Gary Hudes, Councilman

Gary Hudes: Councilman

AMANDA: (0:00:00) Councilman, tell me how you feel about the green initiatives by Tom Suozzi as a resident and as a political leader in the community?

GARY: (0:11:04) Well, the green initiative in general is a great idea. The fact is that our future depends upon us becoming more eco-friendly more green. The county’s effort is certainly applauded. I don’t know how much success is being met at this point because it’s a tough time to do it. Right now people are not…people don’t have a lot of extra money to spend. And the initiatives right now as part of the green Levittown require, a great deal of it requires an input of money. Whether you are going to work on making your home more efficient, it requires money and the initiative to do that would cost a fair amount of money. And with the economy as it is softening a bit, it has become a little bit tough for people. And so it’s difficult at this point now to ask people to dig into their pockets and to spend $500, $2000 to insulate their homes and to make their homes more air tight or go out and buy more energy efficient appliances. The least expensive of the initiatives to replace light bulbs is one that actually interesting because I did it many years ago in my home and I went to the compact florescent bulbs. There is no downside to it except the fact that some of them just take a little longer to warm up. It’s not a bad price to pay to have it wait a few minutes for the lights to become brighter to a) save money and b) to make for a better environment.

GARY: (2:11:01) The Town of Hempstead’s been doing green initiatives for a long time now, with my partner Kate Murray, as town supervisor. As a matter of fact jus today I was sitting at a traffic light in Hempstead and I was looking at town hall and if you look on the south side of town hall you will see photocells covering the entire top of the building. Kate’s office and her conference room are all powered by those solar panels that are there. The town has also invested in some hybrid garbage trucks; we have some electric vehicles now in parks. Levy park as a matter of fact, which was a landfill at one point and was closed. The state wanted the town to cap it, which would have cost us a lot of money and instead at that time through supervisor Richard Giordano we capped it and turned it into a nature preserve. And again if your talking about going green you go to the top of the level preserve which is located on Merrick road and the Meadowbrook parkway. Go up to the top, it’s a nice healthy walk and when you get up to the top you’ll find a wind vain up there and that is actually powering, the wind is powering the water distribution at the top where there’s a pond

GARY: (3:41:18) As a matter of fact as part of the town’s green Levittown, we’ve been going to the schools. This school (Northside School) actually is on the list to be done but just yesterday we were in Stokes school in Island Trees where we are doing a program on recycling in the schools. The great thing about it is that the kids now are getting into the whole green idea. The fact that the county started the green Levittown if it does nothing more than get people aware, of thinking about greening, thinking about saving energy, thinking about the future then it’s accomplished its’ goal in my opinion. I think that the fact that we’ve had more and more children in the schools over the last year asking about recycling, interested in recycling and they’re not getting paid to do it. They’re taking it upon themselves to say you know what I want to do my part I want to do what I can, it’s my future. And you know I’m 52 years old, I don’t have the same future they have. And when we were kids there was no such thing as recycling and now it’s important, it was important then, only we didn’t know it. Now it’s certainly very very important so anything that helps is a great idea.

AMANDA: (5:10:11) Besides putting in the compact fluorescents have you done anything for your home?

GARY: (5:14:21) Yes as a matter of fact, actually many years ago I had an energy audit done. And just about 3 weeks ago, I had an energy audit done of my house, they actually did a wind test of my house and it cost me over $2,000 to have my house insulated better, the wind resistance cut down in the house or I should say increased they actually sealed a lot of the input into my house. And they showed me on this machine that the air is not blowing in and out of my house as much as it was before. They have told me that I’m going to save x amount of dollars by next year. I guess next year I will see if what they did is actually saving me money or else I’ll actually be calling the company back to come visit me again. But that’s why I speak first hand when I say a lot of people at this point don’t have $2000 to spend on that. I had been planning this all along to do some additional insulation in my house, so I was prepared for it. The greening has taken some people by surprise that they weren’t prepared to spend the extra money. But yea I did it in my house; I’m a firm believer. I’m very big on recycling. My term in office, I’m in office almost 9 years, I’ve personally delivered probably about 7,000 recycling bins to people’s homes because I want people to be encouraged to recycle. Because it’s such a waste to see broken cans and bottles and plastic bottles on the side of the road when I know they can go back in and be recycled. And the paper that we’re doing in the schools and I think it’s every 10 foot stack of paper you save a tree and for every group of bottles or cans it will take a couple of hours but it will run a television. All these things are important and they help are future.