Letters

As you read this letter (and thanks if you do), the Suffolk County Legislature should have voted (on July 25) to put the creation of funding by taxpayers that supports their wastewater improvement program on the ballot so that the voters could decide on it. Or they could have missed the boat, and we lost a valuable opportunity and our chance to vote on it this November.

Bob DeLuca, president of the Group for the East End, wrote a strong piece for Riverhead Local last week urging the legislature to jump on board and let the voters decide in November whether to approve a 1/8 of a cent tax to continue the good work that Suffolk County is doing to study and correct water problems. This tiny tax would continue to fund their excellent efforts, and it would open the county to qualify for thousands of dollars from the state to preserve the future of clean water.

For decades, the degradation of our fragile water supply has become increasingly alarming.

I wish to underscore Bob DeLuca’s concern that we are at a crucial crossroads in terms of affecting our water quality. We must take action to upgrade the hundreds of thousands of outdated residential and commercial septic systems that are still in use throughout the county before it is too late. Nitrogen is the sanitized word for what is degrading our water. Overdevelopment one of the obvious causes accelerating it.

I am opposed to burdening taxpayers; however, it seems to me that the comprehensive action plans already begun, which were described and endorsed by DeLuca, are necessary and excellent, and for each of us it is only a 1/8 of a cent tax. I hope we will see it on the ballot in November. We can’t afford to wait.

Joseph R. McLoughlin

Southampton Village