Nassau County’s environmental bond act program, which dedicated $100 million to open space preservation, saved scores of acres of pristine land that could have been vulnerable to development.

Though several purchases – including those from politically connected sellers – were never fully enhanced for public access, as promised, there were others where the public benefit appears to be uncompromised.

“I don’t want the public to be left with the impression they got screwed, because I don’t believe that,” said Citizens Campaign for the Environment executive director Adrienne Esposito, who served on the advisory committees that recommended open space purchases to then-County Executive Thomas Suozzi and the county legislature.

“I really feel this was an immensely successful program for Nassau County residents that leaves a better environmental legacy,” she said.

Voters approved the bond acts in 2004 and 2006. Between 2006 and 2012, Nassau closed on 23 properties totaling about 300 acres that the committees had recommended, using criteria such as size, connection to existing preserves and importance to groundwater supply.

Today, many are widely cited as successes:

• The preservation of some of Nassau’s last remaining working farms. Under the first environmental bond act, the county spent $4.3 million on development rights to the 8.5-acre Meyer’s Farm in Woodbury and, in the second, bought the former 5-acre Grossman’s Farm in Malverne for $6.5 million, and the 2.5-acre Fruggie’s Farm in East Meadow for $2.1 million. The latter two have since been contracted out to nonprofits for continued operation.
• The purchase of, or securing of development rights to, two portions of the Boegner Estate in Old Westbury. For $6.2 million, Nassau ensured that 47 acres would be preserved alongside Old Westbury Gardens’ existing 160 acres. The deal received legislative approval shortly before the 2006 death of the landowner, heiress Margaret Phipps Boegner, who had opened the nonprofit Gardens on the larger part of her family’s expansive grounds.
• The acquisition of a Brookville horse farm, known as Old Mill, to ensure more affordable equestrian programs for all county residents, “not just for the select few,” as officials put it at the time. Nassau spent $12.1 million for the 40-acre site and has since contracted with a private company to run the renamed Nassau Equestrian Center.

Cynthia Cooper, a former Lakeview civic activist who served on the advisory committees, recalls researching the Old Mill property’s history and learning it was once a part of the Underground Railroad system that helped African-American slaves in the 1800s make their way into free states.

“It was one of the properties that really stuck with me,” Cooper said. “It had historical significance other than it being just a horse stable.”

The county also acquired land that helped connect a Mill Neck nature preserve with an existing Japanese stroll garden. It joined with the North Shore Land Alliance, the Oyster Bay nonprofit that played a significant role in the process, and a private investor to preserve a 60-acre field in Old Brookville.

That site had previously been owned by Banfi Vinters, but is now dedicated for use by local farmers.

The vista of rolling farmland over the horizon has become an attraction for visitors to nearby Youngs Farm, a popular purveyor of fresh produce and pies.

“That could be the poster child for what works in government,” the multigenerational farm’s owner, Paula Youngs Weir, said as she looked out the window of her farmstand shop.

This project was written and reported by Paul LaRocco
Interactive map by Tim Healy, Will Welch, James Stewart and Matt Clark
Photo Credits: John Paraskevas, Howard Schnapp, Jeffrey Basinger and Alejandra Villa
Read the full Newsday investigation

In 2001, as Thomas Suozzi prepared to take office as Nassau’s first Democratic county executive in decades, he looked for new ideas to fix the deficit-ridden budget he’d inherit.

To urge county employees to be part of the process, Suozzi created a $20,000 fund of private donations to reward their best ideas. He named two businessmen to oversee it and hand out the prizes.

One was Michael Held, a campaign supporter and former Oyster Bay Cove village planning board chairman who ran a stationery company.

“Who better to come up with ideas to save money in county government than the employees themselves?” Held said at the news conference, where he stood with Suozzi to announce the fund.

Years later, Held became a beneficiary of another of Suozzi’s initiatives. In 2009, the county bought 8 acres of Held’s property in Oyster Bay Cove for $2.9 million — part of the $100 million it spent on open space preservation under Nassau’s landmark Environmental Bond Acts.

A Newsday investigation found that roughly $30 million of that money, both under Suozzi and his successor, Republican Edward Mangano, was paid to political contributors and people with ties to county politics, the property selection process;or both.

Those who helped shape the program say that sellers’ political connections weren’t relevant to the process that resulted in properties such as Held’s being recommended for purchase. Others say those types of connections weren’t even brought to their attention – the county then didn’t strictly enforce the submission of forms for disclosure of campaign contributions or other political ties.

In Held’s case, the land met some of the top criteria set by the Suozzi-appointed advisory committees that ranked nominations and recommended them for purchase: It was part of the state-designated Special Groundwater Protection Area along the North Shore and was adjacent to existing open space, the county’s Tiffany Creek Preserve.

But the Held acquisition – one of several in Oyster Bay Cove involving connected sellers – also had some of the characteristics that have drawn criticism: The county purchased it for $105,000 more than its highest appraised value and about $230,000 more than what the county had assessed as the market value of the entire 13.6-acre Held estate, including the home.

His sold-off 8 acres, featuring a spring-fed pond and some trails, expanded the rear portion of the 200-acre Tiffany Creek Preserve by 4 percent, with the only public access remaining through the front of the preserve, a roughly two-mile hike from the Held site.

On the county’s land records website, a search of the purchased parcel still yields the description; “inaccessible vacant land.”

That final sale price, however, was reduced from an even higher figure, said the former Suozzi aide who helped negotiate the deal with Held.

“He had really ridiculous ideas of what his property was worth and we kind of whittled down to where we were,” Sean Rainey, then the county’s deputy real estate director, said of Held, noting that while he appreciated the natural beauty of the land, “the committee made recommendations of what they wanted to buy. I didn’t make that decision.”

Held said in a brief interview that he never dealt directly with Suozzi in negotiations and didn’t believe his prior appointment by him provided him with any special treatment.

“I think many of the people who wound up selling to the county knew people involved,” he said.

Suozzi declined to comment on individual bond act acquisitions, but in a brief interview he noted that all properties bought by his administration “went through a rigorous process” of review and were for prices in the general range of fair market value. His environmental coordinator, Tom Maher, said the county executive – now a congressman – did not interfere with the advisory committees that reviewed nominations and recommended purchases. The committees, as Newsday has reported, were largely appointed by Suozzi and consisted of several environmentalists as well as civic leaders with ties to the county Democratic Party.

“Tom stayed away from it and just left it up to the committee,” Maher said.

The environmental bond programs, passed overwhelmingly by voters in 2004 and 2006, apportioned $100 million for acquisition of open space, with priorities to parcels critical to groundwater protection, near existing preserves or under development pressure. The process laid out by the referendums required parcels to be nominated to – and then recommended for purchase by – the advisory committees.

Suozzi’s office signed off on the recommendations after obtaining approval from the county’s Planning Commission and Open Space and Parks Advisory Committee. Finally, at least 13 of the 19 county legislators needed to vote on all purchases.

But at each of those steps, Newsday found, sellers’ ties to county politicians or the property selection process were never prominently raised. Some advisory committee members said they were never presented with any of those details.

Held acknowledged that he’s heard general complaints about deals like his, in which the seller benefits by getting a market-value price from government, yet by continuing to live alongside it, retains de facto access to a plot where extracting a profit may have otherwise been difficult. One of the appraisals commissioned by the county said the parcel was “impacted by wetlands restrictions that limit its development potential.”

The difficulties of building on the land notwithstanding, Held said if the county didn’t buy it, “we probably would have developed it and put a number of houses on the piece.”

“What people don’t say is the amount of taxes you’re paying on the piece year after year after year, and it’s not like if you don’t develop it you get any kind of tax relief,” he said.

Just down the road from Held’s land, a series of bond act purchases helped create a new county preserve. But it also allowed Suozzi political contributors and donors to the nonprofit that helped shape the open space program to sell off parts of their property at market value and lower their tax burden by reducing the size of their estates.

The Pulling Estate

One of the first deals closed under the environmental bond acts was the 2006 purchase, for $6.5 million, of 16 acres at a prominent corner of Oyster Bay Cove that had been the subject of development speculation for years.

