Lee E. Koppelman, a making plans visionary who right through 4 a long time fought to impose a regional schedule for financial construction and environmental conservation throughout Lengthy Island, died on Monday in Stony Brook, N.Y. He used to be 94.
His dying, at Stony Brook College Medical institution, used to be showed by means of his daughter Lesli Ross.
As the manager director of the Nassau-Suffolk Regional Making plans Board from 1965 to 2006, Mr. Koppelman used to be instrumental in holding tens of 1000’s of acres of farmland and open house in Suffolk County, protective coastal wetlands and the underground water provide, growing Suffolk County’s park device and holding the huge Pine Barrens woodland.
“All the ones issues had been smartly forward of recent pondering on the time; now they’re taken without any consideration,” John V.N. Klein, a former Suffolk County government, informed The New York Occasions in 1999.
As an appointee beholden to elected county executives, Mr. Koppelman wielded little direct energy. However as a nonpartisan, if prickly, skilled planner, he gained the honor of politicians, preservationists and builders.
Over the process his lengthy occupation, he persuaded legislators to undertake an preliminary 2 p.c gross sales tax, which started grossing about $100 million every year in 1970; warned that highway runoff used to be a number one pollutant of aquifers and estuaries; and effectively lobbied to increase the Lengthy Island Freeway and First light Freeway east towards the Hamptons.
When Mr. Koppelman resigned as government director in 2006, Mitchell H. Pally, vp of the Lengthy Island Affiliation, a trade and civic staff, mentioned, “There’s been nobody extra important to Lengthy Island within the ultimate 40 years.”
The writer Robert A. Caro recalled encountering Mr. Koppelman first when he used to be a reporter for the Lengthy Island newspaper Newsday after which when he used to be researching his magisterial biography of Robert Moses, “The Energy Dealer” (1974).
Moses used to be a grasp builder who left a legacy of parks, expressways, public seashores and bridges. Mr. Koppelman used to be additionally a person of giant concepts, however extra of a grasp planner.
“I met only a few planners with one of these sensible and farseeing ‘imaginative and prescient of grand scale and scope,’” Mr. Caro wrote in an e mail. “Amongst his many achievements, he used to be the main drive within the established order by means of Suffolk County of a program to keep farmland — and Lengthy Island’s vanishing open areas — by means of having the county acquire construction rights.”
Whilst Mr. Koppelman survived partisan political upheavals on Lengthy Island, he used to be every so often extra a hit at producing powerful debate over his plans than at imposing them.
His ideas for a commuter rail line alongside the Lengthy Island Freeway, an funding in 100,000 reasonably priced houses and flats, and a bridge or expanded ferry carrier throughout Lengthy Island Sound by no means were given some distance past the drafting board.
He drafted 4 grasp plans for Lengthy Island, together with one in 1970 that stuffed 60 volumes.
“There are two sorts of planners,” Frank DeRubeis, Smithtown’s making plans leader, used to be quoted as pronouncing in Lengthy Island Historical past Magazine in 2009. One sort, he mentioned, “does the plan after which leaves it as much as the elected officers to both put into effect the plan or now not”; the opposite “is a planner who completes the find out about after which makes use of the whole thing of their energy to get the plan carried out.” Mr. Koppelman, he mentioned, “used to be the latter of the 2.”
Lee Edward Koppelman used to be born on Might 19, 1927, in New york and grew up in Astoria, Queens. His oldsters, Max and Madelyn (Eisenberg) Koppelman, owned a greenhouse in Queens and a flower store on Madison Road.
After graduating from Bryant Top College in Astoria, Mr. Koppelman joined the Army in 1945, then earned a bachelor’s stage in electric engineering from Town Faculty in 1950 and a grasp’s from Pratt Institute in 1964. He won a doctorate in public management from New York College in 1970.
Along with his daughter Lesli, he’s survived by means of his spouse, Connie; 3 different youngsters, Claudia and Keith Koppelman and Laurel Heard; and 3 grandchildren.
In 1952 Mr. Koppelman, who owned a panorama structure trade, moved to Hauppauge, on Lengthy Island, the place he was energetic in civic affairs. In 1960, the Suffolk County government, H. Lee Dennison, named him the county’s first making plans director. He held that submit till 1988.
At the side of serving as government director of the Regional Making plans Board, he was the director of the State College of New York at Stony Brook’s Middle for Regional Coverage Research in 1988.
He used to be the writer, with Joseph De Chiara, of “Web site Making plans Requirements” (1978) and “City Making plans and Design Standards” (1982).
