The East Hampton Town Board this week revealed some details and a prospective timeline for a contentious plan to build an estimated $75 million sewage treatment plant in Hither Woods to serve parts of Montauk.
The discussion at Tuesday’s work session was “a kick-off to this project,” said Town Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc, and was meant to raise awareness about what he described as a “more than 10-year effort” to improve water quality in Montauk. “This will entail a lot of back and forth,” he said, “and as we move forward there will be many more opportunities for discussion.”
Nicholas Bono is a “wastewater discipline engineer” at H2M Architects and Engineers, an engineering and consulting firm based in Melville that was hired by the town to assess and analyze the prospect for a treatment plant in the hamlet. He told the board Tuesday that the timeline to get a proposed plant up and running would extend for up to eight years and was predicated on numerous assumptions about a process that is just getting underway — including “timely approvals from regulatory agencies as well as the town itself.”
The proposal has been greeted with a less-than-enthusiastic response from some Montauk residents.
Those include Sharon Sennefelder of Hither Hills, who attended both a recent Montauk Citizens Advisory Committee meeting and Tuesday’s work session to raise concerns about her and her neighbors’ wells possibly becoming contaminated by discharge from the proposed sewage plant.
“Don’t forget the 600-plus wells in Hither Hills,” Ms. Sennefelder told the board during the public comments period that kicked off Tuesday’s meeting. “You’re jamming this down into our neighborhood and we want to be considered.”
Mr. Van Scoyoc assured Ms. Sennefelder that “some of your concerns” would be addressed during the presentation.
Other residents have accused the board of a lack of transparency regarding the town’s recent $4 million-plus purchase of a 19-acre undeveloped lot on East Lake Drive in Montauk, which it would trade to Suffolk County in exchange for county-owned land in Hither Woods, where the sewage treatment plant would be constructed.
Officials from the town’s Natural Resources Department addressed the board on Tuesday and noted that failing septic systems across Suffolk County have given rise to local, county, and state incentive programs to upgrade these systems, but that groundwater levels in Montauk — along with the fact that Montauk’s residences and businesses utilize cesspools that have to be regularly pumped — create unique problems in the hamlet.
Innovative/alternative onsite wastewater treatment systems are not a great match in this case, said Mellissa Winslow, a senior environmental analyst with the Natural Resources Department.
“There are several reasons why I/As are not the solution in downtown Montauk,” said Ms. Winslow, including a lack of space owing to underground utilities, and “insufficient vertical ground to separate leaching systems from the groundwater. With sea level rise and rising groundwater, the septic issue is amplified,” she said.
Addressing Ms. Sennefelder’s concerns about possible contamination of wells, Kim Shaw, the town’s Natural Resources director, said that when private wells are contaminated in East Hampton Town, they are “usually contaminated by onsite septic systems,” due to the proximity of the cesspools to the wells.
There is documentation, Ms. Shaw added, that showed some businesses spend up to $100,000 a season to pump their cesspools, “often pumping out groundwater with it.”
Ms. Shaw also underscored the frequency of toxic algal blooms in Fort Pond as a further indication of a need for Montauk to get a handle on its effluvial flow.
The presentation from H2M highlighted four areas in Montauk that would eventually be served by the proposed sewage treatment plant — the downtown business district, the dock area, Ditch Plain, and the area around the Montauk Firehouse and Long Island Rail Road station.
First the town would need to approve the conceptual arc of the proposal to build the sewage treatment plant on county land adjacent to the capped landfill in Hither Woods, which would begin with the land-swap plan.
The driver behind the town’s push for the wastewater treatment plant, argue proponents, is growing density downtown, which creates up to 173,000 gallons of untreated sewage a day.
The railroad and firehouse area pumps out about 48,000 gallons of untreated sewage a day, while the dock area and Ditch Plain both flush about 100,000 gallons of untreated sewage a day into the ground.
Montauk may boast a lot of open space but Mr. Bono noted there are few options when it comes to siting a sewage treatment plant in the hamlet. Numerous sites were considered and rejected by H2M because they were in flood-prone areas with shallow groundwater.