The land was part of a once-150-acre family holding controlled by banking executive Thomas Pulling, who was executor of his father’s estate along with JPMorgan Chase Bank. Pulling acknowledged being a longtime Suozzi contributor;and in 2006 had given at least $10,000 to the North Shore Land Alliance, the nonprofit that had lobbied for the bond acts and whose president and CEO, Lisa Ott, had a prominent role on the county advisory committee that recommended purchases.

County campaign finance records from before 2006 are no longer available, but Pulling contributed $500 to Suozzi’s unsuccessful bid for governor in January 2006, about a month before the county announced that the site was one of six it was targeting with the first bond funds.

Pulling, a Republican who that year contributed to no other Democrats on Long Island, gave Suozzi’s campaign another $250 in August 2006, a month after the Nassau County Legislature approved the sale. During Suozzi’s unsuccessful 2009 and 2013 county executive runs, he contributed $3,450, and has since given Suozzi’s 2016 and 2018 congressional campaigns a total of $2,000.

“There was absolutely no connection between the two,” Pulling said of the land deal and his contributions to Suozzi, who he said has become a good friend. “I’ve just supported Tom, probably, well before this property deal came along and ever since, including now that he’s in Congress.”

In 2006, Pulling also donated between $10,000 and $24,999 to the Land Alliance, making him one of its biggest benefactors that calendar year (there were only six individuals or families that had given $25,000 or more), according to a group newsletter that did not pinpoint the precise amount of donors’ gifts. He said that money wasn’t meant to help along the deal but rather came at the request of nonprofit board members.

Ott said the contribution came at a wine auction in September 2006, after the Pulling deal with the county had received legislative approval, and helped the nonprofit create a “quick action” fund for subsequent preservation efforts.

Pulling acknowledged at first being skeptical of selling a portion of his land to the county – a developer still plans to put homes on a large portion of it on the opposite side of his estate. But he said he was finally convinced when he realized that the county wasn’t asking for donation of the property but would pay a price comparable to what he might make had he built there.

“As an executor of my father’s estate, I had to do as well as I could for the estate,” he said. “And it never occurred to me that the county would pay the highest value.”

Creating a preserve

After securing Pulling’s property during the first $50 million environmental bond act, the county looked to extend its land there after securing the second round of funding – $100 million – which passed in a 2006 referendum promoted by the Land Alliance. The nonprofit that fall had pumped $222,000 into a political action committee to fund pro-bond mailers and television ads, records show.

With the additional open space money secured, a second advisory committee in 2007 recommended more properties for preservation. Among those purchased in 2008 were two that joined the former Pulling property to establish a nearly 30-acre preserve. One was a 7.2-acre parcel owned by one of Pulling’s sisters, bought for $3 million; the other was 5.9 acres of the adjoining Schwab estate, acquired for $2 million.

The three pieces of land created the Red Cote Preserve at the corner of Route 25A and Yellow Cote Road in Oyster Bay Cove. Like Pulling in 2006, his sister Lucy Cutting and her husband, George, were top Land Alliance backers when their land was nominated for the extension and then acquired, contributing between $10,000 and $24,999 in 2007 and between $10,000 and $50,000 in 2008, according to the nonprofit’s newsletter.

Referring to the contributions that Pulling and the Cuttings made to her organization, Ott said they had no impact on the purchase recommendations by the advisory committees, both of which she served on. She noted that both properties, based on their features and location in the groundwater protection area, had already been identified as preservation priorities in a state open space report.

“It really didn’t matter who owned them,” Ott wrote in an email, noting that the Cutting contribution helped create a fund to maintain the Red Cote Preserve. “They met the objectives of the program.”

The owners of the adjacent parcel, Hermann C. Schwab, a former Oyster Bay Cove mayor, and his wife, Meteer, nominated their land for county acquisition in 2005, during the first environmental bond act period, county records show. This was when their daughter-in-law, Katie Schwab, was Suozzi’s deputy planning commissioner and was on the Land Alliance’s advisory board and the first county advisory committee that reviewed nominations and recommended the adjacent Pulling land, records show.

Katie Schwab left her county job at the end of 2005, stepped down from the Land Alliance advisory board and, in 2007, completed her divorce with Hermann and Meteer Schwab’s son, George, records show. The county ultimately purchased her former in-laws’ land in 2008, for the $2 million price that was slightly less than the $2.4 million its assessment department had valued the couple’s entire 11-acre estate, with their home.

Suozzi administration officials acknowledged to county legislators at the time that there were no imminent plans to develop the land, but justified the purchase as a way to add onto the just-purchased Pulling land.

“I think that, generally, these people really wanted to just leave some legacy behind, so I think that’s why they were really pushing for this,” Rainey, referring to the Schwabs, told legislators during the 2008 legislative committee meeting where the purchase was approved.

Hermann Schwab died in 2013. Katie Schwab declined an interview request but provided a statement: “I was not aware that my former in-laws’ parcel of land was purchased until after the fact, and I had no role whatsoever in the County’s decision.”

George Schwab, an attorney, said he was involved in the Land Alliance and assisted his parents in the sale. He recalled that his ex-wife “certainly would have been in favor of us trying to sell the land,” but that he dealt directly with the county’s real estate attorneys to get the deal done.

“I may have called her and asked her some questions,” he said of Katie Schwab, noting that they had an amicable divorce, but he did not recall her being part of the process following her departure from the county.

“Katie Schwab got us nothing extra, or nothing we wouldn’t have gotten anyway,” he said.

The Red Cote Preserve also ensured that there would never be development in the shadow of one influential couple with property across the street: Elia “Aly” Lizza, president of Carlo Lizza and Sons Paving Inc., and his wife, Marisa, who gave money to the Land Alliance during the years the group was pushing for the nearby open space buys. She is listed in Land Alliance newsletters as having given “$99 and below” in 2006 and “up to $499” in 2008.

Marisa Lizza, whose husband’s firm won more than $100 million in paving contracts from Nassau between 2002 and 2016, also gave Suozzi large campaign contributions at times when the county was pushing for preservation of the neighboring land, records show: $16,000 to his bid for governor in July 2006, days before Pulling signed his contract with the county; and $25,000 to his county executive campaign in June 2008, about a month before both the Schwabs and the owner of the other adjacent parcel signed their contracts of sale.

“The day after your neighbor puts their land into open space, your property value goes up,” said Daniel Press, a professor of environmental studies at the University of California Santa Cruz who has written extensively on government land preservation. “So there’s this windfall for people who are adjacent to permanently protected open space because they’re going to have this … permanent buffer.”

Marc Gann, Marisa Lizza’s Mineola attorney, declined to comment on behalf of his client. Marisa and Elia Lizza were indicted last year by the Nassau district attorney in an unrelated public corruption case involving land deals in the Town of Oyster Bay. They have pleaded not guilty.

The Smithers Estate

Much of the land acquired in affluent North Shore communities was already zoned to provide as little density as possible, meaning that preservation, as opposed to elsewhere on Long Island, meant stopping the development of just a handful of homes at most.

The $7.8 million purchase of 25 acres of the Smithers estate in Mill Neck Village in 2008 was the most extreme example. The land, which was owned by wealthy philanthropist Adele Smithers, the estate of her late husband, R. Brinkley Smithers, and the anti-alcoholism foundation she ran, could not have accommodated more than three or four new homes due to strict village zoning laws.

“For most people, I think their understanding is, if the county is going to spend $8 million or $10 million, they’re going to go out there and save the property from being massively developed by corporate buildings, by dense housing and stuff,” Richard Nicolello, a Republican county legislator who now serves as presiding officer, said at the 2008 hearing where the Smithers property was first debated.

As a comparison, a half-acre site in Point Lookout, on the South Shore, that was recommended for preservation but not purchased later was sold for three new homes. A five-acre farm the county saved in Malverne, also on the South Shore, could have yielded 33 single-family homes – a typical number for the more-densely zoned area.

