No doubt about it, you've just got to hand it to that politician-in-chief Steve Gonzalez, as well as Glen Cove's crack planning board, the good folks from Morgan's Island, Mr. Postal and the Caggianos. If ever there were a group that could appreciate the color of a belt, it's these people. They're the ones who stopped the Glengariff Nursing Home in its tracks and saved their revered Green Belt-some 19-plus acres of pristine property up on the north end of Glen Cove-from the horrors of commercial development.

Yep, they're the folks who undertook the spirited campaign to make sure that Glengariff would never use five of its 19 acres for a low profile nursing facility-leaving 14 acres of champion trees untouched-while they marched and demanded the preservation of their beloved "Green Belt" with the development of a bunch of homes on two-acre parcels.

Unfortunately, what the Green Belters never realized is that when you subdivide a large parcel of property for residential development, you need driveways, roads, rights of way for utilities, pools, tennis courts, guest cottages and all the other stuff that requires you to destroy tree after tree in order to save the Belt. And, as for the classic birds that used to reside on the property? Well, it was sure great for the tree huggers while they had them. Now, they're probably flying south with the Canada Geese who are all too happy to leave a major annual deposit on Glen Cove's golf course just to let us know that they flew among the Belters, if ever so briefly.

Yes, these people really ought to be proud of themselves. They've saved Mr. Gonzalez' Green Belt. They've slain the nursing home monster. They've won. And now they're going to have their Green Belt intact after all. The only problem is that nearly each and every day, another tree gets trashed and another group of related birds leaves its final deposit as it heads out of town wondering what just happened to the family estate on branch number eight. And as the greenery goes down and the bulldozers make way for the magnificent development of yet more suburbia, the mud takes over the visage of this wonderful "Green Belt" of which the politician Gonzalez was given to muse in letter after letter as he pandered for the three votes he could expect in his next city council race.

But why blame Mr. Gonzalez alone? Wasn't it State Senator Marcellino who called the proposed nursing home "an environmental disaster?" Or how about John Canning, another genius politician currently between political success stories? Didn't he stand up in defense of the "Green Belt" like the rest of them? Gosh, these guys are really smart, aren't they? They decimate a good project so that the land can be decimated, and they, like the birds they've dispatched elsewhere, are no longer anywhere to be found themselves. They're on to saving us from the fate of even more environmental disasters that threaten our American way of life.

So, here we are. Now we've got a "Brown Belt." But everyone wants it green. I've got a suggestion. I'm neither a fast politician like Sen. Marcellino nor a slow politician like Mr. Gonzalez. I like to consider myself in the middle-a half-fast politician. Why can't the people from Morgan's Island go down to the local paint store, buy lots of rollers and gallons of green paint and just slop it on the whole place? Then we can be sure we'll have Mr. Gonzalez' Green Belt back and it can be called, "Benjamin Moore Acres."

Phyllis Recine