August 24th, 2023 - Lake Agawam Conservancy Details Preliminary Proposal

Some of New York City’s homeless immigrants should be sheltered on Long Island at an Air National Guard base and the shuttered grounds of state-owned mental hospitals, according to a letter to the state filed this week by the Adams administration. Matthew Chayes reports on Newsday.com that the proposed sites on Long Island, according to a copy of the request obtained by Newsday, are the Francis S. Gabreski Air National Guard Base on Moen Street in Westhampton Beach; Pilgrim Psychiatric Center on Crooked Hill Road in Brentwood; and Kings Park Psychiatric Center in Nissequogue River State Park. The city also requested nearly two dozen other state-owned sites — from Eastern Suffolk to Flushing to Buffalo — where the city hopes to place migrants. The sites include the Javits Center in Manhattan, Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens, State University of New York dorms and vacant prisons upstate. The request is made in an appendix in a letter, dated Aug. 22, that has not been made public. It was filed in a Manhattan state court by the city, which is scrambling to find room to shelter, feed and otherwise care for tens of thousands of immigrants who have arrived from abroad, mostly from Latin America and West Africa, and need a place to stay. So far, about 60% of the 104,400 immigrants from the surge, which started last spring, are being sheltered, fed and otherwise cared for by the city, according to figures released yesterday by the Adams administration. This means that 59,300 are living in city shelters, hotels and other accommodations. In the latest week, 3,100 more migrants came to the city. ***Massapequa Park resident Rex A. Heuermann, who has been charged in the deaths of three women and is a suspect in the slaying of a fourth whose remains were discovered on Gilgo Beach in 2010, submitted to a cheek swab last week for Suffolk County prosecutors looking to bolster the DNA case against him, sources familiar with the case said. The test took place on Aug. 16 at the Suffolk County Jail in Riverhead, where Heuermann has been held since his arrest on July 13. Grant Parpan and Nicole Fuller report on Newsday.com that the development comes as police in South Carolina say they have turned over information in a missing persons case to the FBI after receiving a report that a woman may have been spotted with Heuermann shortly before disappearing in 2017, a spokesperson for the Sumter County Sheriff’s Office told Newsday. Police in Nevada and New Jersey, where Heuermann also has owned property, have said they are looking into possible connections with Heuermann to open cases in their jurisdictions. Heuermann, 59, has pleaded not guilty to first- and second-degree murder charges in the killings of three women whose remains were found near Gilgo Beach 13 years ago. Authorities also have said Heuermann is the “prime suspect” in the slaying of a fourth woman. ***Riverhead’s Ukrainian community held its annual flag-raising ceremony at Town Hall yesterday, in celebration of Ukraine’s Independence Day. Event officianls and town officials also spoke out in solidarity with Ukraine. Quint Nigro reports on Riverheadlocal.com that a crowd gathered near the flagpole on East Main Street in Riverhead, made up mostly of Ukrainians, young and old. Almost all the attendees were wearing the national colors or a vyshyvanka, a shirt embroidered in a traditional Ukrainian style. “I would like to start with a moment of silence for the victims of the terrible fires in Hawaii, and for the victims of Russian aggression in Ukraine,” St. John the Baptist Ukrainian Catholic Church Pastor Bodhan Hedz said. The flag-ra