Returning to Suffolk government after a 30-year career in the state assembly where he became one of New York’s leading environmental advocates, newly re-elected
County Legislator Steve Englebright has again put protecting Long Island’s natural resources at the top of his agenda.
The Setauket lawmaker once sat on the dais with County Executive Edward Romaine, who shares his passion for protecting an island that depends on a sole source aquifer for its drinking water. The two will be part of a political process to draft a sewer bill that can pass muster in Albany and then go before voters to decide on raising the sales tax an eighth of a cent for wastewater initiatives and merge all of the county’s sewer districts, each with different rates for homeowners, into one.
Englebright sees the failure to hold the sewer referendum in November as a missed opportunity as county legislators balked at the 75-25 split in funds favoring private cesspool upgrades over the installation of new sewers. “The funding formula was based on science,” said Englebright, a long-tenured sustainable sciences professor at Stony Brook University, who pointed out that it was his bill in Albany that provided the funding to study the issue. “It was 10 years of effort by the state and Suffolk County to determine that 74 percent of the nitrogen pollution was coming from private cesspools, so we rounded the allocation up to 75 percent to go after the problem at its main source,” he explained, acknowledging the importance of sewers for economic development and the creation of affordable housing. He nevertheless expressed concern about “increased urbanization” that could be spurred by the expansion of sewers. “We are Long Island, not Manhattan Island,” he said.
Also at the top of the environmentalist’s agenda is the reduction of plastics in the waste stream. He was the original sponsor of county legislation that would have banned single-use plastics, a debate hampered by lawsuits that went on for years, with the legislature ultimately bowing to the industry. “They said, ‘trust us, we'll take care of the recycling aspects of it,’ and now here we are 30 years later, and plastics are still a huge problem,” Englebright said, pointing to recent studies that revealed nano plastic particles in the human bloodstream. “Plastics are poisoning us,” he declared, also noting that there is a “plastics-laden garbage patch floating in the Pacific Ocean the size of New England,” with another forming in the Atlantic. “I want to take another look at the promises the industry had made. Suffolk was on the right track, but recycling hasn't worked out. The industry broke its promises.”
According to Englebright, plastics should be limited to just a few types that can be easily mixed together and reprocessed. U.S. conservation efforts crashed four years ago when China stopped buying recycled plastics and now municipalities are struggling with disposing of the non-biodegradable material. “Towns are shipping their garbage to Ohio; we see plastic bags blowing in trees, they clog up our sewer systems, poison our wildlife,” he said. “It’s become an expensive, ugly, unhealthy problem. We should move in the direction of having a cradle-to-the-grave approach to plastics that makes sense.”
An original backer of the bottle bill, the legislator said he favors increasing the deposit on returns to 10 cents and expanding it to other containers as a way to generate more public involvement in recycling. “I’d also like to see us return to the days of reusable glass bottles for soda and other beverages,” he said.
Another missed opportunity was the Shoreham nuclear debacle, which Englebright said threw Long Island off the renewable energy path for decades. “We were on the right track back then by stopping Shoreham and were fortunately able to turn the page,” he opined. “Renewables were just dreams in those days; there was no real game plan or anything organized. So we've made some progress, but I wish we had made some of this progress a lot earlier. We spent too much money on the nuclear experiment, and I hope we'll have more renewable energy flowing from offshore wind and solar.”
Another natural resource close to Englebright’s heart is Long Island’s Pine Barrens, the wooded sentry guarding over vast reserves of fresh drinking water. “We don’t want to end up like Nassau County where they pumped so much water that streams have dried up and water quality has become a problem,” the trained geologist said of the importance of protecting the water supply. “Their sewer systems discharge into the ocean, and they are constantly removing water from the aquifer. Saltwater is intruding into their wells,” he warned, noting that Nassau has similar geology to Suffolk. A sponsor of the legislation that created the Pine Barrens preserve along with Senator Kenneth LaValle, Englebright said he will continue his legislative focus on protecting them.
Sitting at the top of the leadership in the Democrat-controlled state legislature with three decades of seniority and chairmanship of the Standing Committee on Environmental Conservation, Englebright had a powerful platform to pursue his natural resource initiatives. But in an electoral stunner, he lost his seat in 2022 to Republican Edward Flood, an attorney with the Town of Brookhaven. Refusing to retire from public life, he won his old legislative seat back in a battle against Anthony Figliola.
“We’re the part of the United States that invented suburbia, and the quality of our lives in suburbia is generally good,” concluded one of the deans of Long Island politics. “We need to keep it that way.”