Montauk Sewer Debate Is Focus of Express Sessions Event

The debate over whether to build an estimated $70 million sewer system for downtown Montauk is just getting started, East Hampton Town officials and critics of the proposal agreed at the most recent Express Sessions event last week.

On one side of the coming debate are business owners and town officials who say that without a sewer system, downtown Montauk businesses are hamstrung into an unsustainable predicament of overflowing septics and unsanitary pollution of groundwater and nearby surface waters.

On the other side are those who say that the town should not put a sewage treatment plant in the midst of one of the largest swaths of undeveloped woodlands on Long Island, and that a sewer system itself could threaten overdevelopment of the downtown and other areas of the hamlet.

Montauk could not be built as it stands today without a sewer system, East Hampton Town Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc pointed out in kicking off the discussion over lunch at Gurneys Resort on Friday, April 21.

The hamlet’s downtown businesses and hotels currently flush more than four times as much wastewater from their toilets than Suffolk County Health Department standards would allow — and most of that goes into failing cesspool systems that do nothing to filter out any pollutants or nutrients before they reach groundwater just a few feet below.

“At high tide now, there are businesses in downtown Montauk where … the large amount of flow that we see in the summertimes especially, causes overflows within the streets and requires constant pumping of waste,” the supervisor said.

Over the last five years, the Town Board and a committee of Montauk residents and business owners have explored the potential for a sewer system — devising a draft plan that would build a system capable of handling the wastewater from the downtown and, potentially, three other areas — Ditch Plains, the Montauk Harbor docks and the area surrounding the train station, which the Hamlet Study report suggested would be prime area for future commercial development as sea level rise makes some areas near the downtown untenable in the future.

The town has proposed building the treatment plant next to the town landfill in Hither Hills and plans to ask Suffolk County to swap 14 acres of parkland for more than 18 acres of undeveloped land the town recently purchased off East Lake Drive, which is contiguous with Theodore Roosevelt County Park.

The first phase of the project, which would sewer just the downtown and construct the plant, has been forecast to cost $70 million, and wouldn’t come online until at least 2030, engineer Nick Bono, who designed the proposed system, said.

Most of the costs — potentially as much as 90 percent — could be covered by state and federal grants, Van Scoyoc added.

Leo Daunt, the president of the Montauk Chamber of Commerce, said that the septic problems in the downtown have hamstrung many businesses that cannot improve their septics because of shallow water tables or space limitations on their property, and are forced to spend tens of thousands of dollars, or hundreds of thousands of dollars, annually to have their cesspools pumped out on a regular basis — potentially threatening the long-term viability of some.

“As sea level rises as well, our septic systems are going to be at risk,” Daunt, who owns a hotel in the downtown area, said. “We do not want to wait until our septic systems all fail in order to try and address the problem. We need to be proactive and decide on a solution now.”

Bono said that in most of the downtown, properties are too small for individual septic systems to be replaced or upgraded, and that the shallow groundwater table would render many useless anyway.

The same goes for some residential properties in Ditch Plains, where septic pollution has been found to be a major contributor to bacterial and nitrogen pollution in Lake Montauk, Councilman David Lys said.

But Rick Whalen, the director of the Coalition to Preserve Hither Woods, said the town has shielded the details of its plans from the general public for too long. The town should have brought the details of its plan to the public long before it took them to the Suffolk County Parks trustees, who earlier this year recommended against approving the land swap.

Whalen said that the town’s proposal is an offense to the efforts of conservationists to preserve open space in two ways.

“It’s important for both its direct impact on Hither Woods and its ramifications for the larger issue of parkland protection,” he said. “We don’t want this town, other towns, getting it in their head that parkland that the people thought was preserved forever is going to be available for other uses.”

Robert DeLuca of the Group for the East End warned that building the critical infrastructure like sewers could be a catalyst for development pressures.

“Probably 30 years ago, a former supervisor of the Town of Riverhead said to me that it was easier to get into bed with a polar bear than it was to get out,” he said, drawing laughter from the audience. “When it comes to infrastructure, this is true.”

He applauded East Hampton for having been the rare municipality that kept development in check in the 1980s.

“And I think if you ask the people in this town, what defines East Hampton is that it was a community that tapped the brakes, and stepped back, and looked to its future,” he said, warning the town to watch out for unintended consequences in solutions to a vexing problem. “And, I get it, the temptation is huge, but we’re also 80 miles out in the Atlantic Ocean on a sandbar. So you have to be careful.”

The problem with relying on zoning alone to keep development in check, DeLuca offered, is that zoning cannot be made permanent by one Town Board so that a future board could not loosen limitations in the future as political winds shift priorities.

