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| Affiliation | Democratic |
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| Name | David A. Bishop |
| Address |
West Babylon, New York , United States |
| Email | None |
| Website | None |
| Born |
Unknown
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| Contributor | RP |
| Last Modifed | Paul 🇺🇦
Oct 11, 2023 01:42am |
| Tags |
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| Info | Progressive and energetic, Legislator Bishop has been at the center of County policy making for the better part of a decade. Throughout his tenure in the Legislature, Dave has sponsored some of the body’s most significant laws and championed issues relating to the environment and suburban quality of life issues.
His long tenure wasn’t supposed to happen. David Bishop was first elected to the Suffolk County Legislature in February of 1993 at age 27. At that time he was the youngest member of the body. But in two separate redistrictings (1993 and 2003), Republican mapmakers attempted to saddle Dave with “unwinnable” districts, and he’s had to fight through a long series of campaigns designed to defeat him. Now after twelve years in office, four of which he spent serving as the Leader of the Minority Caucus, Dave is currently his in sixth and final term as a Suffolk County Legislator, barred by term limits from seeking another consecutive term.
Legislator Bishop’s strong commitment to keeping Suffolk County a healthy and safe place to live can be seen through his outstanding environmental record. The County’s landmark Greenways law, which Bishop co-authored, is responsible for the preservation of hundreds of acres of open space and farmland as well as the creation of a dozen new parks. Four of those parks were sponsored by Legislator Bishop —the addition to Van Bourgendien Park in West Babylon; Ocean Avenue Park in Amityville; Maxine Postal Memorial Park in Amityville; and Oak Beach Park (at the former site of the Oak Beach Inn). The Oak Beach Inn was infamous for disputes with adjoining communities and tens of millions of dollars of litigation. The OBI purchase rescued Babylon taxpayers from paying $16 million to the OBI’s former owner, and the Town of Babylon is now committed to constructing a waterfront park.
Suffolk County’s older communities are defined by their downtown areas. To allow them to compete and thrive in the era of box stores and parking malls, Legislator Bishop sponsored the law creating the County’s Downtown Revitalization Program in 1997. The program has directed millions of dollars to projects for parking, sidewalks, plantings, marketing and decorative streetlights.
Most recently, Dave has spent a great deal of legislative energy on promoting the use of filtering technology to prevent storm-water runoff from reaching the streams that feed into Long Island’s bays. He has pushed Suffolk County towards installing filters on all its storm drains using funding from the ¼-Cent Water Quality Protection and Restoration Program. Legislator Bishop argues that with such storm drain filters in place, marine life, in real abundance, can once again return to Long Island’s estuaries. Because of his efforts Suffolk will be one of the first jurisdictions in the Country to so thoroughly address polluting storm-water runoff.
As Chair of the Legislature’s Environment Committee (1999-2003), Dave was prime sponsor of a reform package to insure that Suffolk County’s land preservation program would not pay inflated prices to the politically connected. The thrust of the reform is to create accountability by requiring a second vote with the purchase price revealed. Under the prior system the Legislature voted at the beginning of the process before the purchase price was agreed upon. The reforms restored desperately needed public confidence in the expensive but critical program.
Legislator Bishop also successfully sponsored a renewal of the Pine Barrens Protection Program. In 2000, he authored the law phasing out the use of pesticides on County owned property. The Long Island Ducks Baseball field, among many other sites, is now organically maintained.
Perhaps the most controversial piece of legislation Dave pursued was the Living Wage Law, which requires all businesses and organizations that contract with Suffolk County to pay their employees no less than $9.00 per hour with health benefits, or $10.25 per hour without health benefits. When subsidized employers are permitted to pay their workers less than a living wage, taxpayers end up footing both the bill for the subsidy as well as the food stamps, health care, housing and other social services that low-wage workers require to support themselves. Legislator Bishop believes that our limited public dollars should in no way subsidize poverty-level work.
Legislator Bishop and his staff take pride in addressing constituent complaints and neighborhood issues. When Dave noticed that his office frequently received complaints about traffic dangers at specific intersections within his district, he decided to take action. In December 2002, Legislator Bishop introduced a bill to establish a web site that tracks all reported motor vehicle accidents with injuries and fatalities in order to provide the public with a resource that will allow them to gather information in an effort to improve traffic safety. Over 35,000 accidents occur annually in Suffolk County. The web site, unveiled in May of 2003, is the first of its kind in the nation. The web site was designed by the County’s award winning Management Information Services Division, and can be found at [Link]
Dave is currently leading the opposition to the construction of a $200 million enormous new jail. The proposed facility would be the largest County building project in Suffolk’s history and would, Legislator Bishop warns, lead to a doubling of the General Fund Property Tax.
Legislator Bishop feels that the County should further investigate options to defray the immense costs, reduce the size of the project, and trim down the inmate population. He has supported initiatives to expedite the pre-trial system and increase the participation of non-violent offenders in parole programs. Most importantly, Legislator Bishop has been a steady advocate for Suffolk County taxpayers in seeking a variety of alternatives to avoid a doubling of property taxes.
Legislator Bishop has been honored by hundreds of organizations for his work in the community, and through the Legislature. In 2003, he became the first recipient of an award from The Nature Conservancy honoring his longstanding leadership in environmental initiatives. Dave has been honored with numerous awards from youth organizations for his support of youth programs within the 14th Legislative District, including the Lindenhurst National Little League, Copiague Youth League, South Shore Soccer Club, Babylon Little League, Amityville Little League, and West Babylon Youth Center. He has also been honored by local civic organizations, chambers of commerce, and beautification societies for his tireless efforts to restore our downtown areas.
Legislator Bishop received a B.S. from American University in 1987 and graduated from Fordham Law School in 1993. He currently resides in West Babylon with his wife Brianne, a teacher in the Kings Park School District.
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