As a result of a countywide referendum last year, the terms of members of the Suffolk County Legislature have been extended from two to four years.
With this new arrangement now in place, some history of governance in Suffolk County might be helpful.
The Suffolk County Legislature is a relatively new county governing body, established in 1970. It replaced the Suffolk County Board of Supervisors, formed when Suffolk County was founded in 1683.
I’m the only journalist still around who covered both the Suffolk County Legislature and the Board of Supervisors — somewhat later than 1683! I covered the Board of Supervisors in the 1960s.
New to it then was the involvement of a Suffolk County executive. That position came into being when H. Lee Dennison was elected in 1960.
The office of county executive and the establishment of a charter form of government were largely a result of what were called the “Suffolk Scandals.”
In the middle and late 1950s, New York State conducted investigations and took legal action against corrupt Suffolk County public officials.
I first became a reporter in Suffolk County in 1962, and the impacts of the “Suffolk Scandals” were still reverberating.
Warren Liburt, who passed away last year at 95 years old, wrote a book (under the pen name William Young), published in 2019, “Suffolk County Scandals Investigations: A Reminiscence.” I interviewed him after his book was released.
Liburt, an attorney and a Republican from Huntington, was a law assistant in the Suffolk County Surrogate’s Court from 1956 to 1959. He then ran for the Huntington Town Board and lost. He relates in his book that in 1959, GOP politicians in Suffolk were in the opposite position from what had existed previously.
In the early 1950s, “the Republican Party in Suffolk County,” he writes, “held all the countywide elected offices, the congressional seat for the county and all the county’s seats in the State Legislature. Of equal, if not greater, importance for the organization, we held seven out of the 10 town supervisorships.”
If you were a Republican and “you were nominated, you would get elected.”
But “in the election of 1959, we lost control of the Board of Supervisors … winning only four of the 10 town supervisorships, and losing other town elective offices across the county.”
“The genesis of the debacle” came, he says, when W. Averell Harriman, a Democrat, was elected New York governor in 1954. Harriman appointed J. Irwin Shapiro, a former assistant district attorney from Queens who had become a New York City magistrate, to head the State Commission of Investigation. A special focus, said Liburt, was Suffolk County.
Those charged included Suffolk County Office of Civil Defense Assistant Director William Hart, for selling furniture “for county offices” through “intermediaries,” and State Assembly member John A. Britting of Babylon, who formerly, as deputy county treasurer, “participated” in “land deals” that “cheated Suffolk County taxpayers out of millions of dollars.” A long list of investigations is detailed in Liburt’s book.
The New York Times, Liburt notes, ran an editorial the day after the 1959 election declaring: “The sordid history of corruption and malfeasance that has been undergoing a long process of exposure in Suffolk County, ancient stronghold of Republicanism, was sufficient reason for the voters of eastern Long Island to give control to the Democrats.”
In 1960, Dennison, although an enrolled Republican, was elected county executive on the Democratic ticket. He had arrived in Suffolk from upstate in 1927 and worked in the county’s then-Highway Department but was fired after writing a report saying Suffolk government was so mired in partisan politics that it was “doing nothing to encourage adequate county planning.” Dennison then began a private engineering practice in Port Jefferson.
Suffolk Democrats invited him to run for county executive, and he happily agreed, later recalling: “I would have done anything to fight the abuse of one-party power.”
In the 1960s, its last decade in existence, the Suffolk County Board of Supervisors met in the county seat of Riverhead, as it had for centuries. Hauppauge would later become an alternate county center because of the mid-20th-century population boom in western Suffolk.
The board’s gatherings began with a pre-meeting session, to which reporters were welcome. Discussed were the resolutions at hand. Then came the regular meeting that included public hearings and voting by the 10 town supervisors of which the board consisted.
The supervisors were administrators of their respective towns, with a patchwork, as still exists in Suffolk, of two- and four-year terms. They functioned as a kind of board of directors of the county, but mainly their focus was on their towns.
Some were extraordinary officials, especially the last two chairmen of the board, Shelter Island Town Supervisor Evans K. Griffing and then-Smithtown Town Supervisor John V.N. Klein, both Republicans. Other strong members of the panel in my time were Huntington Town Supervisor Jerome Ambro and Islip Town Supervisor Harry Kangieser, both Democrats.
The interplay of the supervisors with independent and reform-minded Dennison, who was committed in the wake of the “Suffolk Scandals” to creating an honest county government, and who took many actions in this regard, was always interesting and often newsworthy. Dennison was reelected in 1964 and 1968.
How did a Suffolk County Legislature come about? There were a series of one-person, one-vote rulings in the 1960s, starting with the U.S. Supreme Court and then involving other federal courts.
The Suffolk County Board of Supervisors faced a legal challenge brought by I. William Bianchi, a Democrat from Bellport and subsequently a State Assembly member for 22 years, and Quentin B. Sammis, also an attorney and a Republican from Huntington and a former Huntington Town supervisor. Their lawsuit focused on the sharp contrast between Suffolk’s East End towns having a small fraction of the populations of the western Suffolk towns, yet each of the 10 supervisors on the Board of Supervisors had one vote. This was in violation of the one-person, one-vote decisions based on population.
This litigation led to the formation of the Suffolk County Legislature, with elected legislators representing 18 districts of sought-for equal populations.