Help Plan the Future of the Sound at this Year's Long Island Sound Citizens Summit

This year’s Long Island Sound Citizens Summit, which Connecticut Fund for the Environment/Save the Sound is organizing, will be as much a work session as a conference and will be a chance for those who attend to shape the future of Long Island Sound activism.

The goal is to come out of the event with a two-year work plan, based on the Long Island SoundVision agenda, for restoring and protecting the Sound, and so anyone who attends will have a say in that work plan.

I see this as a rare, if not unique, opportunity. In my previous job, I organized eight conferences in 10 years, and I’ve attended plenty of others, and I don’t remember any in which the people who attended the event helped devise such a broad, potentially important document -- that is, the two-year work plan.

The format is simple and conventional -- four morning work sessions, each one facilitated by an expert in some facet of the Sound's restoration and protection. The topics of the sessions are:

A Clean and Healthy Sound: Water Quality
The Sound People Love: Business, Tourism and Recreation
The Sound Environment: Habitat and Wildlife
Getting it Together: The Bi-State Working Group

Participants in each session will use the SoundVision agenda as a guide. Over an hour and 45 minutes, each group will come up with three priorities, hurdles to overcome, strategies to achieve what they want to achieve, key points to make to the public, and target audiences and partners.

Then everyone will re-assemble in the main conference room for a panel discussion among the leaders of the work groups and the audience. I’ll be moderating that discussion and the question and answer session that is part of it.

We’re thinking of trying to employ Twitter as a communications tool during the session I moderate. The plan is to have a laptop project a Twitter page onto a screen. People in the audience can then tweet their thoughts and questions, using the #LiSoundVision hashtag. The panelists and I will keep our eyes on it and react accordingly. We think it might be a good way of hearing from people without having to force them to stand up, wait for the microphone, and then ask their question (which we’ll also do as well).

In addition to all this, Senator Richard Blumenthal and Bridgeport Mayor William Finch will speak.

The Citizens Summit is scheduled 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Friday, October 28, at Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport.

Click here to register. And if you’re a Twitter user, include your Twitter user name as well.

Sound Summit Predicts a Long, Hard Effort to Clean Up the Sound

There's a good, short summary of yesterday's Long Island Sound Citizens Summit, which was in Bridgeport (I couldn't make it, unfortunately), in the Hartford Courant.

In short, the situation facing the Sound is both daunting and ongoing, sort of like the rest of our problems now. Here's the first paragraph:

In the long term, protecting Long Island Sound will take lots of money, more low-impact housing, mass transit systems, effective sewage treatment facilities and individual efforts, such as installing rain barrels to collect runoff from home roofs.

And then there's this, from Senator Christopher Dodd:

"This is not a battle that's ever permanently won," Dodd said.

The truth of what Dodd said is that it was true 10 years ago and 20 years ago and 30 years ago and on and on.

Saturday's Long Island Sound Citizen's Summit

Save the Sound and the Long Island Sound Study held the annual Long Island Sound Citizens Summit on Saturday, at the Holiday Inn in Bridgeport. The theme was “The Long Island Sound Fishery: Flourishing or Floundering?” On the evaluation form included with the handouts, I rated it a 3 out of 5, which I’d characterize as “pretty good” but which the form characterized as “fair.” So be it. I've organized five conferences for the non-profit I work for and it's not the easiest thing in the world to do.

I said “pretty good,” rather than “good” or “great” because some of the speakers and panelists seemed to be under the impression that they could stand in front of a room of 150-plus people and wing it with their poorly-conceived Power Point slides. I have a great example from the conference of how Power Point makes for lame presentations, which I’ll write about later probably. But suffice it to say that if you’re going to talk to 150 people about a topic you know a lot about, and which they know something about and are interested in, you need to actually prepare cogent remarks – you should think about what points you want to make and then you should make them, with good examples. Your slides should illustrate your point; they can’t be your point.

Anyway. David Funkhouser from the Hartford Courant was the only reporter I saw there, and you can read his story, which is a fine summary, here.

I want to add just a few things that people said that stuck out in my mind.

