Lee Zeldin Drops-In to Cheer Oyster Bay’s Oyster Hatchery

By Rupert Deedes

Director of the US Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) Lee Zeldin came back to Long Island last week to cheer one of the great successes in local environmental rebirth – the Oyster Hatchery program being run by the Town of Oyster Bay.

Decades of commercial over-harvesting had left Oyster Bay harbor ecologically diminished. But the steady reversal of that story is now underway.

Zeldin, the former Long Island congressman who now leads the EPA, was joined by Oyster Bay Supervisor Joe Saladino and local officials at the town's shellfish hatchery, tucked along the harbor near Theodore Roosevelt Park.

Zeldin toured the operation by boat, inspecting the infrastructure of what has become one of the more quietly ambitious municipal conservation programs in the region.

"As far as the effort of cleaning up this waterway," Zeldin said during the visit, "I would say that this is a coalition leading the way."

The centerpiece of that effort is the Town's shellfish hatchery — the only municipally run hatchery on Long Island's north shore.

Opened in 2019, it was built to do something deceptively simple: grow clams and oysters from seed, nurture them through their most vulnerable early stages, and release them in sufficient numbers to rebuild a population that commercial fishing had worn down.

The hatchery operates a network of Floating Upwelling Systems — motorized docks fitted with in-water silos — that accelerate shellfish growth by drawing nutrient-rich water upward through the shells. In its current form, the facility can produce over two million clams and oysters annually.

Those numbers have been steadily climbing. In 2024 alone, the town seeded approximately six million clam and oyster seedlings into Oyster Bay Harbor.

This past spring, the nonprofit Friends of the Bay joined the effort, dropping 20,000 adult hard clams into designated shellfish sanctuary areas across Oyster Bay and Cold Spring Harbor.

The rationale is both ecological and practical: a single adult oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water per day; an adult clam, roughly 24 gallons.

Multiplied across millions of shellfish, the effect on harbor water quality is measurable.

The town has also taken harder-edged steps to protect the recovery.

In October 2024, the Town Board imposed a temporary moratorium on shellfish harvesting across 1,850 acres of harbor bottom — land previously leased to a commercial shell-fishing company — to allow for a comprehensive scientific assessment of sediment conditions and population density.

The moratorium was supported by Friends of the Bay and the town's own environmental staff, and is intended to lay the data-driven foundation for long-term management strategy.

What has emerged is a layered conservation architecture: a hatchery that grows the shellfish, floating grow-out systems that bring them to maturity, protected sanctuary areas where they can reproduce, and a harvesting moratorium that gives the ecosystem space to recover.

The town has also partnered with SUNY Stony Brook on oyster population research, and runs a shell recycling program that returns shells collected at the annual Oyster Festival — some 3,500 pounds last year — to the harbor, where they serve as substrate for new shellfish growth.

Zeldin, who represented eastern Long Island in Congress from 2015 to 2023, used the visit to speak as well about the EPA's broader water quality agenda.

At the Oyster Bay event, Zeldin defended the EPA’s approach, arguing that responsibility for contamination should fall on its source.

"What we believe is that instead of the water system having to pay and then passing it off to the ratepayer," stated Zeldin. “That it should be a polluter who pays model — where whomever is responsible for putting that PFAS contamination in should be the party that has to pay."

For now, Oyster Bay's harbor recovery proceeds shellfish by shellfish, season by season - an incremental and largely successful effort to give the town – and the harbor - back its name, and put the "oyster back into Oyster Bay."