Long in the works, a plan to overhaul the way sewage and wastewater are processed at Montauk Shores Condominiums took a significant step forward in December when the Suffolk County Department of Health Services approved an application for a new sewage treatment plant there. The application had been submitted in April of 2018.
Montauk Shores is an upscale oceanfront trailer park beside Ditch Plain Beach with more than 200 housing units. Many of the trailers are in a flood zone that falls under Federal Emergency Management Agency regulations. Septic issues there came to the fore in the summer of 2019, when reports of foul odors at Ditch Plain, and skin and eye irritation among swimmers, made headlines and some observers pointed fingers at the nearby condominium complex.
Grace Kelly-McGovern, a health department spokeswoman, said that while these types of projects usually take one to two years to review and approve, the Montauk Shores application took more than five and a half years. “The approval of this application took longer because the proposal was even more complex than a typical sewage treatment plant application,” Ms. Kelly-McGovern said.
She cited several complicating factors: The park is already densely developed; existing conditions required a setback variance from the health department, and there was “lag time between issuance of department comments and [the] applicant’s resubmission to address comments.” Ms. Kelly-McGovern also noted that a full construction plan to show how the operators would “maintain wastewater discharge from occupied units while the new [plant] is being built” was required.
An official groundbreaking is still far off, however.
The next step, a full site-plan review by the East Hampton Town Planning Board, is only in the beginning stages. The condominium complex’s first appearance before that board, in October, did not go as smoothly as its administration had hoped.
In interviews this week, the Montauk Shores board president and an East Hampton Town official each suggested the other party was the cause of the holdup.
The Montauk Shores application “is still incomplete,” said Tina Vavilis LaGarenne, the assistant town planning director. “The last time they met, the planning board had a lot of questions. It’s a unique property with a long history, and the planning board wanted a crisper understanding of the state of the infrastructure there.”
Jim Graham, president of the Montauk Shores board of directors, characterized the situation as “a mess” of “red tape.”
“What they’re doing to us is they’re going back over the last 20 years of paperwork from Montauk Shores,” he said. “They’re digging up things that we had done or were signed off on. . . . The Planning Department had a stack of questions. At one point, the chief of the building department said we won’t need a new survey, and then the new guy says we need a survey. Every time we look, it’s something different.”
The Montauk Shores board has asserted that the county’s approval should have provided the answers the town wanted. “For something that will help both the county and town, and the community, and us, they are giving us a little bit of a hard time,” Mr. Graham said. “It should be moving along. This is a good thing, but it seems like jumping through hoops is all we’re doing.”
Ms. LaGarenne said that the town “usually requires county approval as a condition of our approval, but both entities are looking at different things. Suffolk County has in its purview the design of the treatment plant, the sizing of the treatment facilities, the nature of the effluent that can be discharged. Our concerns are not those — they are more the site concerns. What it looks like, where is it placed, will the screening be appropriate? Long-term planning — what kind of capacity are they building into the treatment plan? That was a big thing that was discussed that wasn’t clear.”
The project’s current cost estimate is $2.2 million, though with every passing year, as is the case throughout the building industry, the price tag could balloon. Mr. Graham said the board had recently requested bids for the membrane bioreactor, a key component of the proposed treatment system. The building itself is intended to be of cinderblock construction with fencing and landscaping to screen it from view.
To pay for the project, the Montauk Shores board collected money from its homeowners several years ago. Property owners told The Star in July that they had each chipped in about $10,000. East Hampton Town has also pledged a water-quality grant of $200,000 toward the project.
