Money Needed for Water Quality

Officials in the East End towns and villages are taking a new look at water pollution and suggesting that a regional approach might be the solution. They have proposed seeking as much as $100 million from the state for rebates on private septic systems or tax credits, acknowledging that environmental damage from failed or inadequate systems is a problem that spans municipal borders.

There have been other efforts too, and they are welcome. Suffolk County has initiated a test of new and improved nitrogen-removal units for home effluent. East Hampton Town is deep into a wastewater study of its own. The Town of Southampton has been an early leader, helping secure $2 million for a Stony Brook University program to develop new, effective wastewater systems.

The main problem with household and commercial wastewater, as well as fertilizer runoff, is its elevated nitrogen and phosphorus content. Both are essential elements, but when levels are too high, the environmental consequences are significant. They can cause harmful algae blooms, like those linked to shellfish collapses in the Peconic Estuary, and bacteria that can cause illness in humans.

Nitrogen is also seen as a leading cause of so-called dead zones, coastal areas where oxygen levels are so low that almost nothing can survive. This is known as hypoxia, and it has been identified as a culprit in the nearly complete loss of the essential eelgrass habitat in most East End bays and harbors. Perhaps less well understood, but of potentially massive impact, are changes in the oceans’ nitrogen cycle, which have the potential to alter the marine environment on a global scale. We are, in short, killing the seas with every flush.

Enhanced treatment of wastewater is seen as the solution. But improved septic systems can be prohibitively expensive for homeowners, and competing demands for funding are a constant for the operators of municipal sewage treatment plants. A recent study in East Hampton Town alone found at least 1,700 individual septic systems in need of correction and that number is likely to climb when examination of additional watershed properties is completed. The cost to retrofit a single private system to curb nitrogen and phosphorus could be as much as $40,000, according to the study’s author.

One idea for dealing with wastewater pollution has been to take money from the community preservation fund. As we have argued before, this should be a last resort. History has shown that when public officials begin to dip into dedicated funds, they will seek to raid them again and again for all manner of purposes. Think of former East Hampton Town Supervisor Bill McGintee’s bleeding of the C.P.F. to secretly balance the town’s budget, and Suffolk Executive Steve Bellone’s refusal to repay money owed to the county’s drinking water protection program.

The 2-percent C.P.F. tax on real estate transactions should remain out of bounds, and alternate funding found. Tapping the preservation fund for septic system rebates, which could have the unintended effect of increasing residential density by reducing groundwater contamination on individual sites, would be a net loss for the region. On the flip side, using C.P.F. money to buy land and prevent development in important watersheds, as East Hampton has done around Lake Montauk, for example, is the right approach.

Because East Hampton’s wastewater consultant also sells name-brand septic upgrade equipment, we have to wonder about his advice against hoping for money from state or federal sources to fight water pollution. On the contrary, while East End town and village officials should seek to fund interim work at home, we believe a collective effort to obtain state and federal funding is warranted.