Smithtown's $5M budget funds projects from parks to tree inventories

Smithtown will spend $5 million next year to rehabilitate parks and municipal buildings, study possible dredging outside Stony Brook Harbor and outfit thousands of street lamps with high-tech sensors.

Those are among about two dozen projects in the capital budget approved Dec. 14 by the town board.

The selection reflects Supervisor Edward Wehrheim’s focus on the town’s sprawling parks system. The 133-acre Hoyt Farm Nature Preserve, where the town hosts family concerts and seasonal events, will undergo a $900,000 renovation. Cracked blacktop in the main pavilion will be resurfaced; public-use barbecues will be replaced and relocated to areas that receive less foot traffic. At Smithtown Landing Country Club, a $400,000 gut renovation is planned for a lounge used for cocktails and catered events.

The budget also shows changes in the way the town provides some of its services, using technology to streamline municipal work. Traditionally, officials have relied on resident complaints and nighttime inspections to maintain the town’s 12,000 street lamps. That will change with a $465,000 investment in projects including sensors and cameras for up to 4,000 street lamps, giving the town basic data about any outages along with more sophisticated information like traffic counts and localized snowfall levels.

"This will enable us to take a more proactive stance," traffic safety director Mitch Crowley said.

In coming years, he said, officials could use lamp-mounted cameras to optimize traffic flow, direct snowplows to problem areas or deploy Public Safety officers to municipal facilities if they detect people there after hours. The town may also use the poles as Wi-Fi hot spots, enabling high-speed internet service in parks, train stations and downtown business districts like Lake Avenue in St. James.

"This is all kind of new, something we’re taking an adventure on," Crowley said. "We have this massive infrastructure in place with our street lighting — we can utilize that."

There will be a change, too, in the way town foresters tend to tens of thousands of trees that line local roads, with $200,000 allocated to inventory, assess and prune — the first such capital program in town history.

"Under the old system, we were relying entirely on residents identifying if there was a need for trees in front of their house to be pruned and removed," said environmental protection director David Barnes.

Active management will help foresters identify and treat ailing trees before they need to be removed. Every tree that is removed will be replaced, Barnes said.

Another possible first, at least in the town’s modern era, would be dredging Stony Brook Harbor’s outer channel, which bay constables and owners of large recreation vessels say has become too clogged by sand to navigate at low tide.

A $200,000 study will assess the practicality of such a project in an area where sand naturally migrates along the coastline and the environmental implications that dredging could have for harbor ecology.

Dredging would be performed by a Suffolk County contractor and would require state and federal permits, pushing the start date of any work to several years away, Barnes said.

By Nicholas Spangler

nicholas.spangler@newsday.comspanglernewsday

Nicholas Spangler is a general assignment reporter and has worked at Newsday since 2010.