a Long Island-based reporter. I got to thinking about that when invited recently to speak at a meeting of the Affiliated Brookhaven Civic Organizations. I put together a presentation, “Fifty Years as a Reporter on Long Island.”

You stay in an area long enough and you learn the territory. Being a reporter results in a concentration of knowledge. Once off the George Washington Bridge to visit my brother in New Jersey, I could be in Romania, I told the group. I don’t know Jersey at all. Indeed, I’m not very clear about neighboring Nassau County, although for 33 years I’ve traveled there to teach journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury.

But Suffolk County I know very well.

It’s quite a different place than when I started as a reporter here in 1962. In recent decades, for example, Italian-Americans have become ubiquitous in elected office in Suffolk. But I recall Leon Giuffreda, who became a state senator in 1966, saying how in the ‘50s he became the first Italian-American to be on the ticket of the omnipotent Brookhaven Town GOP. And he had to wage a primary fight for the nomination for town justice. Brookhaven leadership was most “WASPy” in those days, he noted.

As for Democratic parties on the East End, I remember my first editor, John A. Maher at the Babylon Town Leader, explaining how they considered themselves “Wilsonian.” Conservative, they rejected Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

The “Suffolk Scandals” of the 1950s were still reverberating when I began. A succession of special state prosecutors had been dispatched to Suffolk and exposed a deep-set culture of corruption. This led to major institutional changes. A Suffolk County Charter was enacted. A Suffolk Police Department was formed. And the office of county executive was created. The first person in that job was the no-nonsense H. Lee Dennison.

He came to Suffolk from upstate in 1927, worked for the Suffolk Highway Department and was dismissed in 1951 for writing a report on a lack of county planning. A political independent, he was asked to run on the Democratic ticket for the new post in 1960. Mr. Dennison held it for 12 years, the finest Suffolk County executive I’ve known.

My first major journalistic crusade was challenging public works czar Robert Moses’ plan to build a highway on Fire Island. For the Leader I wrote not only about how the four-lane road would devastate Fire Island but about the benefits of a Fire Island National Seashore. Whenever I visit the National Seashore, I take pride in my part in the effort years ago that succeeded in saving exquisite Fire Island.

After two years at the Leader I went to the daily Long Island Press where I became an investigative reporter. A big story was exposing — and stopping — a huge sand-mining operation in Jamesport. Under the guise of building “a deepwater port,” entrepreneur George Semerjian of Southampton was gouging out a square mile of Long Island and barging the sand off to Connecticut.

At the Press I broke the story of the oil industry planning to drill off Long Island and elsewere along the Atlantic Coast.

And there was the Long Island Lighting Company’s plan to build seven to 11 nuclear power plants in Suffolk with Shoreham being the first. With the Press ceasing publication in 1977, I wrote on this for Suffolk weeklies and also authored a book on it, “Power Crazy.” Shoreham and the plan to make Suffolk a “nuclear park” were stopped, and I’m proud of my part.

Then there’s Brookhaven National Laboratory which among its disinformation over the years claimed high radioactivity in the Peconic River was caused by fall-out which came here from atmospheric nuclear weapons tests in Nevada. It turned out the radioactive poisons, including plutonium, came from BNL itself. In the ‘90s, at long last, its nuclear reactors were shut down.

Governmental corruption has, meanwhile, continued in Suffolk, which has been called the “Wild East” for good reason. Having Tom Spota as the DA since 2002 can be seen, I said, as a prosecutorial Camelot for Suffolk. But he is term-limited. What will happen when he departs?

What I thought would be a little talk lasted two hours and I was glad to see the audience — civic activists grappling with issues here — quite interested in my providing some history and context out of (I find this hard to believe) my 50 years as a journalist here.