Democratic Brookhaven Supervisor Brian Foley may need to give up his favorite punch line.
When he took office, Foley repeatedly blasted the mess he said his Republican predecessors left him . For Foley, the crowning example of all this — the grace note of Brookhaven’s managerial decrepitude — came the day he asked parks officials a seemingly simple question: how many parks the town has.
The officials, Foley said, could not tell him. It was an anecdote Foley repeated in speeches, at press conferences, and with this reporter – we won’t say ad nauseam, but something close to it.
At a work session Thursday, Brookhaven Parks Commissioner Brian Pratt put and end to the mystery.
Erik German
After seven months of research — mapping, surveying, archive-diving and number-crunching — Pratt generated an on-line electronic database of all parks in the town. When it’s finished this summer, Brookhaven’s 3,652 and a half acres of parkland will be electronically monitored in real time, and searchable by residents according to location and the recreational use of their choice.
The final count, by the way, is 169.