Letters

Ah, yes, the Department of Environmental Conservation. Otherwise known as the Department of Enabling Cohorts. Your editorial, “What’s Going On?” [April 20], declares, “It’s time to ask the question directly: What is going on with the State Department of Environmental Conservation and its steadfast refusal to get out of bed with sand mines on the South Fork?”

Thanks for asking, but your question comes about 35 years too late, and after the fact(s) for those of us who lived for years under the putrid odors and miasmic clouds of the Rambo sandpit. We posed your question and many more. We provided evidence again and again of illegal and environmentally disastrous activities. We were in contact with the malingering dissemblers of the DEC time and again.

When asphalt waste from highway construction was grinding away and shooting a plume of fine sediment on everyone in the neighborhood’s houses, gardens and pools, 24/7, the DEC stroked their chins and did nothing. When the sickening, decaying vegetation and fecal odors arose from composting for days on end, the DEC would come a day or two after they were called and then maintain that they didn’t smell it. They required that their noses be on site at the moment of occurrence, and despite their delays. Catch-22? They never issued a violation.

And as for the ubiquitous Fred Thiele, now pounding his chest, when he was Southampton Town supervisor, he refused to compel his building inspector (remember Paul Houlihan?) to inspect and make a determination about activities on the site or answer questions as to why he would not, asked by the residents’ lawyer in the face of his blatant dereliction of duties.

Could it have been that Thiele was in the process of yet again changing his political party, and the subordinate building inspector was a factotum in the new party? No problems for the DEC with that administration.

Instead, Thiele threw his hands in the air and dumped the problem on the residents, and myself in particular, as he required that I sign a complaint that the sandpit had exceeded their zoning usages; the sand pit was found not guilty by the then-carpenter-magistrate (you did not have to be a lawyer to be a judge in those days), and the road was paved for a meritless Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation lawsuit meant to silence any more complaints against the activities at the Rambo pit.

Santayana said that those who did not study history were doomed to repeat it.

In my opinion, the DEC is more than “in bed” with the sand mines on the South Fork — they are like the pilot fish that embeds in, and nourishes itself on, the hide of the shark.

Frances Genovese

Southampton