ny pml sec 109 violatres the rights of clams snd oysters secured by ny const art 1 sec 3
andrew cuomo hates horses and bettors snd loves on harleys, breasts and cash
you will note that one member of the nassau itb board of directors is on the oyster bsy ethics commission
there is a close tie between oyster bsy snd nassau otb
choose sides snd put the hit on sndrew cuomo snd tell the lawyer this is a lazy man's case as the arguments have been made and vetted by ira block who was vounsel to now dead nyc otb
Let the shells fly snd sue em for that which the odds are in your favor
working is for people who do not shake down
Claude Solnik
Long Island Business News
2150 Smithtown Ave.
Ronkonkoma, NY 11779-7348
Home > LI Confidential > Stop scratching on holidays
Stop scratching on holidays
Published: June 1, 2012
Off Track Betting in New York State has been racing into a crisis called shrinking revenue. Some people have spitballed a solution: Don’t close on holidays.
New York State Racing Law bars racing on Christmas, Easter and Palm Sunday, and the state has ruled OTBs can’t handle action on those days, even though they could easily broadcast races from out of state.
“You should be able to bet whenever you want,” said Jackson Leeds, a Nassau OTB employee who makes an occasional bet. He added some irrefutable logic: “How is the business going to make money if you’re not open to take people’s bets?”
Elias Tsekerides, president of the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York, said OTB is open on Greek Orthodox Easter and Palm Sunday.
“I don’t want discrimination,” Tsekerides said. “They close for the Catholics, but open for the Greek Orthodox? It’s either open for all or not open.”
OTB officials have said they lose millions by closing on Palm Sunday alone, with tracks such as Gulfstream, Santa Anita, Turf Paradise and Hawthorne running.
One option: OTBs could just stay open and face the consequences. New York City OTB did just that back in 2003. The handle was about $1.5 million – and OTB was fined $5,000.
Easy money.
OYSTER BAY, N.Y. — The bounteous shellfish here in this hamlet on the North Shore of Long Island are so iconic, they were extolled by Cole Porter in his song “Let’s Do It,’’ with its line about oysters down in Oyster Bay doing it.
While the lyric connotes cozy relations between the famously fertile shellfish of this bivalve capital, feelings among shellfishermen themselves are decidedly less friendly.
Locals describe them as the clam wars, with two sides waging a public battle for decades over rights and practices in Oyster Bay Harbor, which remains the most productive shellfishing habitat in New York State.
The dispute pits the baymen who hand-rake for clams against the Frank M. Flower & Sons shellfish company, which uses dredge boats to mechanically harvest the clams and oysters it farms on a swath of 1,800 acres leased from the Town of Oyster Bay.
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Each side accuses the other of intimidation and harassment, in a battle that has included lawsuits and letter-writing campaigns, as well as arrests and police reports for episodes that include vandalism, assault and poaching.
The baymen have raised numerous challenges — in court, in public protests and with governmental agencies — about the legitimacy of the company’s lease of the town’s prime shellfishing area, and its dredging, which the baymen claim threatens their livelihoods by damaging clam populations on nonleased areas.
The company has long called its dredging harmless, but now federal and state officials, responding to baymen’s complaints, are reviewing the company’s permits. That process is being watched by the Town of Oyster Bay officials who administer the lease, though they would not comment any further about the dispute.
The Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency conducting the review, would not provide details on the matter. New York State Department of Environmental Conservation officials said in a statement that the review would examine Flower’s permits and compliance with harvesting rules and then arrive at a decision “on any changes or limits needed to the company’s permit to ensure that Oyster Bay remains protected from overharvesting and environmental damage.”
The baymen are confident that it may finally bring a long-sought crackdown on the company, and changes to what they call a “bay of imbalance.”
Flower officials call the review a routine process that will prove they follow all regulations, are fully permitted for dredging and pose no harm to the baymen or the harbor, which opens onto Long Island Sound.
Founded in 1887, Flower is the oldest and largest shellfish-farming operation in New York. After steadily taking over smaller local leases years ago, it signed a 30-year lease with the town in 1994 providing exclusive harvesting rights of its section.
The company says it has improved the cleanliness and fertility of the harbor by seeding the bottom with clams and oysters that help filter the water and have helped Oyster Bay’s shellfish populations remain strong, even as other areas have been depleted by pollution, overfishing and algae bloom.