Though Mill Neck and other North Shore villages have long had multi-acre zoning that prevents condo communities or tightly packed single-family homes, Ott says the ever-changing composition of local village leadership means that no zoning restrictions are permanent – while an open space acquisition is.

“With new mayors come new changes of rule, so if something is five-acre zoned today, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be in five years,” she said.

The density issue was debated at the time of the purchase, but the seller’s status as a Suozzi campaign contributor was not, records show. No disclosure form was filed with the contract documents provided by the county, though other open space deals included them.

In the 18 months leading up to Smithers’ contract of sale with Nassau, Smithers, a Republican, had contributed a combined $13,000 to Suozzi’s 2006 gubernatorial bid and his county executive re-election campaign. After the deal was closed, she gave another $5,500 to Suozzi’s subsequent campaigns over the next five years.

Smithers, who died last year at age 83, was the aunt of State Sen. Tom Croci (R-Bay Shore), who served as one of the family’s contacts during negotiations, before his first election to public office.

Mangano takes helm

Mangano took office in January 2010 with the vast majority of open space funds already spent. He did, however, close a deal that had been discussed for years: purchase of the 4.2 acre Brooklyn Water Works property in Freeport.

Under Suozzi, negotiations with the politically influential property owner Gary Melius, who also owns Oheka Castle, had stalled. As Newsday reported in its detailed investigation of Melius’ life in February, the Suozzi administration had twice appraised the property as worth no more than $2.7 million.

“We did make him an offer, and he laughed,” Maher testified to county legislators in 2008 about negotiations with Melius.

Under Mangano – whom Melius had befriended and supported, to that point, with roughly $15,000 in campaign contributions – the county appraised the property at a minimum of $6.3 million. It cited Melius’ ability to develop the land into as many as 121 condominiums.

The acquisition was completed in September 2012, at a price of $6.2 million.

But, as Newsday reported, Melius did not have permission to build all those condos and, under Freeport village’s density restriction of 75 units on the property, would have had to have gotten significant variances to allow for the proposed building heights and required parking. On top of that, environmentalists had long opposed Melius’ plans, wanting the site, which abuts a nature preserve, to remain open space.

The increased sale price, all but exhausting what money remained in the bond act funds for open space purposes, caused the county to pay for the last $1.7 million using more than half of what remained in a separate open space account. That account is funded by 5 percent of proceeds from each general county real estate sale and at the time had about $2.9 million available.

Under Mangano, that open space account was also tapped in 2013 and 2014 to pay $45,000 to an engineering firm that had drawn up never fully realized plans to enhance public access at several open space sites.

Nelson & Pope Engineers & Surveyors, which was on retainer for general county engineering work – and had done open space design work for many municipalities – employed the wife of Mangano’s then-chief deputy, Rob Walker, as well as Walker’s mother, Rose Marie Walker, a county legislator.

Mangano, who left office at the end of last year, recently stood trial on unrelated federal public corruption charges, with the case ending in a mistrial. Rob Walker has pleaded not guilty to federal charges of obstructing justice and lying to federal agents in an unrelated case.

Brian Griffin, an attorney for Walker, said in a statement that Walker always disclosed his wife’s job with the engineering firm and his signoffs on the pacts “were nothing more than ministerial after the legislature awarded any contracts.”

In 2014, instead of considering previously recommended parcels that hadn’t been purchased, the Mangano administration decided to spend $800,000 in open space funds on a .7-acre lot in Bethpage that hadn’t been on anyone’s radar.

The lot, once an old nursery, was owned by Mangano’s longtime friend and deputy parks commissioner Frank Camerlengo and had fallen into foreclosure proceedings and disrepair, with landscaping trucks stored on it. The proposal never got past the planning commission after questions about the land’s appropriateness and the seller’s connections were raised.

“It got shot down pretty early in that process,” said Neal Lewis, a county planning commission member who served on the two environmental bond act advisory committees. The commission had just started reviewing the proposal when Newsday wrote about it, drawing widespread outrage.

“But, still, it was quite a moment, where it was like, ‘What are we even talking about here?'”

Lewis, who spoke highly of the overall environmental bond program, expressed surprise when told previous deals that came before the commission also involved county political appointees or people with ties to them.

“I’m a little disturbed,” he said. “I’d hate to think that someone might have pulled a fast one.”

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Do you have information on any other sites purchased under Nassau’s environmental bond acts that remain obscured, hidden or lack sufficient public access? Contact Paul LaRocco at (631) 843-2736 or paul.larocco@newsday.com.

The day after Nassau County acquired nine acres of Glen Cove woods, neighbors threw a party.

A bluegrass band played, guests sipped drinks, and Gordon Allan, who led a local preservation group’s push to spare the land from development, stood behind his family’s home along the old-growth forest and gave certificates of appreciation to elected officials.

Leading up to the $4 million purchase of Red Spring Woods in September 2006, Allan emphasized its ecological benefit.

Three years later, the transaction paved the way for him to benefit financially as well.

Using the same fund, then-County Executive Thomas Suozzi’s administration paid $600,000 for 1.77 acres of the adjoining Allan family property, $50,000 more than the county’s final appraisal estimated it was worth. In disclosure forms filed with the contract, Allan, who owned the land under a trust with his two brothers, didn’t reveal that he served at the time as a special assistant in the county personnel office, a $55,000-a-year, politically appointed job.

The deal was among several made with $100 million apportioned from Nassau’s landmark Environmental Bond Acts of 2004 and 2006 that benefited political insiders as well as wildlife and water quality, a Newsday investigation has found.

The program’s achievements have long been proclaimed: purchases that saved some of the county’s last remaining working farms, kept open an old equestrian center, and greatly expanded the majestic Old Westbury Gardens preserve and museum.

But among the bond act acquisitions — closed between 2006 and 2012 — almost $30 million was paid to people with ties to county politics, the property selection process, or both.

Records show these payments, which secured a quarter of the program’s nearly 300 preserved acres, went to four- or five-figure campaign contributors to Suozzi, a Democrat, or his Republican successor, Edward Mangano; county patronage employees or those close to them; and major financial backers of the advocacy group that largely bankrolled the bond referendums and had influence on which sites were recommended.

They leave questions about whether the money could have been better used to realize a never-achieved promise of enhanced public access to some of the sites and whether other recommended properties held by less-connected people could have been bought instead.

The deals involving people with ties to the process were frequent enough that, in 2014, after Suozzi had given way to Mangano, County Planning Commission Chairman Jeffrey Greenfield alluded to them in a reply to a query from Democratic County Legis. Kevan Abrahams. He had objected to a widely criticized and eventually discarded Mangano proposal to use open space funds to buy his deputy parks commissioner’s nursery lot, then in foreclosure proceedings.

Greenfield reminded Abrahams that during the Suozzi administration he’d voted for numerous land acquisitions for “friends and family.”

Abrahams, who remembers being puzzled, said Greenfield’s letter prompted him and a few other Democratic legislators to learn, for the first time, about the previously undisclosed connections in some Suozzi-era bond act deals – something GOP lawmakers had whispered about for years.

“We looked at each other, like, ‘What is he talking about?'” Abrahams recalled. Then, he said, “We figured it out.”

In at least three cases, Newsday found that the county paid above its own market-value assessment of the land, or what was estimated in appraisals it commissioned. At least five of the properties were not under imminent development pressure, which was one of the criteria for prioritizing buys, or could not be developed without significant roadblocks.

As taxpayers continue to pay down the borrowing for the purchases — the environmental bond portion of this year’s county tax levy is $7.7 million, or $8 on the average homeowner’s tax bill — the level of public access promised for many of the sites was never realized. Several are fenced off. For others, signage and promotion are inconsistent, parking isn’t always available and walking trails and other amenities weren’t installed.

“You have to kind of be ‘in the know’ a little bit of the local landscape to get to these spots,” said Brian Schneider, Nassau’s deputy county executive of parks and public works.

The overwhelming proportion of land acquired was on Nassau’s North Shore, primarily in affluent Oyster Bay villages with expansive estates. Some of the acquisitions, removed from the tax rolls, blend almost seamlessly into the sellers’ remaining property and effectively continue to be extensions of them.

