Dan's Papers - February 22, 2008 - The Hoot Owl Versus The Ski Mountain

Before I give you the chronology of events that has raised the hopes of Riverhead residents to the heights and then dropped these hopes into the depths of hell, I would like to ask you a question.

If an endangered bird, never before seen in your town, landed on a tree branch there for a few moments to catch its breath and then fluttered away, would you say that land should be protected from development?

How about if an endangered bird, never before seen in town, were to waddle around for 24 hours before leaving? How about if it did it for a week?

Maybe you know where I am going with this.

Here are the emotions that the longtime Supervisor of Riverhead, Phil Cardinale, has gone through during the last two months.

Elation. After years and years, the Town of Riverhead cuts a deal with a European building consortium to create a complex to rival Disneyland on 755 acres at the site of a former military air base in Calverton. The highlight will be a 40-story-tall mountain, inside of which you can ski twelve months a year. There will also be, where a 5,500-foot military runway currently is, a beautiful lake.

Boundless Elation. Money changes hands. To buy the property, the consortium pays $155 million, which is three times the town's entire annual budget. The plans show something that will cost $2 billion or more. They say they will break ground in two years. And after it opens Riverhead is to be cut in on the profits, which would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars per year range.

Triumph. Cardinale and staff plan to spend money on a $100 million parking garage in downtown Riverhead five miles away. They will clean up the waterfront. Create a park there. Build a "gateway" building. Writing on tablecloths and napkins and coffee cups, they manage, in a week, to spend probably double what they will take in. Riverhead will be the town of the future.

Puzzlement. It is reported that a short-eared hoot owl, which is endangered, has been spotted on the property. If this is true, there will be problems. "Where did this hoot owl come from?" Cardinale asks, looking around suspiciously.

Disbelief. Cardinale suggests that the hoot owl was photographed somewhere else but pasted on a picture of here. He suggests that perhaps the short-eared hoot owl had been in somebody's pocket, if it were small enough to fit in somebody's pocket, and at midnight placed at the site.

Amazement. Cardinale learns that bird watchers have known for years that short-eared hoot owls, along with several other endangered species such as northern harriers and marsh hawks, fly down to Long Island to forage for six weeks or so in the wintertime among the tall grasses that exist here. After they are done, they fly away.

Anger. Cardinale, upon learning that the DEC wants access to the property to see if there are any other short-eared hoot owls on the land, replies, "Before I would consider permitting access to the site, I would want them to explain how they got access to obtain the data they already have." The next day a TV station shows a whole bunch of short-eared hoot owls flying around and nibbling on tall grass where the two military runways meet up. (The second runway will be jack hammered into pieces, carried away and replaced by a hotel, condominium, sky chalet village and convention center complex.)

We lower the curtain on Cardinale so he can have a little privacy while he experiences grief.

Hope. The developers say they will make every accommodation to the short-eared hoot owl to see to it that it is just fine. Lawyers say that Riverhead does not necessarily have to cede jurisdiction of this property to the DEC about anything and everything. And someone suggests that Cardinale hire an outside source to see what creatures really are there at Calverton.

Trish Pelkowski, the director of the Pine Barrens for the Nature Conservancy of Long Island, said, "If Cardinale wants an outside source, he needs to get out there in the next few weeks, because the birds typically leave Long Island in late February or March for upstate breeding grounds."

What happens if next week the New York State Historical Society discovers that George Washington slept on this site in Calverton?

He encamped there for a week. The site has to be preserved. No, it turns out he was just here for a day. And he didn't sleep. Or maybe he just stopped for a minute and took a little fifteen-minute nap before moving on.