The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has closed its Long Island Sound office in Stamford amid a wave of government cost-cutting, officials confirmed this week.

The office had been located in the Stamford Government Center, with the city acting as the landlord, according to Lauren Meyer, a special assistant to Mayor Caroline Simmons. Earlier this year it was one of hundreds of federal leases marked for termination by the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, according to a list published online.

While the office was first included on DOGE’s closure list in February, Meyer said that agency did not terminate its lease with the city until late last month.

In a statement this week, a spokesperson for the EPA confirmed that agency closed the office, effective June 30, after moving its remaining staff to the EPA’s main regional office in New York City.

“The structural reorganization will save taxpayers the cost of leasing the office, while still allowing the important work to protect and enhance the Long Island Sound to continue,” the statement said. “No staff were terminated or given different assignments.”

Meyer said the EPA was in the first year of a five-year lease for its office space at the Stamford Government Center, with a monthly rent of $5,803. The termination of the lease was expected to save taxpayers $308,951, according to DOGE.

Among the duties of the office was overseeing the Long Island Sound Partnership, a collaboration between the federal government and the states of New York and Connecticut to improve water quality and monitor the overall health of the Sound. The partnership was established by Congress in 1985, and has been credited with helping to reduce nitrogen pollution by half in the Sound, along with the restoration of over 2,400 acres of wetlands.

The longtime director of the office, Mark Tedesco, announced his retirement late last year after more than three decades spent with the EPA.

Tedesco was one of three employees who worked out of the Stamford office, according to the EPA. Of the two remaining staffers, one moved to the agency’s New York office and the other opted to accept the deferred resignation offer sent out by the Trump administration earlier this year.

Altogether, the EPA has seven staff members assigned to the Long Island Sound Partnership, split between the agency’s offices in New York and Boston.

“EPA continues to fully support the Long Island Sound Partnership program, and we are not making changes to the program,” the agency said in its statement Wednesday.

Denise Stranko, the executive vice president of programs at the Connecticut-based nonprofit Save the Sound, declined to comment directly on the office’s closure. Instead, she said the group is focused on maintaining current funding for the EPA’s Long Island Sound program in the next federal budget, as well as finding Tedesco’s successor.

In June, the EPA named Nicole Tachiki, a former staffer under Tedesco, to serve as active director of the Long Island Sound Partnership. Due to an ongoing federal hiring freeze, Stranko said that the EPA will need to obtain a waiver before appointing someone to fill the role permanently.

“We have been very supportive of the request for a waiver so that that position can permanently be filled,” Stranko said. “That’s really big for us, and we are looking to EPA to do that.”

But Tom Andersen, the author of a book on the Sound titled “This Fine Piece of Water” — with a foreword by former activist and current Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — said that the move could make it more difficult for the staff at the EPA to continue their work.

“If you’re overseeing Long Island Sound, you ought to be on Long Island Sound, not on the southern end of Manhattan,” Andersen said.

President Donald Trump’s EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, is a former Republican congressman from Long Island who served as co-chair of the House’s Long Island Sound Caucus.

Earlier this year, to mark the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Long Island Sound Partnership, Zeldin announced the the program’s latest Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan. The plan called for increased water monitoring, removal of marine debris, restoration of coastal habitats and increased public access to the Sound, among other goals.

“Forty years of dedication, hard work and passion have now defended this critical waterway,” Zeldin said in a video promoting the plan. “We look forward to doing our part at the EPA to advance this cause for decades to come.”

A spokesman for U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, D-4, said that the congressman’s office was not notified by the EPA of its decision to close the office within his district.

Another member of the Connecticut delegation, U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney, D-2, serves as co-chair of the Long Island Sound Caucus and released a statement raising concerns about the move, which he noted follows the announcement of plans by the EPA to shrink its workforce by 23% and close its research arm.

“I am closely monitoring any impact of EPA office closures in our state along with local stakeholders,” Courtney said. “The Long Island Sound is an ecological treasure that requires constant, vigilant care… I am committed to ensuring that recent progress that the EPA has contributed to continues uninterrupted.”

Trump’s budget request for the upcoming fiscal year includes $40 million for the EPA’s Long Island Sound program, keeping it level at current funding. At the same time, the budget proposes slashing funding for similar geographic programs in the San Francisco Bay and Washington’s Puget Sound.

Since taking over the EPA in January, Zeldin has sought to roll back many existing federal environmental regulations, and instead focus the agency’s efforts on lowering costs, providing a boost to industry and helping to “unleash American energy.” On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that the EPA was planning on rescinding a key finding that had allowed the agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions in order to combat climate change.

John Moritz is a reporter for The Connecticut Mirror (https://ctmirror.org/ ). Copyright 2025 © The Connecticut Mirror.