A Man With A Plan

Lee Koppelman was an important, indeed pivotal, figure in Suffolk County history.

I knew Lee, who died last week, for a very long time. We first connected in 1962 at a meeting on the effort to create a Fire Island National Seashore. Lee had become the planning director of Suffolk County two years earlier and was in favor of the seashore initiative.

My first “big” story as a journalist in Suffolk County was writing article after article about the four-lane highway Robert Moses was pushing to build on Fire Island, and what was being proposed as an alternative: preserving Fire Island as a National Seashore. Most officials feared crossing the powerful and vindictive Moses.

But Koppelman was a courageous, stand-up person.

A Fire Island National Seashore became a reality in 1964.

Koppelman came into Suffolk County government on the winds of reform. In the 1950s, Suffolk government and many local governments were here wracked by what was to be named the “Suffolk Scandals,” a decade of investigations of corruption led by a succession of special state prosecutors. The “Suffolk Scandals” led to the adoption of a charter system of government to be led by an elected county executive.

In 1960, H. Lee Dennison moved into the post. Decades before, Dennison, an engineer, came to Suffolk County from Hornell in upstate New York to work in the then-Suffolk County Highway Department. He was ousted after writing a report saying that county government was so mired in partisan politics that it was “doing nothing to encourage adequate county planning.”

Koppelman and Dennison first met when Dennison attended a presentation in Hauppauge of a “Hauppauge Comprehensive Plan” put together by Koppelman. Hauppauge was a sitting duck for intense development, with the Long Island Expressway and a spur of the Northern State Parkway nearing it, Veterans Memorial Highway through it, county government buildings rising, and the once-rural area eyed for commercial and industrial construction.

Dennison was impressed by Koppelman’s blueprint to deal with the looming development of Hauppauge in what he believed was a sensible and balanced way. He hired him as the county’s first planning director to try to do the same for all of Suffolk County.

It was a time, Lee Koppelman would later recall, when Suffolk County was the “fastest-growing county in the United States,” in population and economically. At a significant financial loss, he left his landscape architecture practice and accepted the position.

His first chief concern was the preservation of open space. Back then, he would note, no land had been preserved by the county as open space other than Smith Point Park. And, he said, if action wasn’t taken, developers would be “paving over,” as he put it, all of Suffolk County. He defined planning as working toward “better human habitation.”

Koppelman had long been impressed by the writings of Lewis Mumford, which he was first introduced to from his books at the public library in Astoria, where Koppelman grew up. Mumford’s targets included suburban sprawl — what Suffolk County faced.

Referring to Levittown on Long Island in his 1961 book, “The City in History,” Mumford wrote about “a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads … inhabited by people of the same class … This is the ultimate effect of the suburban escape in our time.” Mumford had been a leader of the Regional Planning Association of America.

Koppelman’s first major report as county planning director was on how to preserve open space here. By the time the Dennison administration ended 12 years later, many thousands of acres of county parkland had been created. John V.N. Klein succeeded Dennison as county executive, and Koppelman would work closely with him on the pioneering Suffolk County Farmland Preservation Program that was to be replicated all over the U.S.

Throughout his 28 years as county planner, he was incorruptible. Richard Murdocco, a former student of Koppelman’s at Stony Brook University, where he later became director of its Center for Regional Policy Studies, has related: “He told me that he would never let anyone take him out to lunch, because he didn’t want to owe anyone anything, or give the perception that he was being swayed.” Murdocco now teaches at Stony Brook. Koppelman’s degrees included a Ph.D. in public administration from NYU.

Koppelman, who died at 94, was critical in putting a focus on saving the sole source of potable water on which Suffolk County depends, its underground water supply. And he cast the light of intelligent planning on so much more.

His biggest disappointment was the lack of affordable housing which for so long he pointed to as a huge need in Suffolk County.