Eric Smith, the director of the Connecticut DEP’s marine fisheries bureau, talked about a number of troubling signs in the Sound. The water seems to be clearer than normal, which probably indicates there are fewer phytoplankton, the estuary’s basic food source, he said. Lobster are dying again. And some species are way, way down in numbers. Winter flounder, for example, spawn and produce young but the young don’t make it past two years of age.

“The sound seems to be sick,” he said. “The question is why.”

But if the Sound is sick, it doesn’t seem to be showing up in the data that Penny Howell, a marine fisheries biologist who works for Smith, has been collecting.

She and her colleagues now have about 25 years worth of data on the abundance of 40 species (38 fish plus lobster and squid) in Long Island Sound and, she said, there is no long term trend – no great rise in overall abundance but no great fall either. Some species are down -- lobster and winter flounder – but they’ve been replaced in abundance by other species. One difference is that the species that tend to be here in the fall, including scup and butterfish, are now dominant. Since the water is warmer in fall than in spring, this indicates that warm water species are becoming more prevalent.

Smith said the Long Island Sound Study needs to put this on its research agenda.

One last thing: Dave Relyea, one of the owners of the Frank M. Flower & Sons oyster company, in Oyster Bay, brought with him oysters, ice and a shucker, and served them with lunch -- Pine Island oysters, they're called, and I've had them at a pretty good shellfish place in Mount Kisco. On Saturday they were amazingly good. We were asked not to go crazy, to make sure there was some for everybody, so I had two with lunch and then, when lunch was over, went out to the serving area to see if any were left, and had two more. My estimate is that Relyea must have brought over about 600 oysters, and I was thoroughly impressed by the gesture.

Riding the Old Staten Island Ferry

I can think of only a handful of families who might feel a bit sentimental if and when these names -- The Dongan Hills and The Pvt. Joseph Merrill, The American Legion and The Cornelius G. Kolff, The Gold Star Mother, The Knickerbocker, The Mary Murray -- come to mind.

They were all Staten Island ferries in the 1960s, when my father worked on the ferry with men named Crawford and Bungay and Captain Arnesen, midnight to 8, 8 to 4, 4 to 12, depending on the week. When I was really young, he worked as a deckhand on the tug boats in the bay – one of the companies was based on Staten Island – but changed jobs for what I assume were the usual reasons: better (though still extremely modest) pay, better security, better benefits. He’d take me to work sometimes and bring me to the engine room, where the engineers worked in their t-shirts and wore bandanas around their heads and seemed always to be sweltering in the enormous heat and noise. And he’d bring me to the wheelhouse, where the captain would show me the radar and, when the boat was steaming safely, hand me the wheel and let me guide the ferry through a part of the bay where it didn’t need much guiding. For a few months in the early 1980s, long after my father had died and while I was between jobs, I lived in an apartment in Saint George, the Staten Island neighborhood where the ferry docks, and on afternoons when I had nothing else to do I'd ride back and forth, watching the gulls and the ships and the shoeshine men, and the grayish-green wake that the boat churned up.

The Dongan Hills was named after a neighborhood on Staten Island, the American Legion after the veterans group, the Gold Star Mother after women who had lost their sons in the wars, the Pvt. Joseph Merrill after one of those sons, a soldier whose heroism was described on a plaque on the boat. I didn’t know who Cornelius G. Kolff was and until this morning I didn’t know who Mary Murray was. It turns out though that she was a Revolutionary War figure, at least according to the Times, which has a story this morning about the old ferry. It sits in the mud on the Raritan River waiting for someone to figure out what to do with her. The Times describes the situation.

Other things left over from the weekend … The annual Long Island Sound Citizens summit was held Saturday on Long Island. Actual work (as opposed to doing this) prevented me from attending. But here’s Newsday’s account.

In an interview with Newsday, Timothy White, the new director of the Long Island Regional Planning Board, declined to take a stand on regional issues. His one exception: the Broadwater liquefied natural gas plant proposed for Long Island Sound:

"No one has made a convincing argument that Long Island needs Broadwater," he said.

And in the lower Housatonic and Naugatuck valleys there’s support for increasing Governor Jodi Rell’s Clean Water Fund budget proposal.