State and federal officials gathered at the Indian Harbor Yacht Club on Tuesday to announce that they were on board with a new action plan for helping to clean up and restore Long Island Sound.
The action plan, called SoundVision, is a product of the Citizens Advisory Committee of the Long Island Sound Study, which has been overseeing the Sound cleanup since the late 1980s. SoundVision has four major components:
- Protecting Clean Water to Achieve a Healthy Sound
- Creating Safe and Thriving Places for All Sound Creatures
- Building Long Island Sound Communities that Work
- Investing in an Economically Vibrant Long Island Sound
You can find a link to the entire action plan on the LISoundvision.org website.
The event at the Indian Harbor Yacht Club was the last in a series of officials announcements of the SoundVision plan, and was organized by Save the Sound, the CAC and SoundWaters, among others.
At each of the previous events (in Mamaroneck, Bridgeport, Port Jefferson, New Haven and Old Saybrook) state and federal officials had all stepped to the microphone to announce their commitment to cleaning up the Sound.
But on Tuesday they took it a step further, saying that the Long Island Sound Study had now come up with its own action agenda that was consistent with the CAC’s action plan, and that they’d be working over the next several years to carry it out. The Long Island Sound Study is a cooperative effort funded largely by the U.S. EPA and involving researchers, regulators, user groups and others who are working together to protect and improve the health of the Sound.
“We’re going to be working to make the action agenda happen on a day to day basis,” the U.S. EPA’s Mark Tedesco, the longtime head of the LISS office, said yesterday, “and the CAC is going to hold us accountable.”
Other officials at Tuesday’s event included U.S. Representative Jim Himes; Dan Esty, the commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection; EPA Regional Administrator Curt Spalding (out of Boston); State Senator L. Scott Frantz; State Representative Terrie Wood; and Greenwich First Selectman Peter Tesei.
Environmental organizations were represented by Don Straight, executive director of the Connecticut Fund for the Environment/Save the Sound, which organized the event; Tom Baptist, executive director and vice president of Audubon Connecticut; Leigh Shemitz, executive director of SoundWaters; Bill Boysen, a board member of the Greenwich Land Trust; and Nancy Seligson, co-chair of the CAC.
“The citizens need the agencies to push this forward,” Seilgson said, “and I like to think the agencies need the citizens too.”
-- by Tom Andersen. Andersen is a communications and fundraising consultant to non-profits and is the author of This Fine Piece of Water: An Environmental History of Long Island Sound (Yale University Press). You can reach him at tandersen54@optonline.net
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