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By Denise Civiletti - February 28, 2025
Representatives of two dozen organizations gathered Thursday for an annual environmental roundtable meeting hosted by State Senator Anthony Palumbo to discuss regional environmental issues, concerns and needs. The event went off as it does every year: a cordial, free-wheeling, pass-the-mic conversation.
If the ongoing federal staffing cuts and budget-slashing being undertaken by the Trump administration worried the environmental advocates and government officials in the room, their concerns were mostly left unspoken —even though most of the programs addressing local environmental issues substantially rely on federal funding.
There is little doubt that the administration’s actions, as well as the budget resolutions currently being considered by Congress, will have profound effects on the ability of local governments and nonprofits to deal with East End issues such as: building coastal resiliency to deal with the impacts of sea level rise; restoring the water bodies surrounding the twin forks; providing clean drinking water to homes whose private wells are contaminated by chemicals; expanding wastewater treatment initiatives; moving away from fossil fuels and pursuing sustainable clean energy alternatives, including community solar energy production and clean energy technologies for homes and businesses.
On Wednesday, the Trump administration announced plans to cut all EPA spending by 65%. The EPA provides funding for programs that tackle many of the top-of-mind concerns of elected officials and environmental advocacy groups at Thursday’s roundtable meeting. In addition, the agency is charged with implementing and enforcing federal environmental protection laws by setting standards for drinking water purity, air quality, protection of surface waters and more.
Ten days before the roundtable meeting, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin, who represented eastern Suffolk’s First Congressional District from 2015 to 2023, said the EPA would seek to freeze or claw back $20 billion in Greenhouse Gas Reduction grant funds obligated to grant recipients last summer to fund community and individual solar energy projects, specifically aimed at making the transition to solar energy affordable to low-income communities and residents. The funds were deposited with Citibank pending distribution to grantees.
The meeting also came on the heels of reports that Zeldin is urging the White House to strike down the “endangerment finding,” the conclusion that planet-warming gases pose a threat to public health and welfare. That finding, made in 2009, is relied on by federal regulators as the basis for setting limits on greenhouse gas emissions, a key element of federal climate policy.
But only one person at the roundtable directly addressed “the elephant in the room”: the future of federal funding needed to accomplish many of the goals outlined by the organizations and elected officials present.
East Hampton Council Member and Deputy Supervisor Cate Rogers said the roundtable conversation centered on state funding, but much of the state funding relied on by local governments to address environmental issues is pass-through funding that comes from the federal government.
“There’s not much we can do — that small towns can do — without federal funding,” Rogers said.
For example, she said, small towns lack the financial resources required to construct, maintain and repair coastal resiliency projects. They must rely on county, state and federal funds.
“They’re not ‘one and done’, as I’m sure everyone knows here. They require constant maintenance and repair when the next storm comes,” Rogers said.
She cited as an example the loss of a dune system in Ditch Plains in Montauk, which caused flooding in residential neighborhoods. The town is working to rebuild the dune in a way that is “FEMA-compliant, so that we can be eligible for some kind of federal funding to help us out,” Rogers said.
“Well without FEMA, what’s the point?” Rogers asked, referring to the Trump administration’s cuts at the federal agency responsible for distributing emergency aid, and the president’s comments indicating he may support eliminating the agency altogether.
“So I would just ask that we also look to secure the federal funding for these issues that we need,” Rogers said.
Francis Martin, district coordinator for First Congressional District Rep. Nick LaLota said anyone receiving federal funding should contact him if they have any problems accessing the funds. “Oftentimes you who are receiving the funds, get first notice. If you are seeing something being frozen of that asset, please let us know, and we can advocate and see what we can do to help you,” Martin said.
Most of the people attending the roundtable meeting pressed the Palumbo and Assembly members Jodi Giglio and Tommy John Schiavoni, for state support — both legislative and financial — for issues and programs on which each of their organizations is focused.
Adrienne Esposito, executive director of Citizens Campaign for the Environment, which focuses on water quality protection, asked for passage of a bill that would “ban the intentional input of PFAS into common products, such as children’s toys, dental floss, carpets, cleaning products and many other products that we use every day.”
The State Senate passed the bill last year but the Assembly did not. Esposito asked for support to get the bill enacted this session. She also asked that this year the bill include a ban on cookware, which Esposito said was removed from the bill before the senate passed it for unknown reasons.
“We want to urge you to please leave it in the bill. Nowhere in New York State people are waking up saying, ‘My God, I hope there’s still PFAs in my frying pan so I have a side with my scrambled eggs,’” Esposito said.
“This is a bill that is critically important, because the PFAs is so toxic, and the more we learn about it, the more toxicity elements that are revealed about it,” Esposito said.
Esposito thanked County Executive Ed Romaine, who was among the elected officials attending the roundtable, for his strong support and advocacy concerning groundwater pollution migrating from the former Grumman plant in Calverton, which the Navy, the site’s former owner, is responsible for restoring under federal law.
