Transcript of Councilman Fred Pollack Interview

00:00 Are you ready? Okay. I’m councilman Fred Pollack, I represent the 6th District of the Town of North Hempstead. As such I’m a member of the Town’s legislative body, one of six members of the town board, plus the supervisor.
00:14 And is it correct that you make environmental sustainability on Long Island a Big issue in your work?
00:17 Yes, environmental issues are very important. We have particularly Port Washington we are a peninsula surrounded on one side by Hempstead Harbor and on the other by Manhasset Bay. We have 32 miles of waterfront in the Town of North Hempstead, 3 harbors and bays, so, we also have the largest open space left in Nassau County, which is privately held, but we are very careful to protect it and make sure that it doesn’t get developed.
00:40 And what have you personally done in terms of protecting the environment?
00:44 I’ve created what’s called the environmental trust fund, which is a public-private partnership that is designed to use non-tax dollars for open space and other environmental programs, beautification, acquisition. Et cetera. Educational programs, things that would not otherwise we’d be able to do. There’s a limit to what you can do with tax dollars. We’ve also created the waterfront advisory commission, which advises the town on policies on how to manage the waterfront. And I was instrumental in creating the both the Hempstead Harbor protection committee and the Manhasset Bay protection committee, both of which are intermunicipal bodies that deal with the issues affecting the water quality and management of both of those harbors and bays.
01:25 Okay, and um, I don’t know if your work really deals with this, but what if anything would you suggest local residents can do themselves to help your initiatives?
01:39 Well, local residents—look, everything comes down to what people do in the environment and what people do locally and on their own, whether it’s making sure they recycle everything that recyclable and do it properly. Sometimes that gets complicated, start looking at the numbers on the bottom of plastic items and whether it’s the appropriate item to recycle can sometimes make people a little bit nutty. But they have to, you know, separating it. Making use of organic chemicals rather than pesticides and making sure that the rules and regulations are followed when its appropriate. Cleaning up after their pets. We’re an—we have—on Long Island we get our water from the aquifer. And all these pesticides and all the pet waste and everything else that goes into the ground eventually works its way into both the harbors and bays and into the aquifers. So we really have to be very careful about what we put on the ground.
02:26 Okay, do you feel that in New York government or Long Island local government apart from your office obviously do you feel that people put as much of a stress on sustainability as you or do you feel that it lacks in other areas?
02:42 I think certainly on a county level, and certainly my colleagues here in the town, we’re all very aware of the environmental issues and concerns and that’s what I’m mostly familiar with. I don’t know. I’m sure that the other officials in other bodies and other governments are interested. I think it’s a major issue.
03:00 For example the county legislature just passed a law banning, I think it was banning the use of plastic shopping bags. At supermarkets, they’re going to require them to, at least they—I haven’t read the law, I think says they have to provide paper bags and they have to provide recyclable bags I’m pretty sure it bans ultimately the use of plastic shopping bags.
03:24 All right. What do you consider your biggest accomplishment in terms of the thing we’ve been talking about?
03:31 620 tons of garbage and stuff that has been removed from one of our local waterways, Sheets Creek, over the last couple of years. We’ve taken out old barges and tugboats and all kinds of crap that’s been dumped there and it now looks a lot, old buildings that have sort of deteriorated. It looks a lot better than it did, there’s more to go, but hopefully we’re going to be able to finish clearing that up and get the necessary permits to bulkhead and build a public walkway so people will be able to walk around that side of the bay. We’re about to do a 5 and a half million dollar project regenerating I guess that’s the right term, rejuvenating Mill Pond, which is a major pond that deals with the estuaries in Manhasset Bay. So, those are a couple of things that I think are really important.
04:22 And what would you consider the biggest issue still yet to be tackled?
04:30 Trying to get, um, develop policies that govern the use of new buildings and indeed existing buildings in terms of lower energy use and making sure that they take advantage of all of the modern techniques to reduce the use the demand on energy, solar, et cetera.
04:49 Okay, um, and just, I guess, one last question, do you feel that with the recent upsurge of going green as a sort of celebrity cause, its gotten a lot of media recently, lets put it that way. Do you feel that that’s affected the policies or enthusiasm in any way on a local level?
05:09 I suspect with some people it has. I’m sure there are some people who are more inclined to pay attention to issues that have media attention. I would think however that the biggest, the biggest motivation, even for elected officials who might not be 100 percent committed to the environment, and I haven’t met any, but the biggest motivation is you know when you go to the supermarket and people talk to you or you go to the park and people talk to you, you know wherever it is, and people say wait a minute, what about noise, what about cleaning up the harbors and bays, what about energy reduction and et cetera. If that’s what’s on people’s minds that’s what you pay attention to.