And in those cases, the landowners not only got paid market value prices for what they sold to the public, they reduced their property tax burden because their retained private property got smaller.

“I thought it really benefited, mostly, the rich people on the North Shore,” said Victor Consiglio, a former Massapequa resident who was active in South Shore waterway cleanups and served on one of the advisory committees that recommended open space buys. “They’ll have all the access to that property just as if they never sold it, except now they pay less taxes.”

Defenders of the program said politics was never a consideration and that questions of access and geographic equity were always secondary to the mission of preventing development on the county’s last swaths of remaining untouched land, much of which had sensitive ponds, brooks or streams and was in a state-designated Special Groundwater Protection Area that encompassed northern Oyster Bay.

“We understand that trees help recharge our groundwater, they help clean our air. Wetlands clean the water as it leaves the land, before it gets into our beaches and bays,” said Lisa Ott, president and CEO of the North Shore Land Alliance, the Oyster Bay nonprofit that lobbied for the bond programs and had significant influence on what was purchased. “So what we have left is really precious.”

Land Alliance staff, board members and advisers involved in the bond act selection process supported the county spending millions of dollars on land owned by prominent contributors to the nonprofit, including some who gave it at least $10,000 in the years their properties were recommended and purchased.

If the seller also happened to be a political campaign contributor or Land Alliance backer, or have political ties to county government, it was secondary, Ott said, because each site was judged solely on environmental merits.

“These were peripheral details,” she said. “They weren’t even a part of the process.”

Many of the people who volunteered on the committees that reviewed open space nominations said they weren’t presented with those kinds of details to weigh.

“Someone may have known about it, but it wasn’t brought out,” said Gary Carlton, an attorney active in North Woodmere civic matters who served on one of the advisory committees and later ran for local offices as a Democrat.

Suozzi, a Glen Cove resident who served two terms as Nassau County executive, through 2009, when he lost to Mangano — and now represents the 3rd Congressional District — declined to speak in detail for this story. But in a brief interview, he defended the deals executed under his administration as well-vetted by the advisory committees and then widely supported by county lawmakers of both parties.

He also alluded to the properties purchased during his tenure as being bought for prices in the general range of assessments and appraisals, contrasting it with an acquisition under Mangano in which a political ally, Gary Melius, received more than double what his land had been valued under Suozzi.

An attorney for Mangano, who left office at the end of 2017, did not return a request for comment.

“These projects, from over a decade ago, were unanimously approved by the legislature in a bipartisan fashion. They went through a rigorous process with an independent committee of respected environmentalists,” Suozzi said. “In each instance, the amount paid for the properties were fair market value. I don’t know if the same can be said of projects that were done after my administration.”

But after being told that many people involved in the review process said they didn’t know some of the sellers’ connections, Suozzi acknowledged that some aspects could have been handled differently.

“Hearing all these details now, I remain very proud of this program and what was accomplished,” he said. “But there could have been more disclosure and transparency.”

Allan, however, insisted that in his particular transaction, “everything that was done was completely above board and clean. And it was probably because people knew that this could be misconstrued.”

Push to preserve

Nassau’s environmental bond program was established in 2004, after the Regional Plan Association had detailed how the county, without action, faced the prospect of losing all of its remaining unprotected open space in less than a decade. Preservationists urged Suozzi and the county legislature to back a referendum for the first $50 million in bonds, which passed overwhelmingly — as did another $100 million in 2006.

Of the total $150 million, $50 million was earmarked for park and storm-water improvements and brownfield remediation, projects that would help the central and southern portions of the county reap more program benefits. The rest was used for open space, with priority to farms and expanding existing preserves.

The bond acts required parcels to be recommended for purchase by an advisory committee appointed primarily by the county executive. The committee’s recommendations, based on criteria such as size, development pressure and importance to groundwater supply, were forwarded for votes by the county’s Planning Commission and the Open Space and Parks Advisory Committee, a separate appointed body to review public land buys. The county executive then signed off on selections before presenting them to the county legislature , where they needed approval by at least 13 of the 19 lawmakers.

Nassau’s process was missing some of the safeguards that Suffolk had installed in 2002, in response to controversy. After Suffolk’s real estate director negotiated the purchase of land at twice the appraised price from a business associate, that county began requiring that every transaction receive legislative authorization twice — once before appraisals and negotiations and then again to approve the acquisition.

“That kind of money just creates all kinds of temptations,” said Paul Sabatino, a former Suffolk legislative counsel and deputy county executive who helped write a series of ethics reforms in the county.

Nassau’s legislature, however, didn’t vote to approve the start of each property negotiation — only the borrowing of funds and final contract of sale. A review of transcripts from legislative meetings when acquisitions were approved shows that sellers’ ties to county politicians or the property selection process were never prominently raised.

The Planning Commission and Open Space and Parks Advisory Committee also didn’t focus on these aspects of the deals.

Suozzi appointed the majority of each 12-member advisory committee that, for the respective bond acts, reviewed and ranked nominations. Nominations could come from anywhere in the community but – for land that was ultimately purchased – were primarily made by a small circle of environmentalists, county legislators and the property owners themselves.

The advisory committees were largely the same for the 2004 and 2006 programs. Some were environmentalists, some were civic leaders, but most were also tied to the Democratic Party. In all, 11 of the 17 people who served on one or both advisory committees have been campaign donors to Suozzi, the county Democratic committee or a local Democratic club or candidate, records show.

The committees were chaired by Brian Muellers, a former Democratic county legislator from the county executive’s home base of Glen Cove. Many participants, however, point to the Land Alliance as holding great sway in the discussions. The nonprofit, whose board of trustees was led by Carter Bales and Luis Rinaldini, Manhattan private equity and investment firm founders living in the area’s incorporated villages, formed in 2003 to preserve some of the remaining tracts of open space in the area.

“In a word, Tom and I agreed on the need to protect the environment and the character of the community,” Bales wrote in an email, referring to Suozzi.

Rinaldini, who knew Suozzi from Glen Cove — and was an early supporter of his first county executive run — said in an interview that the Land Alliance saw the bond acts as the most realistic option to quickly preserve sensitive parcels. The Town of Oyster Bay had recently done something similar, and getting approval to dedicate a portion of recurring county tax revenue for open space, as Suffolk County has done for decades, had little support in Albany.

“We were actually pretty vigilant not to have what I would call irreconcilable conflicts,” Rinaldini said about vetting potential sellers. “If someone close to a politician happens to own land [that otherwise met the program’s environmental criteria], that’s fine. But it’s really more, ‘how did that decision get made’ and ‘does it fit?'”

When Suozzi established the first advisory committee in 2005, the Land Alliance was well represented. Besides Ott, it included Ralph Fumante, an alliance board trustee from Oyster Bay Cove who was also chairman of the county Open Space and Parks Advisory Committee, the separate oversight body that later signed off on all recommendations. Also serving with the county bond act advisory committee were alliance advisory board members Katie Schwab, then Suozzi’s deputy planning commissioner, and Neal Lewis, a county planning commission member.

Ott said the large preponderance of purchased land on the North Shore didn’t indicate disproportionate influence but, rather, a disproportionate balance of where remaining open space was: “You can only buy land where it exists,” she said, noting that the largest parcels of South Shore green space were already state or local parks.

The bulk of the $100 million for open space was spent under Suozzi. About $23 million in deals involved sellers who had been Suozzi campaign contributors, had been appointed by him to a government or campaign post or had ties to someone who had, or had been significant backers of the Land Alliance, Newsday found.

Under Mangano, with most of the open space money spent, the county did not convene a new advisory committee. The sole bond-act-funded acquisition initiated under his administration involved an old water utility property in Freeport, owned by Melius, an influential friend of the GOP county executive, which was bought for $6.2 million, more than double what the highest appraisal commissioned by Suozzi’s real estate office had valued it at: $2.7 million.

The Mangano administration had commissioned new appraisals of the land, and they came back at $6.3 million and $6.9 million.

