New York
Lee E. Koppelman, Trailblazing Long Island Planner, Dies at 94
Lee E. Koppelman, a planning visionary who throughout 4 many years fought to impose a regional agenda for financial improvement and environmental conservation throughout Lengthy Island, died on Monday in Stony Brook, N.Y. He was 94.
His loss of life, at Stony Brook College Hospital, was confirmed by his daughter Lesli Ross.
As the manager director of the Nassau-Suffolk Regional Planning Board from 1965 to 2006, Mr. Koppelman was instrumental in preserving tens of hundreds of acres of farmland and open area in Suffolk County, defending coastal wetlands and the underground water provide, creating Suffolk County’s park system and preserving the huge Pine Barrens forest.
“All these issues had been nicely forward of latest pondering on the time; now they’re taken as a right,” John V.N. Klein, a former Suffolk County government, informed The New York Occasions in 1999.
As an appointee beholden to elected county executives, Mr. Koppelman wielded little direct energy. However as a nonpartisan, if prickly, skilled planner, he gained the respect of politicians, preservationists and builders.
Over the course of his lengthy profession, he persuaded legislators to undertake an preliminary 2 % gross sales tax, which started grossing about $100 million yearly in 1970; warned that highway runoff was a main pollutant of aquifers and estuaries; and efficiently lobbied to increase the Lengthy Island Expressway and Dawn Freeway east towards the Hamptons.
When Mr. Koppelman resigned as government director in 2006, Mitchell H. Pally, vp of the Lengthy Island Affiliation, a enterprise and civic group, mentioned, “There’s been no another important to Lengthy Island within the final 40 years.”
The writer Robert A. Caro recalled encountering Mr. Koppelman first when he was a reporter for the Lengthy Island newspaper Newsday after which when he was researching his magisterial biography of Robert Moses, “The Energy Dealer” (1974).
Moses was a grasp builder who left a legacy of parks, expressways, public seashores and bridges. Mr. Koppelman was additionally a person of huge concepts, however extra of a grasp planner.
“I met only a few planners with such an excellent and farseeing ‘imaginative and prescient of grand scale and scope,’” Mr. Caro wrote in an electronic mail. “Amongst his many achievements, he was the main power within the institution by Suffolk County of a program to protect farmland — and Lengthy Island’s vanishing open areas — by having the county buy improvement rights.”
Whereas Mr. Koppelman survived partisan political upheavals on Lengthy Island, he was typically extra profitable at producing sturdy debate over his plans than at implementing them.
His ideas for a commuter rail line alongside the Lengthy Island Expressway, an funding in 100,000 inexpensive properties and residences, and a bridge or expanded ferry service throughout Lengthy Island Sound by no means received far past the drafting board.
He drafted 4 grasp plans for Lengthy Island, together with one in 1970 that crammed 60 volumes.
“There are two varieties of planners,” Frank DeRubeis, Smithtown’s planning chief, was quoted as saying in Lengthy Island Historical past Journal in 2009. One kind, he mentioned, “does the plan after which leaves it as much as the elected officers to both implement the plan or not”; the opposite “is a planner who completes the research after which makes use of every little thing of their energy to get the plan applied.” Mr. Koppelman, he mentioned, “was the latter of the 2.”
Lee Edward Koppelman was born on Might 19, 1927, in Manhattan and grew up in Astoria, Queens. His mother and father, Max and Madelyn (Eisenberg) Koppelman, owned a greenhouse in Queens and a flower store on Madison Avenue.
After graduating from Bryant Excessive College in Astoria, Mr. Koppelman joined the Navy in 1945, then earned a bachelor’s diploma in electrical engineering from Metropolis Faculty in 1950 and a grasp’s from Pratt Institute in 1964. He acquired a doctorate in public administration from New York College in 1970.
Along with his daughter Lesli, he’s survived by his spouse, Connie; three different kids, Claudia and Keith Koppelman and Laurel Heard; and three grandchildren.
In 1952 Mr. Koppelman, who owned a panorama structure enterprise, moved to Hauppauge, on Lengthy Island, the place he turned energetic in civic affairs. In 1960, the Suffolk County government, H. Lee Dennison, named him the county’s first planning director. He held that submit till 1988.
Together with serving as government director of the Regional Planning Board, he turned the director of the State College of New York at Stony Brook’s Heart for Regional Coverage Research in 1988.
He was the writer, with Joseph De Chiara, of “Website Planning Requirements” (1978) and “City Planning and Design Standards” (1982).
