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SEE SIDEBAR: A cloudy financial picture
Few offices are better suited to a master planner than the top- floor suite of the H. Lee Dennison Building in Hauppauge.
At the height of his career in the 1980s, that 12th-floor office was the domain of Lee Koppelman, chief of Suffolk County's planning department and executive director of the Long Island Regional Planning Board. From his aerie, Koppelman could survey the Island's vast expanses, with a view that stretched from Long Island Sound to the north and the Atlantic Ocean to the south.
For years, elected officials were beneath Koppelman in his penthouse suite. "I was like, you know what? The county executive should have the best view of Suffolk County," recalled former County Executive Patrick Halpin, whose office was on the ninth floor when he took office in 1988. "But ... Lee Koppelman outlasted us all."
That a bureaucrat could occupy the most prestigious location in the county building is a testament to the influence and legend - and, critics say, the towering ego - of Koppelman, master planner. Last month, Koppelman resigned from his position as executive director of the Long Island Regional Planning Board, a post he assumed in the 1960s, amid questions by new board members about the agency's finances, including payments to consultants. The Suffolk district attorney's office has subpoenaed some of the board's records.
When all was said and done, the man who envisioned a Long Island of well-planned town centers surrounded by parkland - but also the man who pushed in vain for grandiose projects such as a bridge connecting Long Island to New England - ended his career in a brief conversation with the county official who demanded his resignation.
It was a humiliating end to a prominent career that spanned four decades, almost all of it in the public eye.
A series of contradictions
The financial questions surrounding the activities of a man who always seemed above reproach is just one of the contradictions that have marked Koppelman's career.
He was above politics, those who knew him say, and yet he managed to be the consummate politician. He wooed Newsday, which gave him and his plans star billing, and leaders of both political parties. He had a...