More Support for Round Pond Bulkhead Replacement in Sag Harbor

Southampton Town and Sag Harbor Village officials on February 22 held the second of two informational meetings on a proposal to replace the Round Pond bulkhead at the foot of Middle Line Highway.

The plan is to instead restore the natural shoreline by installing rain gardens and a bioswale to slow down the flow of stormwater runoff into the pond and remove nitrogen and other pollutants from it.

Last week’s gathering took place at Sag Harbor’s Municipal Building. Just as at an earlier gathering at Southampton Town Hall on February 17, there was widespread support for the project.

Southampton Town Councilman Tommy John Schiavoni said that $187,000 had been awarded for the project by the town’s Community Preservation Fund water quality advisory committee in 2018.

“Since then, we had a world pandemic, which kind of gummed things up, and we have had some challenges in Town Hall getting things in place,” he said.

The cost has also gone up — to an estimated $425,000. Schiavoni said the town had already spent $22,000 of the original award on design work and needed an additional grant of $260,000 to complete the project.

Nicholas Jimenez, the town’s public works capital projects manager, said work is expected to begin this spring and be completed by the end of the year.

Round Pond and the bulkhead at the road end are under the jurisdiction of the Town Trustees.

“What I’d like to remind everyone of is the importance of patience,” said Town Trustee Ann Welker, who is overseeing the project for her board. “It usually takes a bit of time for perennial gardens to get established, usually in the range of two or three years.”

In time, the new shoreline will be both beautiful and “an effective mitigator of stormwater runoff and nutrients into this pond.”

Jimenez said road runoff entering the rain gardens would be caught in soil depressions and absorbed by the root systems of the plants. The bioswale, something like a man-made meandering creek, would handle excessive rainfall and slow its progress to the pond.

Mayor Jim Larocca said he has often been asked whether the pollutants don’t just become concentrated in the plants that are supposed to use them.

“They don’t just remove them, they use them,” Jimenez said of the nitrogen, phosphorous, and other pollutants that enter the system. He said, however, that sometimes it is necessary to replace soil in rain gardens about once every 10 years.

Kate Plumb asked whether any baseline testing had been done of the pond to measure the effectiveness of the new system.

Jimenez said there was no such data, but said the town would use engineering drainage calculations to determine what percentage of pollutants would be removed. He estimated that the system could catch 90 percent of the total.

Schiavoni said that while the village has been undertaking water testing for some time, it has focused its attention on saltwater and not the pond system that makes up the Long Pond Green Belt.

Mary Ann Eddy, a member of the village’s Harbor Committee, which oversees that testing program, said it was both difficult and expensive to get reliable nitrogen readings. She said it would be better to measure for algae concentrations because the algae feeds on nitrogen. When it dies, it falls to the bottom, were microbes eat it, but also use up dissolved oxygen in the water column, killing off fish.