Water Hogs of the Hamptons, 2023

The Suffolk County Water Authority is considering a special new rate tier that would charge properties consuming huge amounts of water more per gallon than even high-volume users pay now.

It is an effort to convince the owners of some of the South Fork’s largest estates to curtail their water usage.

The SCWA has for years dubbed private properties that consume millions of gallons of water per year “superusers” and has tried appealing to owners and property managers to do more to reduce the amount of water they draw in through the SCWA mains, which taxes the authority’s ability to maintain water pressure at peak usage times, posing a threat to firefighting capabilities.

The water authority’s CEO, Jeff Szabo, said the utility is considering a superuser rate — because the creation of the current two-tier rate system has not shown any success in spurring wealthy property owners to cut back.

“We have the first tier, which is $2.11 per thousand gallons, and then we have the second tier, which is a dollar more than that, but we have not seen much movement from those very large users. So we’re contemplating a third tier for those superusers,” Szabo said. “It would help capture the funds that we need for expanding these systems to meet the rising peak demands and also to, hopefully, incentivize a reduction in usage.

“Last summer, we had emergency services pleading with folks to be smart about water use, we had our staff out looking for people watering in the early mornings, we asked homeowners to shift to an every-other-day watering schedule — and we only saw a very slight shift in usage,” he added.

The Express News Group, and formerly The Press News Group, has tracked the growth of superusers and how much water they draw from the SCWA wells since 2010, labeling top users as “the Water Hogs of the Hamptons.”

This year’s lists of the top water users in Southampton Town and East Hampton Town, which The Express News Group received through a Freedom of Information request filed with the SCWA, contains many of the same names as previous years — large estates with either expansive irrigation systems or geothermal heating and cooling systems that are connected to the home’s water mains, and sometimes both.

As it did last year, the oceanfront estate at 1710 Meadow Lane in Southampton Village sucked up more SCWA water than any other residential property on the South Fork. The 12-month period of the latest rankings ran from July 1, 2022, to June 30, 2023.

The home, which is owned by an LLC, Ickenham Limited, and is unremarkable on a street where gargantuan mansions are the norm, used more than 12.5 million gallons of water over the last 12 months — nearly 100 times more than the countywide average for a home — during a period that included last summer’s severe drought on Long Island and a water emergency declaration by the SCWA.

The property did use nearly 5 million gallons less than it did in the 12 months from July 2021 to June 2022, though the SCWA cannot tell if that is because of some change to its water usage habits or just a wrinkle in the data reporting.

The second-largest user of public water was the 3-acre estate and 10,000-square-foot home at 7 Fairfield Pond Lane in Sagaponack, which drew in more than 11.2 million gallons. Its ownership is also shrouded by an LLC, Samudra Farms.

The top 15 largest users of water in Southampton Town are primarily in Southampton Village, and each uses more than 4.5 million gallons of water a year.

In East Hampton Town, the superusers are much more tempered but still represent usage dozens of times higher than the average.

The modern mansion at the end of Two Mile Hollow Road, owned by Robert Taubman, according to SCWA, was again the largest water consumer in the town, at 5.1 million gallons. A home at 11 Beach Plum Court was second at just over 5 million gallons. A cluster of Georgica Pond-adjacent estates topped out at over 4 million gallons each.

The average home in Suffolk County uses about 130,000 gallons of water a year, the water authority says.

But the number of homes that use many times that much has been steadily climbing, thanks primarily to the expansion of sprinkler systems that keep increasingly manicured landscaping and lawns lush through the heat of summer.

Some 70 percent of the water that the SCWA pumps through its mains — around 70 billion gallons a year — is used during the summer, a clear indication that sprinkler systems are the main driver of peak usage.

The SCWA works with the Irrigation Association of New York and appeals to local irrigation companies to try to convince customers that watering less will not impact the quality of lawns, and urging them to shift the times they water out of the 4-to-7 a.m. period, when most automatic sprinkler systems are programmed to turn on, and to use rainfall meters to reduce wasting water.

“This year, it was a little bit cooler in the spring, but we still did not see a decrease in demand, so that tells us that people are turning on their automatic systems in the spring and just leaving them. That’s frustrating for us, because it’s just not necessary,” Szabo said.

“This week, we’ve had a week that has been largely overcast and had some periods of heavy rain, but we’re still hovering around 500,000 gallons per minute, and in Southampton we’re right there at our peaks, still.”

The authority says it has appealed to property managers at big estates to curtail watering schedules, with limited success. Rebates on water-saving devices for irrigation systems have been successful, Szabo said, but largely among smaller property owners who use much less water.

For the first time this year, the authority will spend $250,000 on advertising in hopes of reaching more consumers in the way private companies try to reach potential customers.

While irrigation systems draw the most water overall, the homes that surge into superuser status typically do so because they have geothermal climate control systems that use water to regulate heating and cooling. The systems were originally devised to use groundwater but in many homes have been connected to the water supply.

The SCWA has barred “open loop” systems, which use more water, from connecting to their mains and has appealed to owners or property managers of large estates to install private wells to supply the geothermal and irrigation systems, so that they are not taxing SCWA supplies.

Some former perennial superusers have dropped off the lists in recent years, likely because they have either upgraded their systems or connected to private wells.

The struggle between the SCWA and water usage rates by their consumers on the East End is not so much a battle over an actual shortage of water, at least not in the foreseeable future, as it is about the ability to deliver water and maintain good water pressure for fire hydrants, and the costs of expanding pumping facilities that are passed along to all of SCWA’s ratepayers.

Long Island, and the SCWA, draws its water from the aquifer — a fortuitous natural feature that has saved the residents of Suffolk County from a lot of the headaches other communities across the nation have.

“Our aquifer is plentiful — it’s the largest sole-source aquifer in the country, and we’re very fortunate. There are some people in my position who run larger drinking water utilities elsewhere that struggle every day just to have enough water to provide to their customers,” Szabo said. “We are not in that position. We have trillions of gallons of water under our feet and it recharges naturally every year.

“But we do need to be aware and we need to respect what we have.”