Christopher Clapp, who chaired East Hampton Town’s Water Quality Technical Advisory Committee since its inception, has left the committee as he takes on the role of executive director of the Ocean Sewage Alliance.
A longtime employee of the Nature Conservancy, Mr. Clapp worked in shellfish and eelgrass restoration projects in the Peconic and Great South Bays. “All of the data we were collecting during those projects was leading us toward a larger source of the problem being within the watershed,” he said this week. Progress in restoring the bays’ ecology could not proceed without acknowledging “the hundreds of thousands of cesspools on Long Island,” he said. “From that point on, my career switched to focusing on what are the various interventions to improve our water quality for the health of the bays as well as for our public health, because we depend on our drinking water.”
In 2016, voters approved a referendum to both extend the community preservation fund through 2050 and to allow up to 20 percent of its proceeds to be used for water quality initiatives annually. Mr. Clapp was chosen to chair the advisory committee that was formed soon after the referendum. “I was more than happy to chair that committee at the request of then Supervisor [Larry] Cantwell,” he said.
The town issues a biannual request for applications to fund projects ranging from wastewater treatment improvement to aquatic habitat restoration and abatement of pollutants from point and nonpoint sources. The committee considers the merits of each and provides recommendations to the town board, which votes on approval of the expenditures.
Among recent recommendations in May, for example, were funding for the Montauk Anglers Club and Marina and the Main Street Tavern in Amagansett, both to upgrade a failing conventional septic system with an “innovative/alternative” nitrogen-reducing system; the Stony Brook Foundation, to replace a conventional septic system at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs with a constructed wetlands alternative system; East Hampton Village, to upgrade the conventional municipal septic system at the Main Beach Pavilion to I/A systems for each of two comfort stations, and Concerned Citizens of Montauk, which installed 3,000 square feet of floating wetlands in Fort Pond, an impaired water body.
The Ocean Sewage Alliance is a collective of academic scientists and organizations committed to reducing sewage and other wastewater pollution in the oceans. It comprises numerous partner organizations around the world “who realized they can’t make any progress on ecological targets — coral reefs, mangroves, shellfish, seagrass — without doing something about the amount of wastewater entering coastal waters,” Mr. Clapp said. “I was asked to take the role because of the progress we’ve made here on Long Island.” It has been “absolutely fascinating to work with such a diverse group of people,” he said.
Councilman David Lys thanked Mr. Clapp for his service on the committee at a town board meeting earlier this month. “He chaired the committee since its inception,” he said, “and that doesn’t happen often here, particularly when it’s a committee which is in charge of a very large funding source. . . . We thank Chris Clapp for his leadership that he has shown over the years to the Water Quality Technical Advisory Committee.”
For his part, Mr. Clapp credited the town for investing in the program. Mellissa Winslow and Samantha Klein of the town’s Natural Resources Department “have done a fantastic job” with the committee “and were a pleasure to work with,” he said.