New York
Senator Menendez’s Resignation Letter
ROBERT MENENDEZ
NEW JERSEY
COMMITTEES:
BANKING, HOUSING, AND URBAN
AFFAIRS
FINANCE
FOREIGN RELATIONS
The Honorable Phil Murphy
Governor of New Jersey
Office of the Governor
Trenton, N.J. 08625
Dear Governor Murphy,
United States Senate
WASHINGTON, DC 20510-3005
July 23, 2024
528 SENATE HART OFFICE BUILDING
WASHINGTON, DC 20510
(202) 224-4744
210 HUDSON STREET
HARBORSIDE 3, SUITE #1000
JERSEY CITY, NJ 07311
(973) 645-3030
208 WHITE HORSE PIKE
SUITE 18-19
BARRINGTON, NJ 08007
(856) 757-5353
This is to advise you that I will be resigning from my office as the United States Senator from
New Jersey, effective on the close of business on August 20, 2024.
This will give time for my staff to transition to other possibilities, transfer constituent files that
are pending, allow for an orderly process to choose an interim replacement, and for me to close
out my Senate affairs.
While I fully intend to appeal the jury’s verdict, all the way and including to the Supreme Court,
I do not want the Senate to be involved in a lengthy process that will detract from its important
work. Furthermore, I cannot preserve my rights upon a successful appeal, because factual matters
before the ethics committee are not privileged. This is evidenced by the Committee’s Staff
Director and Chief Counsel being called to testify at my trial.
I am proud of the many accomplishments I’ve had on behalf of New Jersey, such as leading the
federal effort for Superstorm Sandy recovery, preserving and funding Gateway and leading the
federal efforts to help save our hospitals, State and municipalities, as well as New Jersey families
through a once in a century COVID pandemic. These successes led you, Governor, to call me the
“Indispensable Senator.”
I thank the citizens of New Jersey for the extraordinary privilege of representing them in the
United States Senate.
Sincerely,
Pabet Menang.
Robert Menendez
United States Senator
New Jersey
cc: The Honorable Kamala Harris, President of the Senate
The Honorable Ann Berry, Secretary of the Senate
New York
How Well Do You Know Literary Brooklyn?
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz celebrates Brooklyn and novels set around the bustling borough. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. Links to the books will be listed at the end of the quiz if you’d like to do further reading.
New York
See How Your Subway Service May Suffer Without Congestion Pricing
After Gov. Kathy Hochul halted New York City’s congestion pricing program last month, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority cut $16.5 billion worth of planned upgrades to the city’s vast transit network, mostly to account for the loss of funding that was tied to revenue from the toll.
Projects were cut from each part of New York City’s transit system, which is the largest in North America and is used by millions of people every day. The projects included elevator and ramp installations that would make subway stations accessible for people with disabilities, structural repairs to aging infrastructure and upgrades to 1930s-era signals that regularly cause delays.
Here are some of the subway projects the authority says it has shelved:
The cuts announced by the M.T.A. — the state agency that runs the subway, bus and commuter rail lines — will also affect transit outside the subway system. The authority has postponed the purchase of more than 250 electric buses and charging infrastructure at bus depots, as well as upgrades to regional rails and a ramp reconstruction on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.
The $12 billion remaining in the M.T.A.’s capital funds will be spent on projects the authority considers the most urgent, like track replacements and repairs to power substations. It will also replace some of the “least reliable” subway and railway cars, the authority said in a report.
All told, there are 92 subway stations that will not get planned improvements, including 22 stations that will not get new elevators or ramps; 10 that will not get upgrades like structural repairs, platform replacements and new barriers between platforms and tracks; and 71 that will not get upgrades to their public announcement systems.
