Property Owners Rescind Lease Offer They Had Made To South Fork Wind

The owners of an East Hampton property that South Fork Wind had proposed leasing to use for the storage of equipment and soil and water have revoked their offer to lease the property to the wind farm developers.

The 1.6-acre property on Tan Bark Trail is owned by the Snyder family, who also own and operate Round Swamp Farm nearby. The commercial kitchen and bakery where the homemade products produced for the hugely popular market on Three Mile Harbor Road are made is on Tan Bark Trail.

Lisa Niggles, one of Round Swamp’s owners, said this week that while the family had been aware of and comfortable with the circumstances of the developer’s proposal, the fact that opponents of the wind farm had trumpeted concerns about chemical contamination in the soil and water that would be stored there itself presented a risk to the family business.

“I’m not sure it was a necessary, but we told them no, because, really, we didn’t want to hear it,” Niggles said.

“It’s unfortunate. We would never risk contaminating our land. It wouldn’t have been a problem — they’ve tested everything, and nothing is contaminated. But people say things even if they’re not true, and we don’t want people saying our farm is contaminated, so that was it.” She added, “Unfortunately, we could have used the money.”

A spokesperson for the wind farm project confirmed on Thursday afternoon, April 21, that the Tan Bark Trail property was no longer part of its plans, and that the company was looking for other locations it might be able to use for the storage of soils and water storage tanks.

“South Fork Wind is no longer considering use of the Tan Bark Trail property,” spokesperson Meaghan Wims said on Thursday, April 21. “We are considering other potential locations and solutions for the temporary storage of soil and groundwater from the construction site.”

Because of concerns about contamination in Wainscott from PFAS — a group of chemicals used in fire-suppressant foams that have been found in groundwater emanating from East Hampton Airport — the agreements that allowed the wind farm to trench through the hamlet required that all soil and water removed from the ground during the project be tested for contaminants and disposed of at an approved hazardous waste disposal site off the South Fork.

But the developers said that there are times when delays in transferring the materials require them to stockpile dirt and water before it can be transferred to the permanent disposal site.

Currently, the materials have been stored on the land adjacent to the Long Island Power Authority substation in Cove Hollow, where a new substation will be constructed this summer to handle the 132 megawatts of power from the wind farm. Once that construction begins, the developers will need an alternate storage site for the byproducts of the trenching.

A spokesperson for the developers had said that only a few hundred cubic yards of soil and one or two 20,000-gallon water storage tanks would have been stored on the Tan Bark Trail property at any one time.

According to testing records shared on the East Hampton Town website, none of the soil or water removed from the ground during the trenching thus far has turned up measurable traces of PFAS contamination.

The trenching for the work is about halfway completed. Work along Wainscott’s roads is due to be completed by next week. Over the summer, crews will conduct trenching alongside the two miles of Long Island Rail Road tracks that the cable will follow from Wainscott NW Road to the Cove Hollow substation.

The developers did win approval from the East Hampton Town Board that same morning to use a portion of town-owned land off Stephen Hands Path as a staging area for vehicles and equipment.

The resolution approved by the Town Board expressly prohibited any soil or water from the trenching work to be stored there.

The property is currently used by the State Department of Transportation to store road maintenance equipment and materials. The wind farm developers will pay the town $1 per square foot of the property that they use, per year.