“So if you have zoning in place and you say, ‘Good, we’ve got this buttoned up,’ and then the next Town Board comes in and says, ‘Well, I have a better idea’ — that’s the real issue,” the veteran environmentalist said. “And I will tell you that the availability of water and sewers is one of the reasons that a community might use to expand the amount of development that it can have.”

Councilman Lys, who is up for reelection this year, said that he sees the town’s strategy going forward as being one of careful study, open minded thinking and a diligent approach that avoids pitfalls.

“We have the wastewater plan coming, we have the hamlet study, we have the [Coastal Assessment and Resiliency Plan] and we FIMP coming in,” he said. “You have to put those studies to use now — take them all off the shelf right and put them in front of you. You weigh the pros and the cons. You listen to the advocates, the individuals that aren’t going to like it, and you try to make your best decision possible. And then … you put your safeguards in place.”

Van Scoyoc said that much of the work will be simply public education about the details of the plan. The fact that the town asked the county for 14 acres is misleading, he said, because the sewer plant would only require about 6 acres of that land to be disturbed for its construction, and that the plant itself would only be on 3 acres, leaving broad buffers from the few houses nearby.

He also said that extensive study over more than a year has convinced the town and its consultants that the landfill site is the only viable option — for reasons of space needs and staying away from developed areas. The Hither Hills site is next to the landfill and a cluster of cellular towers and the water beneath it flows northward, away from development, the Suffolk County Water Authority has said.

He welcomed Whalen’s suggestion that airing the project in the public forum may present the town with alternatives for siting the system that they had not even considered.

“It’s important that we go back to the public and say, ‘Here’s the problem, let’s talk about all the possibilities,’” he said. “There’s a pretty limited number of options at this point based on our research.”

“I think if the town had invited public input into this process two years ago when they really began to seriously look at how to deal with wastewater in downtown Montauk and elsewhere, they would’ve heard from the very beginning that parkland was going to be very unpopular,” Whalen said.

Brian Harris, president of the Montauk Beach Properties Owners Association — comprising 500 homes in Hither Hills, south of the town landfill — said he has been warned not to take the claims of the SCWA about the direction groundwater in the area flows.

“President Reagan, I believe, said, ‘Trust but verify,’” Harris said, asking Lys to pledge that the town will conduct extensive new groundwater flow studies to ensure the new plant and the hundreds of thousands of gallons of treated water it will release would not infiltrate residential wells.

A cesspool like many of Montauk’s homes and businesses used released waste water with upward of 65 milligrams per liter of nitrogen in it, Bono explained in response. A typical home’s septic tank system cuts that to about 50 milligrams. The waste treatment plant that the town would be looking at — using today’s technology —would be required by state law to cut nitrogen to less than 10 milligrams, he said, so the system would pose a far lesser threat to the drinking water supplies of MBPA’s residents than their own neighbors already do.

Others in the audience for the luncheon weighed in on the town’s options as well.

Laura Michaels, a board member of the Ditch Plains Association, said that before the town decides it needs sewage treatment to help improve water quality, it should be tackling a wide range of existing water quality impacts that do not require sewering — like enforcing a 2005 county law requiring large capacity cesspools beneath commercial buildings to be removed, closing bureaucratic loopholes that allow homeowners to conduct major renovations without upgrading septic systems, and addressing road runoff discharges throughout the hamlet.

Jaime LeDuc of the Concerned Citizens of Montauk said that the group has enlisted Stony Brook University professor Dr. Christopher Gobler to conduct an analysis of water pollution around the hamlet and what impacts sewering might, or might not, have.

Janine Mehring, an Amagansett resident and advocate for more constrained development in the region, said the town needs to look with wary eyes at the potential for sprawling new development in Montauk, with several large properties recently purchased by deep-pocketed prospectors or newly up for sale — like the 11-acre Gosman’s Dock property.

Daunt said that the sewer system would be an important part of preparing for new impacts, not encouraging them. The town’s zoning has already kept some new businesses from pursuing aggressive expansion plans.

“Let’s say somebody buys Gosman’s and the flow increases dramatically just because they are busier and they’re a year-round business — what are the effects going to be on Lake Montauk?” he asked rhetorically. “As flow increases, what’s the cost of inaction?”

Van Scoyoc summed up the predicament facing the town and Montauk residents in the next couple of years: lots of difficult decisions.

“To date, this is the only option that we’ve identified, but we’re just now at the point where we’re ready to have that discussion with the community, and if there are better alternatives that come up, I’m all for it — alienation of parkland is like the worst case, last resort scenario,” he said. “And it may be that the public decides they don’t want to alienate and disturb even 5 acres, even if it means that there’s an additional 19 acres put into parkland to replace it.

“I think it’s an issue and a problem that needs to be solved. If it was an easy one, it would’ve been solved already,” he added. “Those are the problems that we get stuck with, the ones that nobody else has been able to solve to date. But, yeah, you could kick that can down the road if you want.”