Veterans Memorial Park in Calverton will finally have public restroom facilities if current plans to construct a heated, year-round building come to fruition.
The park currently has no bathroom facility, but portable toilets are located near the baseball fields on the western end of the park. The town in its contract with Peconic Hockey Foundation committed to providing a bathroom facility for the domed ice rink being donated to the town, which will be built at the park.
The Town Board moved the long-sought bathroom facility forward last night with a resolution establishing a $25,000 budget for the engineering design of the proposed approximately 675-square-foot building, which is currently slated to be built approximately opposite the area of the dog park and pickle ball courts, on the east side of the driveway that exits onto Middle Country Road.
The cost of the bathroom building and septic system is estimated to be about $700,000 to $750,000, according to Assistant Town Engineer Ken Testa. That price tag could go higher if the Suffolk County Department of Health Services, which must issue permits to build the facility, does not agree to phased construction of the septic system or if it requires the town to install a nitrogen-removing system.
Testa said in an interview last week he believes the town will get the health department’s cooperation on the phased construction of a septic system the department approved in 2007, which was sized to serve five different bathroom facilities then planned.
“If they don’t make us do an IA (an advanced onsite wastewater treatment system) and they allow us to only put in the leaching rings for the this bathroom,” rather than leaching rings for all five bathroom facilities, Testa said, “I think it’s probably going to be $250,000, somewhere in there.”
He said he has also gotten a verbal OK for a traditional septic system rather than one of the more costly onsite treatment systems that have been developed since the 2007 approval, because the septic system will only be used until a connection to the Calverton Sewer District is available.
“In conversations that we had with them, they indicated that because we’ll be connecting to the Calverton Sewer District in the short term, and the Calverton Sewer District has already just been upgraded to levels of denitrification far beyond what the IA systems can do, they feel that it would be a waste of a lot of money to put in an IA system and then abandon it,” Testa said.
The overall park plan, developed in 2005, included five bathroom buildings, including the one now proposed to be built. Another facility was planned to serve the ball fields, and three more facilities were to serve other planned park uses, such as an amphitheater, a maintenance building and a parks department office, which have not yet been built.
The town at the time wrangled with the county health department over whether the bathroom facilities would be required to connect to the sewage treatment plant on the former Grumman site — a prospect so costly because of distance to the plant that town officials said it was out of reach.
In February 2007, the town got a variance from the health department’s board of review, granting permission to build a central septic system that all five bathroom facilities would connect to temporarily. The variance was conditioned on future connection to the sewage treatment plant when the sewer district was expanded and connection became feasible. The health department required the town to file covenants promising to comply with that condition, which the town did, Testa said.
The variance remains in effect, county health department officials confirmed last fall.
Testa said the town will still be required to install a 7,000-gallon septic tank, sized to serve all five bathroom facilities, because that’s what the 2007 variance covered. “They’re going to hold us to that, or we’d have to start all over again,” he said. But there is precedence, he said, for requiring leaching rings only for the building currently being built. “So the next step for us is to make application for a permit to construct.”
The original permit issued by the health department is still open, Testa told the Town Board at its Feb. 16 work session. He health department will allow the town to reactivate that permit, which Testa called “a blessing” because a lot of time and money went into designs for that sanitary permit, he said.
Testa said the engineering department recommends hiring the original engineers, RM Engineering, the firm that did the original site plan for the park and the original application to the health department. “They have all the files and because they have all the files, their proposal is $25,000, or a little less that,” said Testa, calling it “a pretty good price considering the town is asking for a detailed design.”
According to the resolution passed last night, the $25,000 is being transferred from a “park improvements” budget fund to an engineering fund. The money is left over from an LED lighting project at Stotzky Park, which was funded by the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.
The source of funding to construct the bathroom facility is still up in the air.
Council Member Ken Rothwell, who helped bring the ice rink proposal to the board, has said the money to build bathrooms at Veterans Memorial Park will come from a recreation allocation that will be provided in a community benefits agreement with the developer of Riverhead Solar 2, a 36-megawatt solar energy facility being constructed off Edwards Avenue in Calverton. Rothwell said the town expects the agreement to allocate $750,000 for parks and recreation improvements.
Riverhead Town and the developers of the facility have been negotiating that agreement for the past year. In a Nov. 14 interview, Rothwell said town officials were “very confident” that the community benefit agreement would be signed “in the next week or two” and the town would have the money to construct the bathroom.
But the agreement is still being negotiated, according to Deputy Town Attorney Annemarie Prudenti, who has been handling the negotiation.
A spokesperson for AES Corporation, the energy company that has received state approval for the 36-megawatt Riverhead Solar 2 commercial solar production facility, confirmed yesterday that negotiations remain ongoing with the town board on a “host community agreement.”
“We expect that agreement to be executed once the commercial terms of the project are solidified,” Content and Communications Manager for AES Clean Energy Tim Wolf said in an email.
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