Water Hogs

Who pays to bring more water to the thirstiest estates with the greenest lawns on the South Fork? The answer: (nearly) everybody.

A story last week outlined the top water users on the Suffolk County Water Authority system in the one-year period ending in June in Southampton and East Hampton towns. To offer some context, the average property in Suffolk County uses about 130,000 gallons of water per year, the authority says.

Between the midpoints of 2019 and 2020, the top water consumer on the South Fork, Randall Smith of Captains Neck Lane in Southampton, used more than 17 million gallons of water at his 2.7-acre property. That’s the amount of water that goes over the Horseshoe Falls portion of Niagara Falls in a full 25 seconds.

In some 12-month periods since 2010, other top water users have exceeded 20 million gallons. In 2010, just four homes in East Hampton Town used more than 1 million gallons of water a year; today, it’s more than 80. Together, the 20 biggest users tallied nearly 100 million gallons taken from the aquifer in a single year through June.

Providing that level of service, and still maintaining adequate pressure, means constantly upgrading the system. Costs for new water infrastructure are divided up among everyone who gets their water supply from SCWA mains, as the utility’s customers learned earlier this year when a new $80-per-year charge was applied to pay for the cost of treatment systems to address 1,4-dioxane, PFOS and PFOA treatments. Not every well was contaminated, but SCWA customers everywhere are paying for it.

The cost of infrastructure that’s needed to ensure water supply is adequate and water pressure is sufficient for firefighting is also shared among all SCWA customers, even when just a handful of bad actors are using 100 times as much water as the average single-family homeowner. Yes, these estates are large, but not 100 times larger than the average home lot. Nothing justifies their outrageously excessive irrigation practices and the wasteful use of open-loop geothermal heating and cooling systems, which temporarily use and discard large amounts of water. The SCWA now rightfully refuses to hook up open-loop systems.

Last year, SCWA introduced a tiered rate structure that charges an extra 31 cents per 1,000 gallons for water use in excess of 78,540 gallons per quarter. The charge may have caused some middle-class homeowners to dial back their irrigation systems in the summer months, but the billionaires of the South Fork did not bat an eye.

Keeping up with such demand requires more pumps and more storage tanks. Without more infrastructure, houses that otherwise could have been saved will burn down in early morning fires — as fire hydrants compete with lawn irrigation systems for water pressure scheduled to run then.

There are other costs that we all bear so a few people can have emerald lawns year-round at estates that they only visit a few weekends a year. Expansive lawns that often run right up to a pondfront or bayfront dump fertilizers into the estuary, contributing to algal blooms that decimate marine industries.

Native meadows do not require any more water than Mother Nature provides and do not require fertilizer either, while granting homeowners more beauty than their golf course-like lawns built on sand.

Requiring the water hogs among us to cut back significantly on their water consumption — or slapping them with enormous fees for excessive use, helping to pick up a bigger share of the resulting infrastructure costs — is not placing any great burden on them. Meanwhile, allowing them to continue as they do, unabated, puts an appalling burden on the rest of us.