Food pantry thankful for heat, at least

Wally Merna, a United Church of Christ chaplain who runs the LI Council of Churches emergency food pantry for Nassau County in Freeport, was pleased when he got to work Monday morning.

There was heat.

That was no small thing in a county-owned building where there'd been none until then.

The lack of heat isn't the only thing wrong with the building.

There's a hole -- you can see straight through to daylight -- in the roof of one of the women's bathrooms. There also are holes, blocked by cardboard or pieces of wood, in some windows.

The roof leaks, which is why Merna keeps several garbage-bag lined trash cans at the ready. Some are placed permanently, including one on each side of a toilet in the men's room, which also leaks.

Sometime before 2009, which is when Merna arrived, Nassau County workers took a stab at fixing some of the leaks. They draped a series of tarps under the roof, connecting them to a series of plastic pipes.

The result is a marvel, easily seen since leaks have caused multiple ceiling tiles to bow, crack and break. The complex, jerry-rigged system funnels leaking rainwater from one room to another and into a pipe that juts down and hovers over the drain of a sink in a closet.

Then there are gnats.

"They come from the leaks," said Deborah Ramirez, who works at the Long Island Hispanic Pastoral Association, which shares the building at 450 N. Main St.

She and Merna joked about clapping gnats away. "Sometimes during a service the pastor starts clapping," she said.

"Everybody must think he's getting into the service," Merna joked.

"He is," Ramirez laughed, "and he's catching gnats."

How can a county building have so many problems -- and for so long, since many of them, Merna says, predate the current county administration? No one should have to work, or get a needed county service, in such conditions.

Brian Nevin, a spokesman for County Executive Edward Mangano, said Nassau responded quickly to an email Merna sent Friday informing the county that the food pantry was shutting down because it was only 61 degrees inside the building.

A county worker came Monday morning and would have gone in Friday afternoon had he had a key to the building, officials said.

Merna said he's lodged complaints on an automated county HELP line, repeatedly, about the lack of heat and other building conditions. He said he's gotten results, but only rarely.

But officials said Monday he should have been calling another county department.

And what about other problems in the building?

Nevin said the county had asked the Village of Freeport Monday to inspect the building. A call to the village was not returned.

"We don't want people in conditions that could be dangerous," he said.

For his part, Merna said he planned to wear his wool socks and a ski base layer under his clothes to work for one more day. Since the weather changed, the staff has relied on coats, gloves and space heaters to stay warm.

"The heat is on, we're open for the people who need us and we're grateful," Merna said, before leaving to attend the Nassau County Legislature's hearing on privatizing Long Island Bus. "But you don't know what tomorrow will bring."