Letters to the Editor: 06.12.97

Evenhanded Rule?

Wainscott

June 9, 1997

Dear Mrs. Rattray:

Your statement "Village Z.B.A. members appear to shoot from the hip - or vote from the gut - and then figure out how to justify what they have done" seems right on target. Your analysis of the causes and effects of such behavior, is, however, as deeply flawed as it is intemperate.

You gratuitously inflame prejudice against "an influx of wealthy people" but ignore the fact that people who came to East Hampton much earlier are the true masters of "efforts to bend the Village Code to their will." The Z.B.A. has at times acted arbitrarily and capriciously, treating similarly situated people very differently, favoring those who preceded "the influx" and disfavoring more recent settlers. Consider, for example, the actual cases, all decided by the Z.B.A. within the past four years, of three neighbors who asked for variances from Village Code Section 57-6 that were identical except for the size involved.

In the case seeking the largest variance, the Z.B.A. gave the owner (a longtime village resident who'd owned the property for many years) everything he asked for, allowing him to expand by another 232 square feet ,or nearly 10 percent, while asking that owner to pay only half the "mandatory" variance fee of $5,000 per 200 square feet fixed by Village Code Section 57-7C (2) (e) [2], even while the Village Administrator, Larry Cantwell, cautioned the village attorney, the Village Board, and the Z.B.A. in writing that there was no legal basis to waive "the correct fee of $10,000."

In the second case, the Z.B.A. also allowed the owner (who hadn't owned his property nearly as long as in the first case) to expand by almost 10 percent, but insisted this owner pay the full variance fee.

For the third neighbor, however, the newest of the three, the Z.B.A. voted to deny a variance only one-fourth the size of the 232 square feet given at half-price in the first case, even though this third neighbor offered to pay the full variance fee.

Does that sound like the even-handed rule of law? Is there any doubt such selective application of the zoning rules is a major reason why property owners appearing at the Z.B.A. have been forced to seek the protection and advice offered by attorneys and other land use consultants?

You complain "Z.B.A. members . . . seem ill-equipped to handle the charge," but inexplicably exclude Joan Denny from your complaint. Why? You have previously reported applicants find her to be singularly rude. She has made no secret of her bias against those who invest in East Hampton property. Are those the attributes that make a person well-equipped to be a Z.B.A. member?

The Z.B.A. does need change. It needs to avoid giving the impression that "old-timers" are somehow entitled to more favorable treatment than "newcomers." It needs to have all its members make decisions logically and impartially, with due regard for precedent and consistency, neither favoring nor disfavoring any applicant based on perceived wealth or family history any more than race or religion would be considered. The Z.B.A. would be helped in this regard if your pages did not foster an "us versus them" mentality. As you rightly say, the time for change is now.

Very truly yours,

DAVID FINK

This Stuff Kills

Southampton

June 9, 1997

Dear Editor:

Efforts to "fix" the atomic water disaster at Brookhaven National Laboratory - an essentially unsolvable problem given present technologies - are about to create a major ecological crisis on the East End. A cancer-causing radioactive fog is descending upon eastern Long Island as you read this letter. The potential for a Hamptons Chernobyl with major increases in breast cancers, brain cancers, leukemia, and melanoma are real and need to be dealt with immediately.

Tritium-contaminated water that is highly dangerous to public health, but relatively contained for the shortrun as a slow-moving plume, is now being pumped to an exposed basin where it will rapidly evaporate in the summer heat. Not only does this present a more substantial threat to the people living around Brookhaven Lab than does the polluted wells they can no longer drink from, it exposes many more people over a much greater area to nuclear material known to cause cancer and birth defects.

Local winds are going to bathe central Long Island and particularly the East End in a toxic nuclear soup. During periods of rain, this "fallout" will increase to even higher levels. In the 1950s, the area downwind from atomic tests became known as the "Leukemia Belt" because significant increases of cancer, particularly in children, occurred. The health impact of radiation in the environment is quite clear, and it is essential that we focus on this threat rather than on the damage-control-generated issues of lab management or job losses among nuclear scientists who made a bad career choice.

The technique of redistributing radioactive water from a limited area to "everywhere" gives the appearance of doing something. It is politically expedient, but healthwise it is a major error in judgment. Proposals to use this same surface-pumping strategy to deal with tritium contamination of water at other sloppy and mismanaged nuclear sites in the U.S. were scrapped because of the danger to public health - a wise move considering that many of the workers hired to clean up tritium-water at these same facilities subsequently developed melanoma.

On Long Island, the permits were issued in a matter of weeks after public awareness of the ecological crisis at Brookhaven became widely known. There is no substantive environmental impact analysis of what this aboveground pumping approach might do to us. One only has to look at the extreme levels of cancer around Three Mile Island after the accident there to get a sense of what these "safe" nuclear technologies can bring to unvigilant residents of surrounding communities.

Brookhaven scientists, ever active in defending their jobs and continuously telling us they are objective truth-seekers, have little to say about the health effects of evaporating atomic water over our neighborhoods and loved ones. Instead, the media is full of self-serving articles about how important their work is to humanity.

No one really knows what they do with most of the $415 million a year they spend of our money, and the only people who have put forth the view that the work of Brookhaven's scientists has any real significance or value are the scientists and public-relations cronies on the lab's payroll.

The real issue at Brookhaven is not whether the scientists get to keep their jobs but about whether we get to keep our lives. It is important that we judge our representatives in Washington on how they come up on this issue. A position to continue running Brookhaven's reactors, no matter how the politicians package it, means there will be more breast and other cancers occurring on Long Island in the future.

I've read about Brookhaven scientists' efforts to map Lyme's bacteria with atomic physics, but I really wonder how important this is. Personally, I think they should begin to map the levels of leukemia and brain and breast cancers downwind from the reactors they run and then explain why these rates are so high and continue to grow every year. What they need to do is to prove to Long Islanders that their two reactors will not cause us harm. They know this is impossible, so, instead, they distract us with tales of heroic medicine or nuclear mappings.

And, if one can judge the present by the past, one might ask: How much of note have these people really given us for all the taxpayer money they've spent? They've turned the Peconic River into a radioactive sewer and the lab into a Superfund site; our groundwater and our air are tainted with deadly substances. And now that the public is on to them, they turn up at every hearing to promote their "good works."

Does anyone who doesn't work at that lab really believe that the mapping of bull sperm is more important than not exposing our children to materials that can bring them an early death and take them away from us forever? How much longer can lab advocates argue that the two nuclear reactors at Brookhaven are for our good and that somehow the benefit of what they do goes beyond their paychecks or the support of some outdated cold war project? How can people with such an appalling environmental track record continue to command our respect and how can Senator Al D'Amato and Representative Michael Forbes continue to let these reactors poison us?

If all you Brookhaven Ph.D.s really want to benefit us, get into wind or solar power. And surely the people you'd get to hang out with would be more fun than that atomic bomb crowd you work with now.

If folks at the lab really want to show us how useful its scientific expertise can be, they should put the scientists to work on determining the impact on us of continuing to send radioactive substances and other chemical carcinogens generated by the lab into our air. There are lots of studies to show that this stuff kills people, so, perhaps, Brook haven scientists can show us how dumping it into the atmosphere of central and eastern Long Island will not cause us serious harm. Then even I would agree that they can perform miracles.

RALPH J. HERBERT

Associate Professor of

Environmental Studies

Southampton College

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