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Brookhaven Town Confidential Memos (1986-1987)

In 1986 and 1987, Victor John Yannacone, jr. represented the Trustees of the Freeholders & Commonalty of the Town of Brookhaven, a colonial institution created by royal charters in 1666 and 1686 and continued as a political institution throughout the 20th century.

Unlike the Brookhaven Town Board which was created by New York State legislative action, the Brookhaven Town Trustees held actual legal title to all of the natural resources within the Town of Brookhaven and jurisdiction over all waters associated with the town together with the finfish, shellfish, wild fowl, and salt hay (marsh grasses) of the wetlands associated with those waters which included Long Island Sound, the Peconic River and the Peconic Bay, the Great South Bay, merges Bay, and the barrier beaches of Fire Island which separated those south shore Bays from the Atlantic Ocean and protected the mainland from hurricanes and other ocean storms.

The Town of Brookhaven comprises about 420 square miles in land area from Long Island Sound on the north to Fire Island on the south together with some of the most productive breeding grounds for shellfish — clams, scallops, and oysters — anywhere on the East Coast of the United States.

Shellfish from Brookhaven Town waters were commercially marketed from 1666 through 1960 when the waters of Brookhaven town became so contaminated with waste from dozens of Peking Duck farms located along the bays and estuaries of the south shore that the shellfish harvested from those waters could no longer be sold commercially.

With the demand for affordable housing by veterans returning from World War II and the Korean War, developers abandoned the five boroughs of New York City and moved out to the fertile farm fields of Nassau County just east of Queens. They began to plant single-family detached houses where once potatoes and truck crops were grown and harvested to supply the five boroughs of New York City and provide a generous income for the farm families who tilled the soil.

With the prices offered by real estate developers, the Nassau County farmers could not afford to keep on farming, so they sold their land and moved eastward out to Suffolk County starting with the easternmost land in Brookhaven Town.

At the population of Nassau County grew exponentially and sprawled into the Western Townships of Suffolk County, Babylon, Islip, and Huntington, government officials suddenly recognized they faced a serious problem disposing of municipal solid waste (MSW) — garbage and trash.

For generations, the city of New York disposed of the garbage and trash from its millions of residents and workers by incinerating it and then dumping the residue into the Atlantic Ocean — out of sight and out of mind thanks to the ocean currents and Atlantic storms.

As Long Island continued to grow following World War II and the Korean War, the centuries old method of disposing of MSW by burying it in what were euphemistically referred to as “sanitary landfills” which were neither sanitary nor did they really fill the spaces in which the MSW was dumped.

Eventually, the New York State legislature created a public authority with broad governmental powers including eminent domain — condemnation — but without any public accountability to establish a “Long Island Regional Ashfill” into which the collected incinerator ash from Babylon, Islip, and Huntington would be buried. Unfortunately, the plan did not provide for high-temperature incineration and pyrolysis in the town incinerators so that the MSW from the low temperature incineration process that was going to be dumped in the Long Island Regional Ashfill was little more than warmed over garbage to feed the rats.

The Supervisor and the elected officials of the Town of Brookhaven were outraged since the proposed Long Island Regional Ashfill was going to be located in Yaphank, southwest of Brookhaven National Laboratory in the “Pine Barrens” which were the prime groundwater recharge area for the central Long Island aquifer which supplied drinking water for almost a million people and had already been declared by the federal government as a “sole source aquifer” meaning if it became significantly contaminated, there would be no drinking water the people of Long Island.

The Brookhaven Town Attorney and a number of attorneys who were well-connected to the political leadership of Brookhaven Town all declined to bring any kind of legal action against the state or even suggest that an action might be possible.

In desperation, the Brookhaven Town Supervisor who was also the President of the Board of Trustees retained Yannacone to bring an action on behalf of of the Trustees to protect the natural resources of the Town of Brookhaven, particularly its sole-source aquifer and drinking water supply.

Yannacone brought the action and eventually stopped the proposed Long Island Regional Ashfill before ground had been broken.

During the course of the Ashfill litigation, the Supervisor asked Yannacone to take some kind of action against General Electric to modify its plan to dump and stir up enormous amounts of sludge contaminated with PCBs from its manufacturing plants into the upper Hudson River. The Hudson River was a major spawning area for the Striped Bass a popular game fish along the East Coast, particularly the south shore of Long Island in Brookhaven Town.

The action eventually produced a modification of the dumping plan and some mitigation of the contamination of the Striped Bass spawning areas in the lower Hudson River.

While pursuing this litigation, Yannacone prepared more than 200 confidential memoranda to the Brookhaven Town Trustees dealing with a great many environmental issues. A number of them have relevance today and indicate what might have happened had the elected officials exercised a modicum of foresight and taken relatively simple actions which today, with the benefit of decades of hindsight, can be seen to have been the basis for better living throughout the region.