Mangano, a Bethpage resident, also pushed the heavily criticized attempt to have the county buy the old nursery lot owned by Frank Camerlengo, his deputy parks commissioner, in Bethpage.

The Suozzi administration’s deal with Gordon Allan, for land that county appraisers said would be difficult to develop, was one of the last during his administration. It gained legislative approval in December 2008, after the recession had started, and didn’t close until Suozzi’s next-to-last day in office in December 2009.

But it had its origins more than three years earlier.

‘A divine thing’

The nine-acre Red Spring Woods parcel in Glen Cove, about a half-mile from where Suozzi lived, was bought by the county in September 2006, during the first environmental bond act process.

That was largely thanks to Allan, the Suozzi-appointed special assistant in the county personnel office, who had created a resident coalition that joined with the Land Alliance to push officials to preserve the land once they heard it had been acquired by a developer.

The group created a website, had its representatives speak at public meetings, hired a biologist to survey the trees and wildlife on the property and even published a member’s poem (“This lovely place of meditation, which should merit conservation/Is threatened by a builder’s desire for more McMansions, which has raised the ire/of the surrounding community/who say that they all agree/that this is Glen Cove’s last green space/a peaceful, special, hidden place…”)

It all led Al Cirignano, the Bayville-based developer, to abandon his plans to build six homes there and instead sell the land to the county for $4 million, about $500,000 more than he and his partner had paid for it several months earlier, records show.

“They even gave him a little plaque,” Al Cirignano Jr., the late developer’s son, recalled of Allan’s coalition, which also distributed plaques to Suozzi, Glen Cove city officials and environmentalists on the day it held a party to celebrate the county’s acquisition.

Allan’s motivation to save Red Spring Woods, he said, was always his father. The Rev. William Cameron Allan was a well-known Presbyterian minister in Glen Cove who served as chaplain to the city police and fire departments. He died in 1997.

He had cherished the woods behind the family home, so when the first county bond act funding came through, while Allan was looking for a way to stop development on it, Allan said, “I swear it sounds like a divine thing.”

Then came the additional $100 million in bond act funding.

“As soon as I heard,” Allan recalled, “I looked at the sky and said, ‘Dad, you did it again.'”

At the time, his mother, Gail, was living in the house on the family’s 2.6 acres, owned by Gordon Allan and his two brothers under a family trust.

She was looking to move into a retirement community, so Allan said he told her he’d approach the county and ask it to buy the land. Allan proposed a 1.77-acre subdivision for preservation and nominated it upon the second bond act program’s advisory committee convening in early 2007.

“I did nothing except go through the proper channels,” Allan said, noting that his nomination had to be vetted with all of the others to be recommended by the advisory committee.

Nassau’s first commissioned appraisal, in October 2007, valued the vacant land that Allan wanted split from the property at $700,000 but noted that it would be “costly and time consuming” to ever develop a new home there, citing its steep sloping, irregular shape and need for zoning variances. Five months later, in early 2008, a second appraisal valued the land at $550,000, saying “many hurdles” had to be overcome if it would ever meet its “highest and best use” as a residential plot, rather than undevelopable, less valuable vacant land.

No disclosure

Allan and his siblings signed the $600,000 contract of sale with Nassau in August 2008. On his disclosure form filed with the contract — titled “Disclosure of Those Affiliated with Nassau County” — Allan wrote “n/a” to the question of whether he held “any county, town or village public office in Nassau County.”

“If they would have asked ‘do you hold a job in government,’ I would have immediately put yes, because you can’t hide stuff like that,” Allan said.

County legislative committees and the full legislature each approved the purchase unanimously in December 2008, with no mention of Allan’s connections at any of the meetings, transcripts show.

By that point the economy had cratered and the value of all land had decreased. But Suozzi aides told legislators they believed they were getting a “good deal,” citing the first $700,000 appraisal, which at that point was more than a year old.

Then-Legis. Dave Denenberg, who chaired the planning, development and environment committee, asked Suozzi’s deputy real estate director, Sean Rainey, if he felt comfortable with the $600,000 sale price, wondering if the land had devalued even beyond the $550,000 appraised in early 2008.

“I feel comfortable with that number, because it was discounted enough where I don’t think it would make much of a difference,” Rainey replied, according a meeting transcript.

The deal wouldn’t close for another year — Dec. 30, 2009, two months after Glen Cove granted Allan the subdivision he needed to complete the sale.

“It bothers me, but we didn’t know,” said Denenberg — who left office in 2015 after a federal mail fraud conviction related to his private legal work — of voting for the deal without being informed of Allan’s county job. “We were trying to prevent that stuff all along, but if the people who knew didn’t disclose it, that was a problem.”

Allan, who lost his county position on the first day of the Mangano administration, now lives in the family home.

He said neither he nor Suozzi did anything wrong because he didn’t directly deal with Suozzi in the process, while citing the advisory committee as legitimately choosing his property for environmental reasons.

Suozzi declined to comment on specific bond act transactions.

“Tom is no fool,” Allan said. “Mr. Suozzi realized that when you spend this kind of money, you have to have checks and balances in place. Otherwise corruption will be rampant.”

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Do you have information on any other sites purchased under Nassau’s environmental bond acts that remain obscured, hidden or lack sufficient public access? Contact Paul LaRocco at (631) 843-2736 or paul.larocco@newsday.com.

Nassau County’s environmental bond act program, which dedicated $100 million to open space preservation, saved scores of acres of pristine land that could have been vulnerable to development.

Though several purchases – including those from politically connected sellers – were never fully enhanced for public access, as promised, there were others where the public benefit appears to be uncompromised.

“I don’t want the public to be left with the impression they got screwed, because I don’t believe that,” said Citizens Campaign for the Environment executive director Adrienne Esposito, who served on the advisory committees that recommended open space purchases to then-County Executive Thomas Suozzi and the county legislature.

“I really feel this was an immensely successful program for Nassau County residents that leaves a better environmental legacy,” she said.

Voters approved the bond acts in 2004 and 2006. Between 2006 and 2012, Nassau closed on 23 properties totaling about 300 acres that the committees had recommended, using criteria such as size, connection to existing preserves and importance to groundwater supply.

Today, many are widely cited as successes:

• The preservation of some of Nassau’s last remaining working farms. Under the first environmental bond act, the county spent $4.3 million on development rights to the 8.5-acre Meyer’s Farm in Woodbury and, in the second, bought the former 5-acre Grossman’s Farm in Malverne for $6.5 million, and the 2.5-acre Fruggie’s Farm in East Meadow for $2.1 million. The latter two have since been contracted out to nonprofits for continued operation.
• The purchase of, or securing of development rights to, two portions of the Boegner Estate in Old Westbury. For $6.2 million, Nassau ensured that 47 acres would be preserved alongside Old Westbury Gardens’ existing 160 acres. The deal received legislative approval shortly before the 2006 death of the landowner, heiress Margaret Phipps Boegner, who had opened the nonprofit Gardens on the larger part of her family’s expansive grounds.
• The acquisition of a Brookville horse farm, known as Old Mill, to ensure more affordable equestrian programs for all county residents, “not just for the select few,” as officials put it at the time. Nassau spent $12.1 million for the 40-acre site and has since contracted with a private company to run the renamed Nassau Equestrian Center.

Cynthia Cooper, a former Lakeview civic activist who served on the advisory committees, recalls researching the Old Mill property’s history and learning it was once a part of the Underground Railroad system that helped African-American slaves in the 1800s make their way into free states.

“It was one of the properties that really stuck with me,” Cooper said. “It had historical significance other than it being just a horse stable.”

The county also acquired land that helped connect a Mill Neck nature preserve with an existing Japanese stroll garden. It joined with the North Shore Land Alliance, the Oyster Bay nonprofit that played a significant role in the process, and a private investor to preserve a 60-acre field in Old Brookville.

That site had previously been owned by Banfi Vinters, but is now dedicated for use by local farmers.

The vista of rolling farmland over the horizon has become an attraction for visitors to nearby Youngs Farm, a popular purveyor of fresh produce and pies.

