Southampton Town Board To Hold Hearing on Sand Mine Amortization

A proposal to close the handful of remaining sand mines on residentially zoned property in Southampton Town is shaping up to be a bitter battle when the Town Board holds a public hearing on the matter Tuesday, December 10, at 1 p.m.

On one side are the board’s Democratic majority and environmentalists, who say closing mines is in keeping with the goals of the town’s Comprehensive Plan to protect the groundwater, and its zoning code, which outlawed mines in the early 1970s, making those that remained preexisting, nonconforming uses that were expected to be phased out over time.

On the other side are those in the construction business, most prominently John Tintle, the owner of East Coast Mines, the largest remaining sand mine in town, as well as Sand Land, the sand mine in Noyac that has been the subject of a seemingly endless legal battle as the town has sought to close it once and for all.

Tintle has been joined by Councilwoman Cyndi McNamara, the lone Republican on the board, in charging that the legislation proposed by Democratic Councilman Bill Pell is targeting Tintle’s businesses to curry favor with Robert Rubin, the owner of The Bridge Golf Club, which has residential lots abutting Sand Land. They point to Rubin’s donation of more than $140,000 to the 2023 campaigns of Pell, Supervisor Maria Moore and Councilman Michael Iasilli as evidence of Rubin’s influence.

“This law was drafted by Rubin,” said Tintle, who called it a “pay-to-play scheme” that he would ask Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney to investigate.

Brian Sexton, an attorney who has worked on the Sand Land litigation on behalf of The Bridge, environmental groups, and other neighbors, dismissed Tintle’s accusation.

“The facts are that Sand Land has been closed for a year. New York’s highest court annulled their permits in 2023,” he said. “So this proposed town amortization legislation has nothing to do with closing Sand Land. It’s already closed, and they have apparently moved their operations to East Hampton.”

Besides unfairly targeting local mining businesses, McNamara has argued at Town Board meetings that the legislation, if adopted, would raise the cost of construction across the East End by requiring sand to be shipped in from up-island or even upstate.

At a recent Town Board meeting, Highway Superintendent Charles McArdle echoed her concern, saying, “My budget will go through the roof,” if sand, a key ingredient in concrete, is no longer available locally. Plus, McArdle added, the town has relied on sand from local mines to plug gaps when dunes are breached by hurricanes and other major storms.

The Amortization Legislation

The law being considered by the board cites the Comprehensive Plan’s effort to protect the town’s sole-source aquifer, from which it obtains all of its drinking water, and the town’s right to amortize preexisting, nonconforming uses that are not abandoned by their owners.

If adopted, the measure would order all mines in residential zones to be closed within one year, although it includes a provision that gives their owners 60 days from the time they receive notice that they must close to petition the Zoning Board of Appeals for the right to stay open up to an additional seven years if they can prove they have mined less than 50 percent of the sand allowed by their permit. Once a mine had extracted the sand allowed in its permit, the owner would be required to reclaim the land.

The town did not provide a list of where the mines that would be subjected to the law are. But Moore, in an emailed response to an interview request, said this week that the State Department of Environmental Conservation had informed the town that there are currently seven sand mines in the town, although, apparently, only Tintle’s East Coast Mines in East Quogue is actively mining sand. Others are waiting to be reclaimed or converted to new uses.

When the Town Board first took up the proposed law for discussion last month, McNamara, citing the lack of an environmental study, said the town was leaving itself open to a lawsuit.

Tintle pretty much promised the same, saying he was confident in the American legal system to uphold his rights.

“There have been zero cases in the State of New York where a sand or gravel mine has caused any pollution to the groundwater,” he said, “and there isn’t one iota of data that Sand Land has contributed to any pollution.”

For decades, Sand Land also processed vegetative waste for use as mulch and compost and recycled concrete and construction debris. There have been numerous links to that type of activity and groundwater pollution, and the Suffolk County Department of Health Services found elevated levels of iron, manganese and other pollutants in test wells at Sand Land in 2017.

Tintle, who disputes the county’s findings, said he had given up the recycling operation voluntarily in 2018, but he pointed out that the town continues the same kind of activity at its transfer stations in North Sea, Hampton Bays and Westhampton. He said it should make sure its own actions are safe before forcing private businesses to shut down.

A Filter for the Aquifer

Robert DeLuca, the president of the environmental organization the Group for the East End, said arguing about whether mining causes pollution or not misses the point.

The zoning code, he said, has as one of its goals the removal of industrial uses from residentially zoned property. And even if mining has not been directly linked with pollution of the groundwater, he said the simple act of removing layers of forest floor, organic material and sand from above the aquifer is like removing a vital filter. “You are literally just reducing the timespan it takes for something to get into the groundwater,” he said.

DeLuca said every mining permit includes a requirement that a miner reclaim the land that has been mined — but the DEC has failed to require the operations to close out their permits, allowing them to segue into other industrial uses and leaving it to the town to do that work.

“You can get up to seven years,” he said of the town’s proposal. “If you have a facility that is defunct and you are not doing any mining now, what are you doing? To close out the permit requires reclamation.”

DeLuca said requiring sand for construction to be trucked in would raise the price, but he said it is not uncommon to ship in building materials, noting that the lumber used in house construction usually comes from the Pacific Northwest or Canada. “We aren’t cutting down the Pine Barrens to have wood to build houses,” he said.

State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr., who has been at the forefront at the battle against Sand Land, also questioned the economic impact. “It seems to be a gross exaggeration to say that this is going to have a substantial impact on the cost of building,” he said. “It is a regional market.”

Plus, he said, the law would allow any properly permitted mine the right to extract “every grain of sand that can be legally mined.”

Thiele said amortization “is one of the tools in the zoning toolbox” and that it had been used by Southampton Town several times over the years to eliminate everything from billboards to nightclubs.

Both the town and the state signaled their intent that this day was coming many years ago, he said. The town did so when it outlawed sand mines in 1972, and the state followed suit when the legislature passed a law in the early 1990s that created special rules giving towns on Long Island the special authority to regulate mines over that of the DEC.