SOURCE:
https://www.portjeff.com/417/PJVV---Issue-8---Story-7---Its-the-Bees-
July, 2025
The Village of Port Jefferson is one of several Long Island municipalities and organizations sharing more than $600,000 in grants aimed at creating new pollinator gardens.
Pollinator gardens are floral areas stocked with specific nectar- and pollen-producing plants meant to attract bees, moths, beetles and other pollinating insects responsible for pollinating about three-quarters of the world’s plant life.
In 2023, New York State Attorney General Letitia James accepted a $6.9 million settlement from North Carolina-based agricultural science titan Bayer CropScience LP and Missouri-based agrochemical giant Monsanto, who’d allegedly misled the public about the safety of certain consumer weedkillers proven to be toxic to pollinator species like bees and butterflies.
Using settlement monies, Albany created the New York Pollinator Conservation Fund to benefit pollinator species through habitat management, restoration and enhancement and to support pollinator research, monitoring and education. The New York Community Trust, selected as the Pollinator Conservation Fund administrator, awarded several competitive-process grants to statewide applicants earlier this month.
Among the awardees: The Citizens Campaign for the Environment, a Farmingdale-based ecological warrior that earned a $200,000 stipend to create three acres of pollinator gardens, plant 70,000 native plants and develop corresponding educational materials.
The Citizens Campaign was one of several Long Island organizations – including Port Washington-based ReWild Long Island ($150,000 grant), the Brentwood-based Sisters of Saint Joseph ($100,000 grant) and the Malverne-based Nassau Land Trust ($20,000 grant) – awarded by the New York Community Trust through the Pollinator Conservation Fund.
Subsequently, the Villages of Port Jefferson and Patchogue joined with the Town of Brookhaven to submit a joint pollinator-garden proposal to the Citizens Campaign and were selected to share the $200,000 grant.
Port Jefferson will now start the process of determining where the Village should place its 1/2 acre of nectar- and pollen-producing plants.
At the Village Board of Trustees’ June 11 work session meeting, Deputy Mayor Bob Juliano – the board’s liaison to the Port Jefferson Department of Parks – suggested several possible locations, including areas around the Rocketship Park basketball courts, the traffic circles on the east and west entrances of the Port Jefferson Country Club and the grounds surrounding the historic William Tooker House, the oldest known structure on its original foundation in Port Jefferson Village.
Resident volunteer groups are being polled to vote on these potential locations and suggest others – but where the pollinator garden (or gardens) are eventually planted is less important than the fact that Port Jefferson has, once again, made a successful bid for useful grant funding, which will result in another important project that will provide real aesthetic, environmental and quality-of-life benefits, being implemented at no cost to Village taxpayers.