“That could be the poster child for what works in government,” the multigenerational farm’s owner, Paula Youngs Weir, said as she looked out the window of her farmstand shop.

One is a chicken farmer. The other was a clammer.

Each ran his long-standing family business at Nassau County’s poles: Lattingtown on the North Shore and Point Lookout along the South Shore.

And each once had interest, they said, in selling their properties to the county for preservation.

But under the county environmental bond programs, neither made the cut for receiving some of the $100 million that was dedicated to open space acquisitions.

Just why remains a matter of dispute. But both landowners — Eddie Armstrong of Armstrong Farm and Bob Doxsee Jr. of the former Doxsee Clams — were not connected in the way several sellers were, either as regular political contributors (they have combined to give $150 since 2006, none to a county office holder) or through ties to the advocacy group that pushed for many of the properties.

“I came out feeling like they didn’t want me,” said Armstrong, 83, who sells eggs from the roughly 500 chickens he raises on his Lattingtown property, a former dairy farm. “It takes the wind out of your sails.”

After the two bond acts passed in 2004 and 2006, more than 200 properties were nominated for preservation. An advisory committee of environmentalists, civic leaders and political appointees ultimately recommended about three dozen for purchase, including Armstrong’s eight-acre property and Doxsee’s half-acre parcel along Reynolds Channel.

They were among the 13 properties nominated by the bond act advisory committees that weren’t purchased.

Some, like an old power plant site in Glenwood Landing and land held by a private water company in Roosevelt that had been envisioned for a park, were simple cases of the owners being unwilling to sell, while sale of a former manufacturing site in Port Washington North fell through when a partnership with the village and North Hempstead Town broke down. A 40-acre site in Old Westbury, once owned by the Solomon Schechter Day School, had just been sold to a developer months before the county funding came through.

Why the Armstrong and Doxsee deals never materialized depends on whom you ask.

Armstrong’s land in bucolic Lattingtown village sits on the Special Groundwater Protection Area and abuts an existing nature preserve, much like the pieces of North Shore estates that the county prioritized. But Armstrong said he never felt as if the county was serious about buying his land for open space.

“They didn’t try very hard,” he said.

His property was recommended for purchase by the county advisory committees in both 2006 and 2007. But Armstrong said officials never made him an offer.

He said he recalled attending a meeting in Mineola, when officials first announced sites that had been recommended for purchase. He said then-County Executive Thomas Suozzi also once talked to him.

“Then nothing happened.”

Suozzi, a Glen Cove Democrat who now represents the 3rd Congressional District, declined to comment on specific transactions. But Lisa Ott, a member of the bond act advisory committee and president and CEO of the North Shore Land Alliance — the nonprofit that was the driving force behind many of the open space deals — disputes Armstrong’s recollection.

“We tried so hard on that one but Eddie Armstrong was just bound and determined,” Ott said.

She said Nassau was primarily interested in buying development rights to the six open acres of Armstrong’s land behind his chicken farm, but Armstrong said no to those terms.

Later, when Armstrong was more interested in the county’s proposal, Ott said, “there wasn’t enough money left.”

Armstrong said he recalls being told there wasn’t money left, but disputes that there was ever a point where he wasn’t interested, or interested only in a transaction the county didn’t want.

“No, I was always really interested,” he said in response. “They never offered me anything.”

Doxsee also said the county never engaged in strong negotiation.

At just a half-acre, his property overlooking Reynolds Channel in Point Lookout was one of the smallest parcels recommended for preservation. But it was zoned for as many homes as a 25-acre site in Mill Neck, owned by a Suozzi campaign contributor, that the county purchased for $8 million.

Its history as home to a beloved clamming business for more than 75 years also had many convinced of its worth, perhaps as a museum.

“I was disappointed,” Doxsee, 87, said in an interview. “I was open to it.”

Superstorm Sandy in 2012 ravaged what remained of Doxsee’s business, and he went on to sell the land to developers, who have since put up three single-family homes with backyard bay access.

“I guess it wasn’t a priority,” said County Legis. Denise Ford, a Long Beach Democrat who caucuses with Republicans, who had nominated the property for purchase. “It didn’t work and it was a heartbreak for me.”

She said she didn’t know the precise reason the property was never strongly pursued but said she suspected that the Suozzi administration was “trying to get the most for the money they were spending,” and focused on larger North Shore parcels.

Ott said she “wasn’t really involved” in negotiations for the Doxsee site. She recalled that “it was really supported by the community” and said she thought that the county “just couldn’t strike a deal.”

Still, Ford said it was disappointing that Doxsee did not get stronger consideration, seeing how little of the land preserved was in central Nassau or on the South Shore.

Nearly 95 percent of the roughly 300 acres preserved under the program was on the North Shore, where most of the available land is located.

“When you look at it, it was an unequal distribution of the money, in my mind,” Ford said.

Nearly 95 percent of the land preserved under Nassau County’s environmental bond acts was located on the North Shore – much of it portions of estates in exclusive Oyster Bay villages.

All involved in the program acknowledge that there was simply more available open space on the North Shore, since most in the more densely populated central and southern portions of the county were already preserved as state or municipal parkland.

But some argue that the split might have been slightly less disproportionate if the role of one advocacy group hadn’t loomed so large in the results.

The North Shore Land Alliance, a nonprofit formed in 2003, not only lobbied for passage of the 2004 and 2006 county bond acts – putting more than $200,000 into a political action committee that promoted the latter referendum – its members also nominated properties that were purchased with some of the $100 million in dedicated open space funds, and it had representation on the advisory committees that ultimately recommended those properties.

“They had a lot of influence,” said Victor Consiglio, a former South Shore resident who volunteered in waterway cleanup efforts and served on one of the bond act advisory committees. “There was pressure to try and get these bigger pieces up on the North Shore. The threat was: If we don’t buy it, the owners were going to sell it to developers.”

The bond act advisory committees were primarily appointed by then-County Executive Thomas Suozzi, a Glen Cove Democrat who now represents the 3rd Congressional District. They included Land Alliance president and CEO Lisa Ott and several of the nonprofit’s board of trustees or advisory board members.

After the county’s environmental bond committee recommended its first set of properties for purchase in March 2006, the Land Alliance chairman, Carter Bales of Centre Island, and vice chairman, Luis Rinaldini of Old Westbury, gave Suozzi’s 2006 failed gubernatorial campaign a combined $4,500 over the next four months, records show. In the years since, they and their families have given his county executive and congressional campaigns another nearly $17,000 in total.

“I simply thought Tom was the best candidate for the job,” Bales said in an email, adding that Suozzi, to his memory, never solicited a campaign contribution.

Rinaldini said in an interview that he had supported Suozzi long before the bond acts: He met him in Glen Cove, before Suozzi was first elected the city’s mayor in the early 1990s, and although he is a Republican he consistently backed the Democrat’s campaigns both before he was elected Nassau County executive and his subsequent bids for higher office.

“Politicians get forced into certain things they can’t avoid: fundraising, etcetera,” Rinaldini said. “But at the end of the day there are some that are better than others, and Tom is one of those that, universally, he genuinely is better than others.”

A Land Alliance advisory board member at the time, attorney Peter MacKinnon, represented at various times, five landowners in their open space deals with the county, worth a combined $34.6 million.

MacKinnon, who has served as the village attorney for a number of North Shore villages, said in an email that he was referred to those sellers by a variety of sources, including a county real estate negotiator he had worked with on a prior deal. He said he inherited others from a former law partner, but did not cite the Land Alliance as a factor.

Still, one county bond act advisory committee member said he felt the Land Alliance “had a very large influence” on the program.

“They seemed to be rewarding certain people, and the benefit to residents and the taxpayers that were funding this was not necessarily realized as it should and could have been,” said Dan McCloy, who served on the committees as representative of the county legislature’s then-GOP minority.

Suozzi declined to speak in detail about the bond acts. But in a brief interview, he characterized the property vetting as “a rigorous process with an independent committee of respected environmentalists.”

According to an internal list of nominations under the second bond act, provided to Newsday by a person involved with the bond act advisory committee, the committee gave its top “A” ranking to 25 properties on the North Shore, encompassing more than 800 acres, and to 21 properties in the central or southern parts of the county, totaling about 120 acres.

