Sep. 20--With a gleaming new garbage truck and billionaire Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens standing behind him, Gov. George Pataki hailed the Town of Smithtown yesterday for ordering municipal garbage trucks to run on compressed natural gas.

"It's cleaner, it keeps the money here in America and, at the end of the day, it saves money for the Town of Smithtown," Pataki said at the Kings Park Bluff. "Everybody wins."

The town will become the first municipality east of California to mandate that its garbage trucks use compressed natural gas, Pataki said.

The contracts call for the town next year to pay four garbage carters $2.33 for the amount of natural gas required to produce the energy from a gallon of diesel fuel. The price will rise to $2.94 by 2013, the last year of the deal. Carters using traditional diesel fuel would have charged as much as $6 a gallon, said Russell Barnett, the town's environmental protection director.

Switching from diesel to natural gas trucks is a good first step toward a cleaner Long Island environment, said Adrienne Esposito, executive director of Citizens Campaign for the Environment.

"It's just garbage trucks," she said. "We applaud all proactive steps, but we need a lot of them and we need them fast."

Pickens, the founder of California-based Clean Energy, which will fuel the new garbage trucks from its Hauppauge fueling station, predicted that in eight years Long Island would have as many as 2,500 garbage trucks running on compressed natural gas. Pataki also announced yesterday a $150,000 contract to help Clean Energy expand the Hauppauge fueling station.

The event was not the first meeting between Pickens, who bankrolled the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign that helped sink John Kerry's 2004 presidential ambitions, and Pataki. Last October, Pataki flew to Pickens' Texas ranch on the oilman's private plane after a trip to Iowa, according to Virginia state election filings.