Richard Whalen has been leading New Year’s Day hikes for the East Hampton Trails Preservation Society for more than 30 years. This year’s excursion, a 9.66-mile trek through Hither Woods, took about three and a half hours, including a little lunch break. Mr. Whalen’s smartphone hiking app measured their elevation, too — nearly 700 feet. Seven hundred feet! Who knew the hills in Montauk could rise that tall?
But this year’s hike wasn’t just a simple stroll through nature.
Dozens of protesters showed up, many with signs, to send a message to the East Hampton Town Board: They do not support a sewage treatment plant in Hither Woods, even one that is near the old, capped landfill. The town board is angling for a land swap with Suffolk County to carry out this plan, which it estimates will take 10 years, and which would involve trading about 19 acres of town-owned land on East Lake Drive for a minimum of 14 county-owned acres in Hither Woods.
“I haven’t heard anybody expressing support for what the town board is going to do,” said Mr. Whalen, an Amagansett attorney who was the founder in 1982 of the Coalition for Hither Woods. “It seems pretty clear that there’s strong public opposition to putting a sewage treatment plant on parkland in Hither Woods.”
In November, Mr. Whalen resigned from his role as chairman of East Hampton’s nature preserve committee in protest of the potential land swap. And while the Coalition for Hither Woods fell dormant after it successfully fought the development of 1,357 acres in the 1980s, Mr. Whalen has revived it as an umbrella group of organizations opposed to the town’s sewer plan.
“This time around, two things are different,” he explained in an interview yesterday. “We still view ourselves as sort of an umbrella group, but we’ve incorporated as a formal not-for-profit, and we’re going to keep ourselves active. There should be an entity that looks out to make sure there are no future further threats to the Hither Woods parkland.”
More information will be forthcoming soon, Mr. Whalen said, on the coalition’s makeup, its specific requests of the East Hampton Town Board, and the constructive suggestions it plans to offer.
There is precedent for the type of campaign on which the coalition is embarking, and not just in its own history. In 1970, Concerned Citizens of Montauk came together to stop 1,000 houses from being built near Big Reed Pond. And more recently, the Preserve Plum Island Coalition — made up of about 121 advocacy groups from New York and Connecticut — successfully lobbied the federal government to halt the sale of Plum Island to a private owner.
Mr. Whalen recalled that in 1982, alongside a special election to fill a vacant town board seat, the town put two bonds on the ballot. One was to finance the purchase of development rights to protect farmland, and the other was about $1.5 million to buy land in Hither Woods.
“Both propositions passed, but the proposition to buy land in Hither Woods got more support than the proposition for farmland even in the western parts of East Hampton Town,” Mr. Whalen said. “Over 70 percent of people townwide voted to preserve land in Hither Woods, and that was 40 years ago. What we’re seeing is there is a visceral dislike to the idea that the town is going to convert parkland. It’s hard to convert it into something that’s less parklike than a sewer plant.”
On Sunday’s hike, Mr. Whalen pointed out to the crowd where the sewage treatment facility would be located.
“We will fight that until it’s dead, basically. We’re going to stop it,” he said. The town board “should go in a different direction. Find a different way to deal with the wastewater problems.”
East Hampton Town Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc, speaking by phone yesterday, suggested that people don’t fully understand the sewage plant proposal. He described the wastewater issue in Montauk as a longstanding problem that is overdue for a solution. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of untreated, raw sewage are being dumped into the ground every day, he said.
“Something has to be done. The options are very limited,” he said. “There is not enough space in downtown and Ditch Plains and whatnot due to the development that has already taken place. The groundwater level is high, so septic systems cannot service those areas. It’s not an option. We’ve been working on identifying treatment sites for quite some time. . . . We’ve gone through the options and found that basically next to the landfill is the only viable option.”
Mr. Van Scoyoc said the town is “certainly open to any suggestions if someone thinks they know better, but we’ve had outside consultants, the Natural Resources Department, and planning consultants working on this for quite some time. It’s next to an existing capped landfill, not near any residences, and it meets the setbacks of the Suffolk County Health Department. . . . This is an area where the Montauk community has historically disposed of waste, and the groundwater divide and flow is in a northerly direction from that site, away from houses.”
He later continued, “I think the more you learn about the situation and weigh the benefits and the detriments, I think most people will understand this is something that’s truly necessary to do. A blind eye has been turned to it for decades, really. It’s time. It’s past time to take care of this problem.”