Oyster Bay is one of the few places in the New York area where the dwindling bayman culture still thrives.
But the several dozen independent baymen who make up the North Oyster Bay Baymen’s Association say their livelihood has been hurt by the company’s town-sanctioned monopoly on the harbor’s most fertile areas, and by the company’s dredge boats pulling up clams in large quantities from the bottom.
The baymen contend that water jets on the Flower dredges damage the fragile ecosystem on the harbor bottom and stir up a deep layer of silt that causes oxygen depletion.
They say the dredge boats leave wide flumes of turbulent sediment that damages marine life and shellfish fertility in the sections used by the baymen, reducing the number of shellfish they might harvest.
“Their side gets constantly groomed and replanted, so they can survive it, but it’s killing our side” of the harbor, said the baymen’s association president, Billy Painter, who pulled his boat one recent weekday near a Flower boat that hauled its dredge rake up every few minutes to dump its catch onto a sorting table on deck.
Eyeing the dredge’s load, Mr. Painter said, “He’s got like eight bushels of clams right there in one shot.”
Here, a 45-minute drive from New York City, both parties work the same waters along a coastline lined with mansions. In their rough-hewed work boats, the baymen ply the bottom with 50-foot rakes outside the leased area and are barred from using most mechanical means, even running a boat engine while raking for clams.
The baymen say they have to follow stricter rules than the company, including a 10-bushel-per-day limit per bayman, unlike Flower, which is not subject to such limits because it works on leased grounds it seeds itself.
They say their complaints and lawsuits against government agencies have led to retaliatory harassment and summonses by enforcement officers from town, county and state agencies. They complained of harassment from the Flower company’s security guards. Flower denies these charges.
Mr. Painter pulled up to a group of fellow baymen that included Doug Rodgers, Bill Fetzer and Bobby DeFeo, working the deep harbor waters between mansions owned by Charles Dolan, the billionaire founder of Cablevision, and Billy Joel.
Mr. Joel’s support of Long Island commercial fishermen can be heard in his 1990 song “The Downeaster Alexa,” and he has spoken up for the Oyster Bay clammers in their dispute.
The baymen say the company’s dredging method, which is rarely permitted or practiced elsewhere in the state, flouts federal coastal management regulations and requires federal permits and state water quality certificates that the company has not obtained.
The baymen say they have been unable to get government agencies to study the environmental impacts of Flower’s dredging in a harbor that has heavy recreational use and is classified as a federal fish and wildlife refuge sustaining several protected species.
Flower officials counter that the dredge digs down less than four inches into the bottom and that the disturbed sediment settles quickly with no environmental damage.
A lawyer for the company, James Cammarata, said that the baymen collectively harvested as many clams as the company did. The baymen’s campaign, he added, was being waged by a core group of greedy baymen looking to make “easy money” by harvesting in the waters that Flower has long cultivated.
“They want to put the company out of business, with no science to support their claims, so that they can harvest it all and capture the entire marketplace,” he said.
Litigation between the two sides goes back at least to 1991, when the baymen sued Flower for damages and nullification of Flower’s leases. A more recent lawsuit, still pending, demands that Flower obtain proper dredging permits among other claims, Darrin Berger, the baymen’s lawyer, said.
Mr. Painter said that Flower had failed to honor the 1991 settlement stipulations that they provide the baymen with one million seed clams and “boat days,” transplanting clams to harvest areas for the baymen.
Mr. Painter said the baymen had raised over $150,000 for legal costs, while the company benefits from what he calls a “sweetheart deal” with the Town of Oyster Bay. The company pays the town $40,000 a year to farm the bottom and less than $200 a month for a sprawling waterfront docking compound.
Christa Relyea, the company’s general manager, said the company had invested in major improvements to town-owned docks and called the baymen’s campaign malicious, even including death threats left on a company phone, a claim that Mr. Painter called untrue.
Ms. Relyea, while giving a tour of a Flower dredge boat, said, “They’ve tried every argument to knock us out of the water.”
She walked through the company’s hatchery and said the Flower staff of 50 helped raise and plant 100 million clam and oyster seeds each year in the leased waters, and provided the town with one million clam seeds annually to plant on public grounds.
“This is the cleanest harbor around,” she said, “and it’s because of what we’re putting down there.”
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