From the street, County Storm Drainage Basin #132 in Garden City Park isn’t much to look at (if you notice it at all). Driving along Denton Avenue, the chances are your view of the chain link fence and faded green sign that mark the property will be almost completely blocked by a line of trucks parked on the street across from their rental shop.
Get out and walk between the trucks and the fence and you probably still won’t be overly impressed by the overgrown tangle of weeds, the impenetrable line of ragged-looking trees a few feet in and the selection of shopping bags, soda bottles and candy wrappers. If you were to leave at that point, and that was your lasting impression of the property (essentially a sump), no one could blame you. There are, after all, hundreds upon hundreds of such parcels of land tucked away in residential and business areas all over Long Island—untidy, unkempt properties that exist only to filter storm runoff, byproducts of nearby developments, a necessary evil. Who really cares what they look like?
That question certainly appealed to members of the Garden City Park Civic Association, an organization that applied for permission for dual-usage of the property in August of 2007, seeking to utilize the sump as a bird sanctuary. The idea occurred after Stephen Cipot—a local resident and Civic Association member—found that beyond the frontage and the trash, the site had the potential to be turned into something that could benefit both the environment and the local community. Behind the trees on the 4.7-acre property, completely hidden from the street, there is a natural basin, complete with its own ecosystem that had the potential to be a wetland conservation area, which, if properly maintained, could improve the quality of water being released from the sump, and help to lure bird species to it.
In addition to being a place many domestic songbirds call home, Long Island is an important stop-off point on the Atlantic flyway—the migratory route for birds that summer in Canada, but fly to South America in the winter months. Faced with an ever-decreasing number of safe resting points along the way, it is getting harder for the birds to maintain population numbers—one factor (along with cats and power lines) that has seen the populations of some domestic songbirds decline by much as 90 percent.
With an estimated 700 sumps throughout Nassau County alone, there are thousands of acres of land that do nothing but wait for the next rainstorm to fill the overflow pipes. It’s not too much of a stretch to think they could serve as public green spaces at the same time. And bear in mind, this is on Long Island—a part of the world where land is so scarce that build-out is projected by 2015.
The idea for a sanctuary at County Basin #132 was inspired by the work of Robert Alvey at the nearby Garden City Bird Sanctuary, which he has been running since 1995. That facility served as the pilot for the dual-usage scheme in Nassau County and the idea has since been adapted to other properties including a passive park in East Meadow, recreational fields for schools and another landmark bird sanctuary in Floral Park.
It was Alvey’s project that convinced the Civic Association in Garden City Park to submit a request in March 2007 for $458,000 in funding from the $10 million Nassau County Environmental Bond Act. Finding out they were in the running to be granted funds, the group then submitted a request for dual-usage of the sump to the county in August. Since then, however, the group’s plans have stuck. No ruling has yet been reached on the dual-usage proposal and the leadership of the Civic Association has changed from the group that made the original proposals to the county. The request for funding, meanwhile, had to be scaled back to $56,000 to keep it in the running.
Finally, in February, the group received some long-awaited good news. Their modified request for funding had been accepted. While the award will be enough to fund the wetland component of the envisaged project (should that be deemed to be the highest priority when the funds are received), other elements—like walkways and nicer fencing—will have to happen on a slower scale. And that, of course, depends on the county granting permission for dual-usage of the site—something that, at the time of writing, still had not occurred. Should that happen, the group will be able to get on with the job of rounding up enough voluntary labor to carry out as much of the work as cheaply as possible—an eventuality it has long been prepared for.
“This can only be what people want to make it,” Stephen Cipot told me when he showed me around the basin back in July. Envisioning the site as a focal point for the community, where Eagle scouts and high school groups carry out improvement projects, he added, “The more people who become active in it, the better it will be for the community.”
Having toured the site and seen the scale of the work the group was proposing, I was skeptical of how much of the labor the community would be prepared to carry out—4.7 acres is a sizeable chunk of land, after all. That was before I met Robert Alvey. As he showed me round the Garden City Bird Sanctuary, I realized how much could be done with just a shoestring budget and a handful of volunteers.
Alvey’s sanctuary is located in County Basin #232, just a mile down Denton Avenue from Basin #132, and it occupies nine of the twelve acres of that property (the other three are used as soccer fields). At almost twice the size of the proposed Garden City Park Sanctuary, Alvey’s site encompasses two enormous storm drains that empty all manner of trash into its two basins along with the water whenever it rains. That fact alone greatly increases a reliance on volunteers from the local high schools—a typical rainstorm will bring in thousands of plastic bottles, soda cans and the like that can take days to clean up. Yet he keeps doing it and the volunteers keep coming back. They’ve done other things too—built a gazebo on the property, helped him to establish an area of native grassland on the site and checked visitor numbers on weekends.
The community has rallied at Alvey’s sanctuary and he’s turned it from an overgrown, trash-filled hole in the ground into a beautiful nature reserve. And he’s not finished there. He’s submitted his own request for funding from the Environmental Bond, which, if granted, he intends to use to create a staged recharge area in the sump—basically a natural system that will force drainage water to sit above ground to allow plants and grasses to leach toxins out of it, allowing cleaner water to drain through the soil and back into the aquifer; yet another ecological benefit that can be squeezed from such a small patch of ground.
In the face of such a successful project, there is every reason to hope that similar efforts could be a success just along the road in Garden City Park, or in any of the 700 or so similar sumps anywhere else in Nassau County (not to mention Suffolk). All it takes, it would seem, is for enough people to want to make that difference. And the legislative process to help them along.