Groundwater contaminated by PFAS and other chemicals has migrated off site and polluted nearby water bodies south of the site, including the Peconic River.
Last week Romaine, citing the off-site pollution, called a press conference to demand that cleanup of the site be taken over by the EPA and made a priority cleanup site under the superfund program.
Others present addressed a variety of concerns and needs: farmland and open space preservation; sea-level rise and coastal resiliency; the health of the Peconic Estuary, a nationally designated estuary of significance, where marine life is threatened by harmful algae blooms; solid waste management, focusing on waste reduction measures; and others.
Kevin McDonald of the Nature Conservancy said local officials must go to Albany and seek a multi-year partnership strategy to accomplish regional goals, telling state officials, “We need a regional strategy to match our local dollars at the town and county level with state funding.”
The same is true of requests for federal aid.
“Federal legislators, even in this remarkable moment that we’re in, are still sending out invitations, saying ‘We would appreciate any projects that should be part of our opportunity for congressionally directed funding for infrastructure-related projects.’ We should be bundling what those projects are and submitting them to the entire delegation in the Senate as well as our House representatives from Suffolk County,” McDonald said.
The county executive said Suffolk County does not get its fair share of state funding, including monies from the Environmental Bond Act and the federal infrastructure act.
“We have more registered cars, more licensed drivers, more land miles than any other county in the state at one time, with Nassau, who was number three, and Suffolk, we used to get 23% of the transportation aid for roads in the state. We now get 7%,” Romaine said. Nassau County gets $100 million in state aid for bus transportation, but Suffolk County, which is geographically three times the size, gets only $40 million.
“A long time ago, someone said the squeaky wheel gets the grease. So I know I have to squeak a little bit louder and talk a little bit more, but we have great work to do. We need a lot of helping hands,” Romaine said. “That’s why I would say to my federal employees. Anyone that has some decent qualifications, if, for some reason, the federal government doesn’t need your talent, we can always use talent here in this county to get the job done, to do the things that have to be done.”
Esposito said in an interview after the meeting she was not surprised that the discussion did not focus on the implication of federal budget cuts for local environmental issues. In part, she saids, that’s probably because “the tradition of the roundtable,” which was started by State Senator Ken LaValle in the late 1990s, “is to bring to the attention of state lawmakers things they should be aware of, what the local needs are.”
The lack of discussion about what’s happening now in Washington doesn’t mean it’s not on everyone’s minds, she said.
“Honestly, state and county legislators don’t have influence over what happens with the federal budget,” Esposito said. “We could talk about it till we’re blue in the face. We have no idea what’s going to happen or what we’re going to do about it,” she said.
“We could talk about it till we’re blue in the face. We have no idea what’s going to happen or what we’re going to do about it,” Esposito said.
“But we’re all on pins and needles. Are we getting a grant or not? Should we do the work or not? People in the state government are freaking out, too,” she said. The State Department of Environmental Conservation gets 25% to 30% of its funding from the federal government, she said. “Not only don’t we know what will happen to that, but now the governor is in a war with Trump” over congestion pricing. “If the state loses transportation funding, as he threatened, that’s huge.”
The environmental roundtable took place again at the Suffolk County Community College Culinary Arts and Hospitality Center on East Main Street in Riverhead.
This year’s meeting was attended by Brookhaven Town Supervisor Dan Panico, Southold Town Supervisor Al Krupski, Suffolk County Legislators Catherine Stark, Anthony Piccirillo, Dominick Thorne and Ann Welker, and Southold Town Council members Greg Doroski and Brian Mealy, in addition to the county executive, state assembly members Giglio and Schiavoni, Romaine and East Hampton Deputy Supervisor Rogers.
Organizations represented at yesterday’s meeting included: Long Island Pine Barrens Society, Stony Brook University, Peconic Land Trust, Long Island Farm Bureau, Open Space Council, Suffolk County Department of Economic Development & Planning, East Hampton International Dark Sky Association, Save the Sound, North Fork Environmental Council, Setauket Harbor Task Force, The Nature Conservancy, Suffolk County Community College Sustainability Program, PJ Citizens for Open Space, Peconic Baykeeper, NY Sea Grant, Atlantic Marine Conservation Society, Citizens Campaign for the Environment, Concerned Citizens of Montauk, The Resource Group, Peconic Estuary Partnership, Eastern LI Surfrider Foundation, and Cornell Cooperative Extension of Suffolk County.
“This important forum brings together stakeholders and elected officials from throughout our area to brainstorm and identify solutions that can be incorporated into meaningful and effective legislation on a host of environmental issues,” Palumbo said in a statement after the meeting.
“In recent years Suffolk County residents overwhelmingly approved the Environmental Bond Act and Suffolk County Water Quality Restoration Act to equip our region with critical funding to keep our drinking water safe and protect our environment,” Palumbo said. “As elected officials, it is our duty to ensure that this funding and new policies work hand in hand to ensure the health and safety of our residents and environment today and for generations to come.”
