"a whirlpool of extraordinary size or violence; a situation that resembles a whirlpool in violence or turbulence."

On page three of today's Manhasset Press we feature an article about the Nassau HUB. For those who haven't been following it, this is the area of Nassau County that stretches from Fortunoff on the east to the Nassau Coliseum on the west and includes the Glen Cove Road shopping malls, Roosevelt Field, the former Roosevelt Raceway property, Hofstra University and adjacent properties. The method of its development has been an issue for some years no and transportation is the pre-eminent issue. Although we do not live in the immediate area of the HUB, most of us have occasion to spend time there, either shopping, going to events at the Nassau Coliseum or the Marriott Hotel, attending classes or special events at Hofstra University. It seems to us that many of the proposals for solving the transportation problems deal with only part of the situation--the idea, for example, of a monorail running parallel to Old Country Road--and do not look at the larger picture. The larger picture is being studied by a group with a clumsy sounding name, but it seems in this quarter that it is taking the right approach. This is "The Long Island Transportation Plan to Manage Congestion 2000 "(LITP 2000). This group, which consists of government, business and civic representatives, under the aegis of the New York State Department of Transportation, is considering environmental, quality of life, consumer and commuter demands. We read on a daily basis of plans to improve access to Kennedy and LaGuardia Airports, to run the Long Island Rail Road into Grand Central Station and to build an east side subway. Not to consider all these transportation as parts of one puzzle seems shortsighted, to say nothing of prohibitively expensive. We applaud the Citizens Advisory Committee, a member of which represents the Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Shelter Rock's Environmental Justice Task Force, for its oversight of the HUB plans. We are fortunate to have such vigilant watchdogs on the job.

E.F.B.