Ultimately, the committee formally recommended purchase of 16 of the 25 top-rated North Shore properties, or 64 percent, but did the same for just 8 of the 21 top-rated properties elsewhere in the county, or 38 percent.

Ott, who was seen by other members as having the most knowledge of available land, said the advisory committee seriously reviewed all nominations over many months, after months of soliciting public input.

But it became clear, she said, that the land on the North Shore – much of which was in a state designated Special Groundwater Protection Area – provided the best ecological benefit and the best value, as land prices in parts of the county where denser development was allowed were much higher.

“You can buy one acre on the South Shore that might cost $2 million or you could buy 10 acres in the middle of the Special Groundwater Protection Area that costs $2 million,” Ott said. “So which is going to do the most good?”

Though the Land Alliance can acquire land for preservation on its own through purchase or gift, providing tax benefits to the owners, it found public purchase a better alternative.

“NSLA realized early on that many people could not afford to donate their land for conservation purposes,” the Land Alliance wrote in a 2006 newsletter. “As a result, we worked hard in 2004 to get the Nassau County Environmental Bond Program on the ballot and passed.”

Cynthia Cooper, a former Lakeview civic activist who served on both advisory committees and was involved in local Democratic politics, didn’t fault the North Shore Land Alliance. She said she was impressed by the natural beauty of a lot of the sites the group championed and said it was simply the “more proactive” of organizations involved in the process.

“They were ready when the money came through,” said Cooper, who worked to get some bond act funding for park improvements in minority communities such as Lakeview and Roosevelt. “When people are conscious of what’s happening in their community, they’re going to make out better than we are.”

After 300 newly protected acres were bought under Nassau County’s two landmark Environmental Bond Acts, officials and program backers planned for welcome booths and walking trails, kayak launches and well-placed benches for contemplation.

“The only thing that I envision is to make it accessible to the public,” Tom Maher, environmental coordinator for then-County Executive Thomas Suozzi, told county legislators in July 2006, when the first six acquisitions were approved. “It’s the public that purchased these properties.”

More than a decade later, many of these plans haven’t materialized, a Newsday investigation has found, leaving the county with a hidden landscape of pristine open spaces that many of its residents never use and may not even know exist – though they continue to pay for it.

At one site, an Eagle Scout was responsible for the only substantial improvements: a small strip of fencing and a single gravel parking spot cut onto a narrow road shoulder.

At another, the modest county sign noting its public preservation disappeared for years.

At a third, a “Dead End” warning is posted on a chain-link fence blocking entry.

“There’s no real money to even patrol and keep an eye on these,” said Richard Schary, vice chairman of the county’s Open Space and Parks Advisory Committee, which reviewed environmental bond purchases.

The absence of once-promised markers, promotion and amenities affects about a third of the acres that Nassau spent $100 million on between 2006 and 2012, using bond proceeds voters approved in two referendums.

Some of the acquisitions extended nature preserves that had existed for decades, or kept the county’s last farms running and needed little in the way of enhancement.

But much of the newly created public green space – some of which was bought from people with ties to county politics, the property selection process or both – is marked by what isn’t there, starting with prominent entry points and informational kiosks.

County officials once estimated that these improvements would have cost less than $300,000 but later said a general lack of funds and resistance from environmentalists scuttled the plans. They also alluded to opposition to access enhancements from the people who had long held the properties, primarily pieces of tucked-away North Shore estates sold to Nassau for prices that sometimes eclipsed county appraisals or market value assessments.

“We went over and above to make sure every property would have access, and we got some pushback, believe it or not, from the families,” said Sean Rainey, the deputy real estate director under Suozzi who advocated for some of the never-realized plans, such as heavier promotion.

He recalled that he once had put up signs pointing visitors from an existing county preserve to newly acquired land across the street. Area residents who rode horses there, he said he believes, took them down.

“They didn’t like the fact the public was accessing the property that they felt they had a right to,” Rainey said.

Daniel Press, a professor of environmental studies at the University of California Santa Cruz, who has written extensively on government land preservation, said there is a higher chance of public disillusionment with open space programs that don’t strike the right balance between protecting sensitive parcels and making them known and accessible.

“If the public doesn’t feel like they have access to those big pieces – if they are remote or the recreational opportunities are not very good – then they feel resentful,” Press said. “The thought is, ‘We spent all this money, and we don’t have access here.'”

Suozzi, a Democrat who served as county executive from 2002 to 2009 – and now represents the 3rd Congressional District – declined to speak in detail about the bond acts, including property access issues. His political adviser, Kim Devlin, issued a statement that, in part, said the program “enabled the county to protect its precious resources from development and environmental degradation.”

Other bond issue backers built on that point, noting that access improvements and other issues should be considered secondary to ensuring that ecologically sensitive land is never developed.

“The idea was to preserve what’s left and I think we accomplished that,” said Adrienne Esposito, the Citizens Campaign for the Environment executive director who also served on the county advisory committees that recommended parcels for purchase. “The subject of access can always be taken up. It’s not lost.”

The process laid out by the bond act referendums required parcels to be nominated to -and then recommended for purchase by – the advisory committees largely appointed by the county executive. Suozzi’s office signed off on the recommendations after obtaining approval from the county’s Planning Commission and Open Space and Parks Advisory Committee. As a last step, a supermajority of the county legislature had to vote in favor of each deal.

The advisory committees gave priority to potential open space purchases located in a special groundwater protection area, near existing preserves or under development pressure. Their report, however, also specifically noted that “accessibility to the public” was among the most important considerations for recommended parcels.

Lisa Ott, president and CEO of the North Shore Land Alliance, the Oyster Bay nonprofit that lobbied for the referendums and was involved in the property selection process, said access was always a goal. But she argued that the most important aspect was protecting land.

“The Democrats and Republicans came together,” Ott said, noting the unanimous approval of all bond act purchases by the 19-member county legislature as a rarity in Nassau politics. “They did something good for the future of Long Island and it was one of those brief and shining moments when the clouds aligned.”

Access plan stalls

The bond acts that passed overwhelmingly in 2004 and 2006 created $150 million in dedicated environmental funding; about $50 million was earmarked primarily for park and storm-water improvements. The rest was used for open space preservation through the acquisition of land or development rights.

Nearly all of that money was spent under Suozzi.

The timing of Suozzi’s surprise loss to Republican Edward Mangano in 2009 left many of the administration’s access promises – stated generally during public legislative meetings – unfulfilled. Staff under Mangano at first attempted to pick up the torch, in specific detail.

In 2011, county parks, public works and real estate officials jointly drafted an enhanced public access proposal that would have installed entryway kiosks, with maps and other information about the land, at 10 sites purchased with bond act funds, “proper signage” at nine sites, decorative post-and-rail fencing around the property boundaries at four sites and allocated money for surveys for new trails at three sites.

The so-called “Nassau County Open Space Plan,” never formally released but obtained by Newsday from the county, was developed “to find ways to better utilize” bond act purchases and “assure that these properties are accessible to residents.”

After asserting that some properties, such as the working farms, didn’t lend themselves to any improvements, the report concluded: “The county believes that the improvements described in this plan strike a balance between preservation of open space, accessibility to residents of Nassau County and wisely using the county’s financial resources.”

An engineering firm drew up proposals for some of the work, estimating its cost at $238,000.

At that point, nearly all of the open space funds had been used. The last transaction would come a year later, in 2012, when Mangano negotiated a deal to buy 4.2 acres of the old Brooklyn Water Works property in Freeport for $6.2 million. The property was owned by the influential developer and Oheka Castle owner Gary Melius, a Mangano friend who gave him thousands of dollars in campaign contributions.

In paying Melius $3.5 million more for his land than its highest appraisal by the Suozzi administration, Mangano’s office was in line with the figures reached by its appraisers. But the higher price led to $4.5 million being taken from what little remained of the bond acts’ acquisition funds. So the county then tapped a separate open space account for the additional $1.7 million balance, taking more than half of what was available there at the time.

