Trustees, 6-to-2, Okay D.E.C. Application
The East Hampton Town Trustees endorsed two projects aimed at restoring Georgica Pond to health on Tuesday, telling the representative of a property owners’ association that an application to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation for the larger project could be made in the trustees’ name.
The move, over the determined objection of the body’s former clerk, would break with recent practice, in which the town applied for D.E.C. permits on the trustees’ behalf. That allowed the trustees, which owns and manages many of the town’s waterways, bottomlands, and beaches on behalf of the public, to deny the D.E.C.’s authority while affirming its own.
On behalf of the Friends of Georgica Pond Foundation, the property owners’ group, Christopher Gobler of Stony Brook University told the trustees that the dense and toxic blue-green algal blooms which, in the summers of 2014 and ’15, prompted the pond’s closure to crabbing and warnings against going in the water, were at least in part promoted by the macroalgae outbreaks that preceded them. There is a distinct pattern, Dr. Gobler said, in which the release of nitrogen and phosphorous from the decaying macroalgae, the dominant species of which he believes is Cladophora, was followed by blooms of blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria. Excessive algal growth degrades the water, reducing or eliminating dissolved oxygen and causing fish kills. Exposure to cyanobacteria can cause vomiting or diarrhea; skin, eye, or throat irritation; nausea, or allergic reactions or breathing difficulties.
Dr. Gobler proposed weekly harvesting, from May through August, of the macroalgae from the pond’s surface waters by way of an aquatic weed harvester, a boat propelled by paddlewheels that cuts and collects vegetation. The macroalgae would be weighed and analyzed to quantify the amount of nitrogen and phosphorous being removed from the pond. “By doing that,” he said, “we’ll know how much of the nitrogen and phosphorous load we’re mitigating. It may be that we’re handling the whole thing, or it may be that it’s just a drop in the bucket. But until we perform this exercise, we really won’t know.” The Friends of Georgica Pond Foundation would finance the project, said its executive director, Sara Davison.
“Along with harvesting it, we’re also going to quantify anything else that gets removed,” Dr. Gobler said, including invertebrates that would be returned unharmed to the pond. “This could be the panacea, and this could be a drop in the bucket, but either way the evidence suggests there will be benefits.”
He described the project as an interim measure while land-based efforts to reduce nitrogen and phosphorous-loading, including improving or replacing septic systems and cesspools and reducing fertilizer use, are implemented. “In many cases, particularly with Georgica Pond, the watershed is very extensive,” he said. “It extends very, very far north. Groundwater takes a long time to reach it. This is an in-the-water approach that may be needed in the interim.” A letter of endorsement from the trustees, he said, will further the permitting process with the D.E.C.
Diane McNally, formerly the trustees’ longtime clerk, proposed giving the property owners’ group permission to seek a D.E.C. permit in its name. Most of her colleagues disagreed. “I don’t know how we can step back from this and ignore our ownership of the pond and tell them they’ve got to get the permit,” said Jim Grimes. “The first thing the D.E.C. is going to say is, ‘Who owns the property?’ ”
“I don’t care what the D.E.C. has to say,” Ms. McNally said. The pond, she said, “is being affected by every decision being made by upland homeowners who got septic systems, building permits, roads, drainage.” She warned her colleagues that “You’re going to lose so much . . . You’re allowing the D.E.C. to regulate what we can do with that pond.”
“I would wonder why you all became trustees,” she said, gesturing to the five trustees elected in November, four of them Democrats, “if you’re going to give everything away.”
Richard Whalen, who was named the trustees’ attorney by its new Democratic majority last month, said an assertion that the trustees are not subject to D.E.C. regulations would have to be settled in court. “My own view is you’re probably going to find out you are subject to the D.E.C.,” he said. “There are plenty of entities that predate the D.E.C., including the Town of East Hampton, that have to apply for and get D.E.C. permits for much of what they do. . . . The only way to answer that question would be to litigate it.” Regardless, he said, “The notion that the D.E.C. can do away with the trustees, they can’t. You still own the property.”
“This is an issue that was pretty much settled by the last election,” said Bill Taylor, moving to approve Dr. Gobler’s proposal with the trustees named on the permit application. Tim Bock joined Ms. McNally in opposing the motion, which passed by a 6-2 vote. Brian Byrnes was not at the meeting.
Bruce Horwith, a conservation biologist who is overseeing several phragmites-removal projects around the pond, also asked the trustees, on behalf of the property owners’ group, to endorse a plan to seek modification of an existing D.E.C. permit held by East Hampton Village that would allow excavation of a .2-acre area in the northeast section of Georgica Cove. The project, he said, would more than triple the width and double the depth of a narrow channel, achieving a significant increase in water circulation. “It would be easier, cheaper, and quicker to modify the existing permit than to start from scratch with a new application,” he said.
The excavation equipment would traverse village and trustee-owned land to access the pond. The trustees voted unanimously to provide a letter endorsing the plan.