Forty Years of Citizen Action on Long Island Sound

David Miller, a member of the Citizens Advisory Committee and a former CAC Co-chair, describes how citizen involvement has played a critical role in achieving many of the LIS Partership’s successes over the past 40 years.

By David Miller

Citizen action started on Long Island Sound long before the EPA long island sound partnership (now the Long Island Sound Partnership) started in 1985, with examples like my mother advocating to end pollution as a Connecticut Garden Club conservation leader in the sixties, or in the seventies with the formation of groups like the Long Island Sound Task Force (now Save the Sound). But it was not until the formation of the National Estuary Program, authorized through Congress, and thus our own LIS Partnership program, did all of these emerging voices find a path to come together. In the mid-1980’s, after the Partnership started, the Long Island Sound Citizens Advisory Committee was formed which brought together representatives concerned about Long Island Sound from Port Jefferson all the way around Long Island Sound to New London. Most of these leaders had never met each other nonetheless worked together for a common cause. The Advisory Group was to begin a process with Government agencies to begin to develop and enact a Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan (CCMP) for the future of the Sound, a tradition we are celebrating and enacting today.

With this task before all involved, groups with leadership from the National Audubon Society came together with all Long Island Sound leaders and created a program to amplify public involvement called Listen to the Sound. This program held close to a dozen citizens hearings around Long Island Sound collecting testimonials from hundreds of citizens and institutions with over 1,500 people in attendance. Its end result was a Citizens Agenda for the Sound which to this day has been cited as the basis for the original CCMP that was enacted in the mid-1990s.

The Long Island Sound Citizens movement was united, had an agenda and through the future work of the Citizens Advisory Committee and its members was a model of citizens advocacy across the country. The movement created Sound-wide coalitions in the 1990s to implement the CCMP and formed a new groundbreaking partnership entitled the Clean Water Jobs Coalition. With environmental leaders’ standing arm and arm with union leaders and construction industry partners, some of the largest investments to date were enacted to restore and expand the operations of wastewater treatment plants around the Sound, the most direct threat to the Sound and source of the hypoxia (low levels of oxygen) crisis. And in addition to reducing nitrogen pollution to combat hypoxia and creating a cleaner Sound, thousands of jobs were created and the economy benefited.

And with further leadership from additional members of the Citizens Advisory Committee such as Citizens Campaign, Save the Sound, and others in early the 2000s through 2020, historic legislation was passed by Congress for the restoration and stewardship of Long Island Sound authorizing over $40 million in federal funding annually for the program. An incredible achievement that still remains in place through 2025.

So, in the end as we mark this anniversary for the Long Island Sound, citizen advocacy has been the fuel and in turn has gone hand in hand with governmental programs that have successfully restored its waters to numerous conservation goals. While more work remains and the job is not done, it can be clearly said that the citizens of Long Island Sound did truly “Listen to the Sound” and they continue to do so.