Mangano, who left office at the end of last year, recently stood trial on unrelated federal corruption charges, with the case ending in a mistrial. His attorney did not respond to a request for comment.

Of the proposed access plan drafted in 2011, Brian Schneider, who worked on it for Mangano and now serves as a deputy county executive for his successor, Democrat Laura Curran, said: “It just kind of withered. I don’t think we really had clear direction.

“Some people had strong opinions about it [getting done], other people were like, ‘This needs to be left alone.'”

Today, Nassau has agreements with the Land Alliance for basic maintenance and upkeep of some sites.

In explaining the lobbying she sometimes had to do to persuade estate owners to sell land to the county, Ott acknowledged the mindset that caused pushback to access.

“It was a risk for people to sell their land to the government. They didn’t know if tour buses…” she said, her thought trailing off. “They were fearful.”

‘People’s backyards’

During legislative discussion on the 11-acre old-growth forest in Glen Cove dubbed “Red Spring Woods,” some lawmakers, led by then-Planning, Development and Environment Committee chairman Dave Denenberg, said they were uncomfortable with the property’s location within a ring of residential homes.

He called the preserve, in essence, “people’s backyards.”

“If we’re protecting your backyard, it better be open,” Denenberg, in an interview, recalled telling Suozzi administration officials.

The lawmaker – who left office in 2015 after his guilty plea to federal mail fraud charges related to his private law firm work – extracted pledges that they’d eventually provide signage, parking, a clear entryway and marked trails at the Glen Cove site and others.

“That’s the intent to do with all of the properties, create trail maps so people can access the properties,” Maher repeated in 2008. “But it takes a little time to put it together.”

At Red Spring Woods, the county only erected a small sign noting the land’s preservation as open space – one in which Suozzi’s name was later plated over with that of his successor, Mangano. A narrow gravel cutout on the shoulder of the road, barely enough for a single car, and a small strip of post-and-rail fence were put in not by Nassau, but by the Eagle Scout.

New, marked trails were never cut through the property and an informational kiosk, including a map, was never placed at the entryway. And walking onto the property, with little designation of its boundaries, feels akin to trespassing onto people’s backyards.

One yard belongs to Gordon Allan, who was Suozzi’s special assistant in the county personnel office at the time he sold 1.77 acres of his family’s land to the county for $600,000, to extend the initial 9-acre Red Spring Woods purchase.

The most significant completed aspects of the county’s 2011 access plan were small gravel parking lots installed, at costs of roughly $37,000 each, at the 25-acre Mill Neck property that was split from the estate of Adele Smithers, the philanthropist who had been a campaign contributor to Suozzi; and at the 29-acre Red Cote Preserve in Oyster Bay Cove, put together with parts of the three estates owned by Land Alliance financial backers and the ex-in-laws of Suozzi’s onetime deputy planning commissioner, Katie Schwab.

Rainey, the deputy real estate director under Suozzi, advocated for the parking lots and said the one at Red Cote Preserve, especially, received “pushback” from residents and officials of exclusive Oyster Bay Cove, which has a population of roughly 2,000 people and a median household income of $250,000, according to census figures.

“They didn’t want a parking lot there. We said, ‘You have to. You have to put access to the public,'” he recalled.

But most residents wouldn’t know the parking lot exists, because at the preserve’s most visible frontage point – the corner of Route 25A and Yellow Cote Road – the only sign is for a private school a half-mile up the road. The sign there that noted the county land’s preservation has been missing for at least six years.

The preserve’s parking lot also long had no sign indicating its public ownership – until a small one was placed there in late May, following Newsday inquiries.

“It kind of annoys me, because that’s publicly preserved land,” Rainey said.

Thomas Pulling, a Suozzi campaign and Land Alliance contributor who sold 16 acres of his family’s land to the county for $6.5 million – making up the largest portion of the Red Cote Preserve – said he and his sister, who sold a smaller portion of land toward it, “never would or have discouraged use of the property.”

However, he added: “Kiosks and signs and fencing would be sort of the counter to the fact that open space really needs to look as natural as possible.”

Within the last month, officials for the first time placed a small informational kiosk – featuring a map and description of the site’s meadow and woodland wildlife – at the foot of the parking lot.

At Red Spring Woods, residents who supported the land’s preservation say its value as a site of quiet recreation is unfulfilled, as its lack of parking or delineation and its location in a residential neighborhood removed from any main county thoroughfares discourages wider public use.

“As far as being a benefit to the county at large, I’d probably say no,” said David Nieri, a Glen Cove resident who designed a website for the Coalition to Save Red Spring Woods, a local group that pushed for its preservation. “The only benefit I saw is that it’s one additional parcel of woods that won’t be developed.”

“Most people don’t even know about that spot,” said Rainey, who produced a pamphlet advertising county open space acquisitions that never received prominent display or distribution.

In addition, neither Red Spring Woods nor Red Cote are listed among county operated preserves on the county’s website.

‘You can hop a fence’

The county’s 2011 draft access plan also proposed drawing attention to a 3.4-acre cluster of wetlands on a peninsula in Baldwin Harbor. Nassau bought the lots composing the site for $4.8 million using bond act funds.

The report proposed prominent signage and an informational kiosk. Advocates for the purchase said they once envisioned a public kayak launch.

Today, however, it is fenced off from public access, with a “Dead End” sign at the end of the residential block it sits on. Even the small, ceremonial sign marking its preservation as open space is blocked and obscured.

“You can hop a fence and go through there,” said Schneider, noting that the barrier was erected, at a cost of $12,710, because of concerns from residents who live at the end of the block about parking, security and maintenance. “There really isn’t that much to see.”

But in 2006, when Maher was pitching legislators on acquisition of the bulk of the property, he noted adjacent land already owned by Nassau, saying, “we could build onto that and really make it into something that is attractive and very useful to the residents of Nassau County on the South Shore.”

Jimmy Vilardi, the developer who held the majority of the Baldwin Harbor lots – before selling them for $4 million to the county after his luxury housing proposal hit resident opposition – said he no longer has a vested interest in what happens there. But he said the vistas from the site across the bay made it worthy to try to provide access to.

“It’s a beautiful piece. Totally open bay,” said Vilardi, an elected Republican Town of Hempstead sanitary district commissioner who also serves as chairman of the county bridge authority. “It would be nice if they set these things up for some public use.”

A one-acre plot of wetlands along a canal in Seaford, purchased in 2008 for $635,000, runs parallel to the county’s Cedar Creek Park on one side and is surrounded by homes on the other. Ott called it a “beautiful, serene spot where you can [imagine] a bench, and people walking.”

“And there were lots and lots of birds there the day we visited,” she said, noting how she envisioned the property would be appreciated. “There was just nothing there that was really undeveloped and gave people a place to sit and reflect and ponder.”

Like the other properties, however, the county never installed an entry kiosk or the decorative fencing around its borders. Today, “No Trespassing” signs are posted on utility poles along the curb, while the lack of clear signage and a thick wall of overgrown brush suggests no real access point to the waterside strip.

“So what did we accomplish?” said Victor Consiglio, a former Massapequa resident who volunteered in local waterways cleanup efforts and served on one of the county advisory committees that recommended bond act purchases. “We helped the landowner.”

Gary Carlton, an attorney and North Woodmere civic activist who served on the same advisory committee, took the opposite viewpoint: “I think in a lot of ways it was more important that the county just preserve this for the environmental purpose, rather than think it was going to be a big public access space.”

Schneider, who inherited management of some of the open space purchases after they were finalized, said he could see both points of view but noted that county officials could have more clearly and explicitly drawn up access plans before closing on deals.

Many deals were rushed through in a matter of months, with environmentalists warning that prospective sellers would turn to developers if Nassau didn’t act with urgency.

“They just did it,” Schneider said. “There was no wherewithal of thought of the next step.”

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Do you have information on any other sites purchased under Nassau’s environmental bond acts that remain obscured, hidden or lack sufficient public access? Contact Paul LaRocco at (631) 843-2736 or paul.larocco@newsday.com.