Below is a list of the subway stations where upgrades have been put on hold, based on what the M.T.A. has detailed so far:
Projects on hold at 41 stations in Brooklyn:
Union St R
- upgrade to public announcement system
4 Av-9 St R
- upgrade to public announcement system
36 St D N R
- upgrade to public announcement system
59 St N R
- upgrade to public announcement system
Bergen St F G
- upgrade to public announcement system
15 St-Prospect Park F G
- upgrade to public announcement system
Church Av F G
- upgrade to public announcement system
Avenue X F
- upgrade to public announcement system
Neptune Av F
- upgrade to public announcement system
- elevator or ramp installation
- platform or waiting area replacement
Jay St-MetroTech A C F
- upgrade to public announcement system
Hoyt-Schermerhorn Sts A C G
- upgrade to public announcement system
- elevator or ramp installation
Franklin Av C
- upgrade to public announcement system
Nostrand Av A C
- upgrade to public announcement system
- elevator or ramp installation
Utica Av A C
- upgrade to public announcement system
Euclid Av A C
- upgrade to public announcement system
7 Av B Q
- upgrade to public announcement system
Kings Hwy B Q
- upgrade to public announcement system
Avenue U Q
- upgrade to public announcement system
Neck Rd Q
- upgrade to public announcement system
Sheepshead Bay B Q
- upgrade to public announcement system
Brighton Beach B Q
- upgrade to public announcement system
Ocean Pkwy Q
- upgrade to public announcement system
W 8 St-NY Aquarium F Q
- upgrade to public announcement system
Jefferson St L
- elevator or ramp installation
Nevins St 2 3 4 5
- platform or waiting area replacement
Crescent St J Z
- upgrade to public announcement system
Norwood Av J Z
- upgrade to public announcement system
Cleveland St J
- upgrade to public announcement system
Van Siclen Av J Z
- upgrade to public announcement system
Alabama Av J
- upgrade to public announcement system
Chauncey St J Z
- upgrade to public announcement system
Halsey St J
- upgrade to public announcement system
Gates Av J Z
- upgrade to public announcement system
Kosciuszko St J
- upgrade to public announcement system
Myrtle Av J M Z
- upgrade to public announcement system
Flushing Av J M
- upgrade to public announcement system
Lorimer St J M
- upgrade to public announcement system
Hewes St J M
- upgrade to public announcement system
Marcy Av J M Z
- upgrade to public announcement system
Kings Hwy N
- elevator or ramp installation
18 Av D
- elevator or ramp installation
Projects on hold at 9 stations in the Bronx:
Norwood-205 St D
- upgrade to public announcement system
Bedford Park Blvd B D
- upgrade to public announcement system
Kingsbridge Rd B D
- upgrade to public announcement system
Fordham Rd B D
- upgrade to public announcement system
Tremont Av B D
- upgrade to public announcement system
161 St-Yankee Stadium B D
- upgrade to public announcement system
Wakefield-241 St 2
- elevator or ramp installation
Brook Av 6
- elevator or ramp installation
- repairs for structural or aesthetic issues
3 Av-138 St 6
- elevator or ramp installation
- repairs for structural or aesthetic issues
Projects on hold at 27 stations in Manhattan:
Roosevelt Island F
- upgrade to public announcement system
Lexington Av/63 St F Q
- upgrade to public announcement system
47-50 Sts-Rockefeller Ctr B D F M
- upgrade to public announcement system
42 St-Bryant Pk B D F M
- upgrade to public announcement system
- elevator or ramp installation
34 St-Herald Sq B D F M
- upgrade to public announcement system
Broadway-Lafayette St B D F M
- upgrade to public announcement system
2 Av F
- upgrade to public announcement system
Delancey St-Essex St F
- upgrade to public announcement system
- elevator or ramp installation
East Broadway F
- upgrade to public announcement system
190 St A
- repairs for structural or aesthetic issues
145 St A C B D
- elevator or ramp installation
W 4 St-Wash Sq A C E
- upgrade to public announcement system
Canal St A C E
- upgrade to public announcement system
Chambers St A C
- upgrade to public announcement system
World Trade Center E
- upgrade to public announcement system
Lexington Av/59 St N R W
- elevator or ramp installation
168 St 1
- elevator or ramp installation
3 Av L
- new fencing between platform and track
5 Av 7
- elevator or ramp installation
Times Sq-42 St 7
- new fencing between platform and track
Delancey St-Essex St J M Z
- upgrade to public announcement system
- elevator or ramp installation
Canal St J Z
- upgrade to public announcement system
Chambers St J Z
- upgrade to public announcement system
- repairs for structural or aesthetic issues
Broad St J Z
- upgrade to public announcement system
110 St 6
- elevator or ramp installation
59 St 4 5 6
- elevator or ramp installation
7 Av B D E
- elevator or ramp installation
Projects on hold at 14 stations in Queens:
21 St-Queensbridge F
- upgrade to public announcement system
111 St J
- upgrade to public announcement system
75 St-Elderts Ln J Z
- upgrade to public announcement system
Ozone Park-Lefferts Blvd A
- upgrade to public announcement system
Jamaica Center-Parsons/Archer E J Z
- upgrade to public announcement system
Sutphin Blvd-Archer Av-JFK Airport E J Z
- new fencing between platform and track
Jamaica-Van Wyck E
- upgrade to public announcement system
Parsons Blvd F
- elevator or ramp installation
Sutphin Blvd F
- upgrade to public announcement system
Briarwood E F
- elevator or ramp installation
- repairs for structural or aesthetic issues
Howard Beach-JFK Airport A
- upgrade to public announcement system
Broad Channel A S
- upgrade to public announcement system
Far Rockaway-Mott Av A
- upgrade to public announcement system
Rockaway Park-Beach 116 St A S
- upgrade to public announcement system
Projects on hold at 1 station in Staten Island:
Clifton SIR
- elevator or ramp installation
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