Berland Shares Her Family's Life in Dix Hills

There are a lot of things you may not know about Councilwoman Susan Berland.

She's lived in the same house in Dix Hills for almost 17 years and she says she's not moving.

She's been driving a bus for Park Shore Day Camp for ten years now, so that her children can spend their summers there. Only her youngest still attends camp, but Berland won't stop driving for Park Shore until Grant stops going to camp there.

Grant, her youngest, is 13 and will be entering 8th grade this fall.

She has two older sons, Schuyler, who will be 16 in October, and Alex, who is 17.Her oldest child is her one daughter, Stephanie, who is 19, and going into her junior year at the Tisch School at NYU.

She is extremely glad that none of her children take after her in one important way: Berland is profoundly dyslexic.  She said the problem wasn't even discovered until she was a senior in high school and she "bombed the SATs like there's no tomorrow."

She said was able to compensate for the dyslexia, so no one knew. "I have to read things two to three times," she said, and "I have to take notes and then rewrite them. I have no short-term memory. I really have to use all of my senses to learn things."

Berland says that she is on the board of directors for the International Dyslexia Association, Suffolk Branch, and goes around giving talks about dyslexia, to try to help others understand and deal with it.

She became a councilwoman in 2001 after U.S. Rep. Steve Israel got elected to Congress and half his term as councilman remained open. She got re-elected after the two years were up, and has been re-elected ever since.

She has always been interested in politics, she said, especially in high school and college. After college she was a prosecutor in New York, working as an assistant attorney general. She then came and worked for the town of Huntington attorney's office and then became a councilwoman.

Berland says that the economy has really hit people hard in Dix Hills.  "Banks started to reassess the values of homes in Dix Hills, and because the home values were declining, people no longer had the financial resources available that they thought were available."

One of her big concerns as a councilwoman is to try and preserve as much open space as possible in Dix Hills. "I keep trying to get the town to buy open space, so we can preserve it, turn it into a park or a soccer field or something, but NIMBY keeps coming into play. People don't want the traffic in their neighborhood that may come with a soccer field or a park. But then someone else buys the available land and starts building stuff we really don't want."

One example is the Ryder Avenue golf course. She had been fighting to save it for years. She wanted those 44 acres to remain a golf course, to remain open space, but the town board voted against her. The land was purchased and was supposed to be turned into thirty-three $1.5 million dollar single-family homes. Then the real estate market crashed. And now the builder doesn't have the money to build these homes and no one has the money to buy them, even if they were built.

"So the land just sits there, unmowed," Berland said sadly. "I still hope that the town can somehow buy the land and save it as a golf course."

Another project that didn't go as Berland had hoped – approximately 120 one-bedroom units of affordable housing were supposed to be built a dozen years ago on Ruland Road, as part of the Greens at Half Hollow.

"We wanted affordable one-bedroom units built to keep the young people here and to also have a place for seniors," Berland said. But Fair Housing in Huntington Committee spokesman Rob Ralph sued the Greens, saying that the project excluded multi-bedroom units, effectively shutting out families with children from renting there.

And the project has been stalled ever since. "All these years have gone by and they haven't been able to build because of this lawsuit. It's disgusting that they put the town through all this expense. There could have had the second generation of people living there already. This could have been the springboard for young people to buy a house."

Berland said these failures weigh heavily on her. But she has had many success stories as well. She is the town's first full-time councilwoman, and most recently, saw to fruition the Anne Frank Memorial Garden at Arboretum Park.

Former councilwoman Marlene Budd originally came up with the idea, and after she left office to become a Suffolk County judge, Berland took over the project. "I have studied Anne Frank since I was a little kid in Hebrew school and I always loved her," she said. "And now the memorial garden is finally here. It is beautiful and was well worth the wait," she said.