Local Stakeholders Take DEC And Sand Land To Court, Seeking To Block Settlement

Multiple local stakeholders are pursuing litigation against the State Department of Environmental Conservation and the owners of Sand Land over a recent settlement agreement allowing the Noyac mine to operate for eight more years.

Thirteen parties filed a petition on Wednesday, April 17, in Albany County Supreme Court urging the court to void the settlement agreement, as well as a recently issued mining permit renewal. They also asked the court to block the DEC from pursuing any further actions as part of the agreement, such as processing Sand Land’s application to modify its operations. The court granted a temporary restraining order.

Petitioners included the Town of Southampton; State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr.; neighboring property owners 101CO LLC, 102CO NY LLC, Brrrubin LLC, and Bridgehampton Road Races LLC, the latter of which is owner of The Bridge golf club; nonprofit organizations Citizens Campaign for the Environment and the Group for the East End; the Noyac Civic Council and Southampton Town Civic Coalition; and neighboring residents Joseph Phair, Margot Gilman and Amelia Doggwiler.

As part of the settlement agreement, the DEC is seeking to issue a modified permit that would grant the mine another eight years of operation and an additional 40 feet of underground excavation. Sand Land submitted an application for the modification, which is now undergoing a public comment period before the DEC determines whether to approve it.

The settlement agreement was made behind closed doors on February 21 and was not publicly announced until more than three weeks later, on March 15. It came as a shock to the stakeholders, who were under the impression that the DEC was seeking to shut down the Sand Land mine within two years—something the DEC said in a statement in September 2018.

“This settlement and the proposal are 360 degrees opposite from where the DEC itself was last fall, when they said the facility was out of sand, had contaminated the aquifer and had to close,” Bob DeLuca, president of the Group for the East End, said last week. With the new agreement, he said, “they get to go closer to the aquifer, there’s no remediation of the contamination that we know is there, there’s no penalty for the contamination that we know is there.”

A day after the petition was filed, on April 18, Supreme Court Justice Kimberly O’Connor issued a restraining order halting further actions related to Sand Land’s settlement agreement with the DEC and any mining operations until further proceedings take place. The petitioners jointly agreed to the order.

The order stated that the public comment period for the application for Sand Land’s permit modification would be extended for two more weeks, until May 3. Public comments were originally scheduled to end last week. The extension temporarily prevents the DEC from granting Sand Land the proposed terms of the settlement agreement.

“From my standpoint, when you’re looking at a project like this, the amount of time available for public input is key, and especially since this project kind of popped out of nowhere, this expansion,” Mr. DeLuca said Tuesday, pointing out that Group for the East End, Noyac Civic Council and Citizens Campaign for the Environment each submitted detailed comments to the DEC.

Mr. DeLuca added that the additional time could allow the DEC to schedule a local public hearing on the proposal, as the petitioners are requesting them to do.

The court order also stipulated that Sand Land would not mine in the 3-acre area known as the “Stump Dump,” a portion of the property outside the mined area that was previously used for stump and tree dumping.

All parties are ordered to appear for a conference on April 30 at the Albany County Courthouse, court documents state. Comments for the proposed permit modification can be submitted on the Environmental Notice Bulletin on the DEC’s website. The permit application can be found under the March 20 bulletin, Region 1.