East Hampton Town Ready To Act On Wind Farm, If Majority Agrees

A split East Hampton Town Board is poised to press forward with a proposal to sign an easement for the South Fork Wind Farm power cable landing in Wainscott, despite the strident objections and threats of lawsuits by residents there — and the board’s resolve turning on how two members will vote.

With Councilman Jeff Bragman making the case that the board should hold off on signing the easements until state regulators have concluded their review, but Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc and Councilwoman Sylvia Overby saying they want to push ahead, the decision will come down to where Councilwoman Kathee Burke-Gonzalez and Councilman David Lys, who have not voiced strong support for, nor reticence about, signing the agreements immediately.

Mr. Lys voted against signing a memorializing resolution in support of the Wainscott cable landing in July 2018, when he was newly appointed to the board and facing his first election bid. But he has never voiced specific opposition to the proposal and did vote in favor of a later resolution allowing Ørsted to conduct test drilling. Ms. Burke-Gonzalez has voted with Mr. Van Scoyoc and Ms. Overby on all steps of the project thus far — though she is the one facing reelection, along with Mr. Bragman, this year.

Neither responded to a request for comment about their position this week, but Mr. Van Scoyoc, in brushing aside what could be Mr. Bragman’s penultimate appeal for delay, indicated that he believes there is majority support for signing the agreements.

“I don’t think the rest of the board holds the same view,” he said when Mr. Bragman noted that the three years of negotiations since the board was first asked to ink its support for what was then only an $8 million financial incentive have only served to improve its position and asked: “Why jump into it?”

“I just want to conclude the process and move on,” Mr. Van Scoyoc said of the “host community agreement” that would secure the town payments from the wind farm developers of some $29 million over the next approximately 28 years in exchange for the required easements.

The residents’ group Citizens for the Preservation of Wainscott — which is anchored by a group of wealthy Wainscott homeowners, including billionaire Ronald Lauder’s family — has said it will sue the town and the East Hampton Town Trustees if either board signs the agreements it has negotiated with Ørsted, the Danish energy company that now owns the Deepwater Wind application for the South Fork Wind Farm.

The group has also submitted a petition to the town demanding a referendum of Wainscott voters for incorporating as a village, which would take control of the roads away from the town. They have said the town is rushing to sign the easement agreements at Ørsted’s behest to head off the ability of a potential new village to nix the landing site, and have accused Mr. Van Scoyoc and other town officials of working with the wind farm company to ink the agreements quickly in the hope of deflating the incorporation push.

The wind farm, expected to be 12 to 15 turbines that would deliver up to 130 megawatts of power to shore in East Hampton, is still pending before state and federal regulators and is not expected to get final approvals until at least a year from now.

The agreements with the town would allow the power cable to be landed at Beach Lane in Wainscott and follow town roads and the LIRR tracks to the LIPA substation in Cove Hollow, four miles away on the edge of East Hampton Village. The Wainscott residents have said the cable should be landed in Montauk or Amagansett, which would require longer and more expensive runs to the power station but would require less disruption of town roads and neighborhoods.

Mr. Van Scoyoc said on Tuesday that he did not hear “anything new” from opponents during a work session discussion of the easement agreements last week, and thinks the town should ink its support immediately.

He said that the agreements have been crafted deliberately with experienced attorneys and consultants — including engineers, he said, harking to one of the criticisms of opponents — and that the town’s position of authority over the ultimate construction will be more solid with the agreements inked.

Ms. Overby echoed his sentiment, touting the town’s record of progressive pro-environment policy.

Mr. Bragman has said he is in favor of offshore wind power in general and has not been particularly critical of the South Fork Wind Farm project itself, though he noted on Tuesday that the state has said small wind projects like SFWF — a fraction of the size of the several wind farms projects that have been proposed in the same area — are not cost efficient. But he continued to argue on Tuesday that the town’s position of support for green energy, and the prospects for the SFWF would not be impacted at all by the town simply waiting to sign the easement and host community agreement until the state has concluded its review.

He argued that there are critical details of the construction process that are not laid out on paper including what chemicals will be used in the drilling of the conduit beneath Beach Lane beach.

“They are permitted to have hazardous materials that they deem necessary … but, to date, we have no idea which ones,” he said. “That’s plainly something they could identify.”

Issues of how the sound buffering for the construction will be arranged, where vehicles will be parked and how traffic lanes will be kept open during the work, as well as how potential contaminants in soil and water will be handled, are all unanswered in detail in the agreements, he said.

The town would also be in a better position to pressure Ørsted on how the wind turbines themselves would be arranged at Cox Ledge, the undersea ride 30 miles southeast of Montauk where the wind farm is to be built, if it has the signing of the easements to hold over the company’s head.

“One of the issues that’s really important to us locally, to the local fishing community, is Cox Ledge and what’s going to happen to it,” Mr. Bragman said. “It’s an extremely valuable habitat for cod and black sea bass. … That issue is now just beginning to be decided by [federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management] and there are problems with resolving how the Deepwater turbines can fit in a way that mitigates what happens to Cox Ledge.”

“We are like the mouse that roared if we put in comments,” he added. “ But we have tremendous leverage with the application if we don’t sign the agreement at this premature point.”

Mr. Overby said she was confident the town will still wield considerable influence with Ørsted.

“I feel we will have leverage, direct leverage over the easements, if we do sign the documents,” she said. “That’s the beauty of [the easement document]: local control of what’s going on. I think these easements give the town of East Hampton a lot of power. We can pull out of it at any time, which would stop the project.”

Among the concerns voiced by Mr. Bragman and other Wainscott residents is the presence of chemicals related to the groundwater contamination emanating from the East Hampton Airport that has contaminated drinking water wells throughout the hamlet. Opponents have said the town’s agreements do not specifically lay out how the cable crews would protect against spreading contaminated soil or water during the installation of the cables.

The town’s attorney, John Wagner, said that the agreements do require Ørsted to determine beforehand if their trenching might expose contaminated groundwater and, if so, ensure that the work will not spread the contaminants or will be “remediated.” Mr. Wagner also said that the easement gives the town direct control over the details of the construction plan.

Mr. Van Scoyoc also put more emphasis on the town’s role in ensuring the South Fork Wind Farm would ultimately be built, which he implied could potentially hinge on the town’s decision —though he did not explain why. 
“I do think that at a certain point, if we don’t continue moving forward by having a conditional agreement, that this project will probably just fail,” he said. “And I think that would be a failure on our part.”