The Port TIMES RECORD Port Jefferson • Belle terre • Port Jefferson station • terrYVille
Volume 28, No. 40
September 3, 2015
$1.00
SBU & Local Business Resource Guide INSIDE
After the sunset: Port Jefferson Harbor is softly illuminated with oranges and pinks below a fading blue sky.
Photo by John Broven
The buck stops here
Dunk ALS
Residents not fawning over hunting proposal
Comsewogue community in full force at Ice Bucket Challenge event
By Elana Glowatz
PAgE A4
File photo by Wendy Mercier
Belle terre Village may allow bow hunting of deer in an effort to reduce the local population.
Belle Terre residents are up in arms, or ready to take up arms, over a village government proposal to allow bow hunting as a means of reducing the community’s deer population. The village board of trustees set a public hearing for Sept. 15 to consider a law amendment that would allow the hunting, a notion that has split the community, with some calling for more “humane” approaches to the issue. The deer population, in the absence of predators, has increased such that “people are having multiple deer sleeping on their lawns at night and eating all their vegetation,” and making driving in the area more treacherous, Trustee Bob Sandak said in a phone interview
this week. “We’ve had an outcry from the population to please do something.” According to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, which manages the state’s deer, the Long Island deer population has been steadily increasing since the 1980s. It calls hunting, or culling deer “still the most efficient and cost-effective way to stabilize or reduce deer populations and alleviate associated damages to private property and natural resources.” But calling bow hunting “a very cruel way to kill,” resident Natalie Brett said she worried an injured deer would wander into her yard and die. Brett said she has noticed the deer population increase and the animals eat her plants, but DEER continued on page A14