When Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy made the call to place a permanent shelter for homeless sex offenders outside the jail in Riverside in 2007, it certainly helped that FRNCA was already up and operating. It took the group little time to begin staging local rallies, even sending busloads of angry East Enders to Hauppauge to protest Mr. Levy's sex offender trailer. Mr. Brewer and his neighbors also helped organize a public forum on the sex offender issue at Riverhead High School last year. The forum attracted over 200 people, and local and regional media outlets as well. Now, it looks as if the trailers will soon be gone.

Just across the bay from Flanders, residents in Aquebogue, which never had a civic group, formed one in 2008 after getting word that the Riverhead School District was looking to partner with the YMCA to get a Y, as well as a bus barn, built smack in the middle of protected farmland there. The group organized meetings, bombarded the newspaper with angry letters and made its presence felt at each and every school board meeting.

The pressure not only helped to protect the residents' quality of life, it led to a much more sensible and inclusive plan, as it appears a Y will instead be built near Stotzky Park in Riverhead.

It's somewhat odd and even a shame that the downtown Riverhead area has no civic group when most every hamlet -- even other neighborhoods -- boasts incorporated associations. Make no mistake; not having such an organization hurts the downtown area.

Certainly the neighborhoods surrounding the business and court districts are negatively affected by all the vacant and neglected properties on East Main Street. A civic group could pressure the Town Board to craft legislation that cracks down on absentee landlords, for example. Concerned residents could arrive en masse at Town Hall to demand that police be more aggressive in chasing drug dealers from their neighborhoods.

And let's not forget the slumlords. Unlike in Southampton Town, we haven't gotten word of any big slumlord busts in Riverhead. Yet we know these overcrowded, unsafe and blighted homes are out there. So do the folks who live in these areas. They just need to organize and make noise, like the Wading River Civic Association did almost two years ago in demanding more police coverage in their hamlet during a rash of burglaries. They stormed Town Hall, wrote News-Review opinion pieces and circulated a petition, collecting hundreds of signatures in the process. That's the way to get results.

And that's just what downtown needs -- results.

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