That included a state right of way located near the Montauk Downs golf course. The feasibility study also looked at whether existing sewage-treatment infrastructure at the Montauk Manor could be upgraded to accommodate the effluvial flow from the hamlet as a whole, but determined it could not.
The project’s footprint requires a minimum of 14 acres, and the plant needs to address not only today’s sewage treatment needs, but also those in the future — an unknown quantity and sticking point for opponents who include Richard Whalen, a lawyer and activist who has laid out a series of objections to the plant.
Mr. Whalen, a co-founder of the Coalition for Hither Woods, addressed this in an impassioned public letter last week, noting “strong indications that the town board really does want the Montauk sewer system to eventually incorporate these other three areas besides downtown Montauk — plus additional residential areas.”
Among a long list of critiques about groundwater flow and other technical issues swirling around this project, Mr. Whalen highlighted that the $75 million price tag only creates Sewage District No. 1 downtown and the plant itself in Hither Woods. Any expansion, he said, would come with additional expenses.
Mr. Whalen also argues that the sewage treatment plant would have a nominal impact on reducing the frequency of algal blooms in the hamlet’s waters.
Another point of contention among critics is the cost to residents and businesses to hook into the new sewage treatment plant — but proponents look to the wastewater treatment plant model in Westhampton, which provided grants to 90 percent of residents to pay for the hookups.
Ms. Winslow said the town would be doing the same.
After initially rejecting land near the capped landfill, H2M eventually determined that there is an area just to the east of the landfill that “we designated that appeared to be suitable to site a sewage treatment plant,” said Mr. Bono, emphasizing that “again, this is about proof of concept — there is land there with adequate separation from groundwater.”
That preliminary assessment, he said, would “have to be evaluated further,” via the State Environmental Quality Review Act.
A separate undertaking by the State Historic Preservation Office would determine whether there are any significant archaeological features on the proposed 14-acre site.
The town board — which has come under withering criticism in recent months for utilizing some $4 million in taxpayer money to buy the 19-acre tract at 66 East Lake Drive without, critics say, sufficient public input — also spent some time Tuesday addressing the impact a sewage treatment plant might have on real estate development in Montauk.
"One of the major concerns that gets raised anytime there is any discussion about a sewer district or wastewater treatment plant is that it will spur development," Mr. Van Scoyos said. "People have to realize that zoning controls development in our town, not septic flowage rates."
Mr. Van Scoyoc optimistically observed that the proposed plant could aid in addressing the town’s chronic housing crunch. Streetside commercial businesses in Montauk are at present forbidden from creating any housing, affordable or otherwise, in their buildings, because of septic-flow restrictions that limit such development.
“This could help with affordable housing,” said Mr. Van Scoyoc.
Mr. Whalen made the same point in his letter opposing the treatment plant, but minus the enthusiasm, as he dismissed the town’s claims that this was a clean water, pro-environment initiative.
“It isn’t,” he said bluntly, invoking an H2M report that said centralized sewering would provide opportunities for downtown businesses to expand, thereby enhancing property valuations and providing property tax revenue. “The report,” said Mr. Whalen, “gives lip service to environmental protection.”
Councilwoman Sylvia Overby cautioned against the prospect that developers would use “zoning as a bludgeon to make development happen — that’s the big elephant in the room, and for the people in Montauk. We have to be careful of how we approach this and how we inform everyone that is in the community.”
The presentation from H2M offered various wastewater treatment scenarios in Montauk including one in which the town would take no action to address septic issues in the hamlet.
Councilwoman Cate Rogers said it would be a “huge error to not mitigate what’s happening there now,” as she implored the septic engineers at H2M to do their part to summarize the proposal in a way that’s “more tangible” to residents and spelled out in plain English.
“It’s raw sewage,” said Mr. Van Scoyoc. “it doesn’t get more plain that that.”
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Correction: An earlier version of this article contained an error in a quote from Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc that he said gave the wrong impression of his views on the project. Mr. Van Scoyoc said that "One of the major concerns that gets raised anytime there is any discussion about a sewer district or wastewater treatment plant is that it will spur development. People have to realize that zoning controls development in our town, not septic flowage rates." The article has been corrected to include the accurate quote.
