SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: Put Treated Wastewater In The Ground Not The Ocean

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

John Turner, who with his Seatuck Environmental Association has been in the forefront in working for recharge of highly treated wastewater back into the underground water table on which Suffolk County depends, is optimistic that if a countywide referendum in November on water preservation is approved, that goal can be widely realized here.

A major factor is the new Suffolk County executive, Ed Romaine, who as a county legislator and a town supervisor, has long advocated recharge of wastewater.

Romaine, at an event at the start of this month at which he signed a water protection bill providing for the referendum on funding sewers and “innovated/advanced” I/A septic systems, criticized how many of the existing sewer systems in Suffolk “pour out” wastewater into coastal waterways—bays and water bodies including the Long Island Sound and Atlantic Ocean. 

If approved in the referendum on Election Day this year, November 5, the current county’s sales tax of 8.625 percent would be increased by 1/8^th of a cent to raise money for sewers and high-tech I/A septic systems. This would be in addition to the existing quarter cent sales tax which includes support for water preservation. If the referendum passes, both would continue to 2060 allowing, notes Turner, for a “very significant” amount of funds. 

A key to the money financing recharge: 13 words in the measure, the Water Quality Restoration Act, that provide for funds to go for sewers and I/A systems, continued acquisition of watershed land in the Pine Barrens—“and projects for the reuse of treated effluent from such wastewater treatment facilities.”

Put together earlier has been a “Long Island Water Reuse Road Map & Action Plan,” with Turner and Seatuck deeply involved. Turner is senior conservation policy advocate at Islip-based Seatuck. The plan highlights an endeavor in Riverhead as a model. The “Riverhead reuse project,” it relates, started in 2016 to “redirect highly treated wastewater, as much as 260,000 gallons per day” from the Riverhead Sewage Treatment Plant to “irrigate the nearby Indian Island County Golf Course,” an alternative to discharging it into Flanders Bay.

“Reusing water, for some other valuable purpose, provides numerous benefits,” says the plan, “including protecting public wells and water supplies from saltwater intrusion.” It calls for highly treated wastewater to be utilized for a variety of purposes including golf course irrigation, in greenhouses, on lawns and fields of educational and commercial locations. It specifies sites for this. 

Turner, former legislative director of the New York State Water Resource Commission and director of Brookhaven Town’s Division of Environmental Protection, says he is “excited about” recharge projects which through an approved revised Water Quality Restoration Act could get funding.

“We’re ready,” he commented.

These include, he was saying, having Sag Harbor send treated effluent to irrigate the Sag Harbor State Golf Course at Barcelona Neck to the south of the village’s sewage treatment plant which currently dumps effluent into Sag Harbor Bay. It includes having the Port Jefferson Sewage Treatment Plant “redirect” effluent it now dumps into the Long Island Sound to St. George’s golf course in nearby Setauket, where he lives. And it includes sending the effluent from the Shelter Island Heights Sewage Treatment Plant, now discharged into Shelter Island Sound, to golf course courses on Shelter Island. 

For many decades, there have been some officials in Suffolk County seemingly unaware of the consequences of discharging wastewater from sewage treatment plants into coastal waters and the Long Island Sound and the Atlantic.

And this has been despite the major negative impacts of such dumping in neighboring Nassau County which is 85 percent sewered and where all the sewage treatment plants “discharge into coastal waters,” notes Turner. As a result, he says, lakes, ponds and streams in Nassau—the “uppermost expression of the aquifer system” on which Nassau, like Suffolk, is dependent as its sole source of potable water—“have dropped considerably.” Hempstead Lake, for example, now “is Hempstead Pond,” he says. Also, the lowering of the water table in Nassau has resulted in saltwater intrusion into it. 

Suffolk is now 25 percent sewered. 

Suffolk’s last county executive, Steve Bellone, pushed a project during his tenure called “Ronkonkoma Hub” to feature 1,450 apartments and many offices and retail stores—and sending its wastewater to the county’s Bergen Point Sewage Treatment Plant in West Babylon. That plant was built to dump 30 million gallons a day of wastewater through an outfall pipe into the Atlantic Ocean. 

“I am so opposed to this,” said Romaine then. He was Brookhaven Town supervisor. “Pumping the wastewater miles away and sending it out into the ocean is a terrible mistake. This is going to impact on the aquifer. The level of Lake Ronkonkoma is going to drop. People are talking about water quality but we must also talk about water quantity.” He urged instead a sewage treatment plant for the Hub that would include recharge. 

Fortunately, in saving Suffolk County’s sole source of potable water, Romaine is now the county executive. Says Turner: “Ed has long been very supportive of recharge.”

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY at Old Westbury and the author of six books.