Riverhead Town has retained an attorney to sue the Town of Southampton over its proposed sewer district for the hamlet of Riverside — a facility that is essential to developing mixed-use housing in the hamlet, as called for by a plan approved by Southampton nearly a decade ago.
The Town Board at its meeting last week ratified its authorization for Town Attorney Erik Howard to retain Rockland County attorney Steven Barshov to bring an action against Southampton Town to prevent it from taking any further action “in connection with the Riverside Sewer Treatment Plant and establishing the Riverside Sewer District,” according to the resolution passed by the Town Board July 2.
The lawsuit has not been filed as of today.
The resolution authorizes a lawsuit “for the purpose of enjoining further action” by the neighboring town with regard to its planned sewage treatment plant in Riverside. It is not clear what Riverhead Town’s underlying claims or what the nature of the suit will be.
The Southampton Town Board voted unanimously on May 28 to establish the Riverside Sewer District and set its boundaries. The board on that date also passed a resolution appropriating $44.6 million to establish the district and construct a sewage treatment plant. Southampton has lined up financing from the New York State Environmental Facilities Corporation, the Community Preservation Fund Water Quality Improvement Fund, the County of Suffolk, and other sources.
Southampton Town has been pursuing financing, site procurement and conducting environmental analyses for a sewage treatment plant for years to enable the buildout of the Riverside hamlet under a zoning overlay district adopted by Southampton in 2015. The zoning was the culmination of a revitalization plan for Riverside developed by the town and the community over a period of more than a year. Buildout of the high-density land uses envisioned by the plan and provided for in the zoning overlay district is dependent on hookups to a sewage treatment facility, under county sanitary code rules and state regulations protecting the Peconic River watershed.
The land use plan, zoning and sewer district proposals underwent full environmental impact analyses under the State Environmental Quality Review Law and Southampton Town held multiple public hearings on all aspects of the proposal.
The Town of Riverhead raised no public objection to any aspect of the revitalization plans, including the sewer district, until late last year. At a hearing in December, Riverhead’s Economic Development, Planning and Building Department Administrator Dawn Thomas urged the Southampton Town Board to step back and reopen review of the Riverside Revitalization Action Plan, adopted in 2015 and codified in the overlay district later that year.
| MORE COVERAGE | Riverhead Town, school district officials raise concerns about Riverside redevelopment plan |
Thomas told the Southampton Town Board that “the underlying assumptions and data contained in the Riverside Revitalization Action Plan have changed dramatically” over the past decade, citing local demographic changes, including “the marked reduction of opportunities for home ownership and the consequential building of wealth, the increase in population due to COVID and migration, and the increased need for workforce [housing.]”
Noting Riverhead’s success in increasing residential development as part of its effort to revitalize its downtown, located across the Peconic River from the hamlet of Riverside, Thomas said additional new development in the area must promote diversity, not increase “segregation,” which she said may be the inadvertent result if the Riverside plan’s original underlying assumptions and data are not updated.
Thomas returned to Southampton Town Hall for another Town Board hearing in January, this time accompanied by Riverhead Town Supervisor Tim Hubbard.
Hubbard told the Southampton Town Board it should revise its zoning for Riverside to require the development of diverse housing stock rather than exclusively “affordable” rentals. He offered Riverhead Town’s partnership “to fund a study whose purpose would be to review the current market and demographics for incorporation into the plan.”
“We strongly urge the Town Board to consider a mix of senior housing, which won’t impact our schools and parks as much, ownership units, single-family homes, market-rate rentals, workforce rentals and affordable rentals,” Hubbard said. “Riverhead addressed this problem by providing housing of all types for people of all types,” he said.
During the January hearing, Hubbard asked Southampton to change the proposed boundaries of the Riverside sewer district to take in the Suffolk County facilities in Riverside — the county jail, criminal court building and the county center — which since 1969 have been hooked up to the Riverhead sewage treatment plant.
The Riverhead Sewer District needs to free up capacity in its treatment plant so that it can serve properties on West Main Street where antiquated and failing septic systems are polluting the Peconic River, Hubbard said.
“We do not have any CPF [Community Preservation Fund] funding to expand our district, so getting back that capacity is crucial for us,” Hubbard said.
| MORE COVERAGE | Riverhead supervisor makes pitch to Southampton Town: Let’s partner to revise Riverside redevelopment plan |
Riverhead Sewer District Superintendent Michael Reichel told RiverheadLOCAL in an interview after that hearing that Riverhead’s facility has a permitted capacity of 1.5 million gallons per day and currently handles about 1.05 million gallons per day.
Total wastewater volume from the county facilities in Riverside is an estimated maximum of 169,400 gallons per day of wastewater, Reichel said. Riverhead must set aside that capacity for the county facilities, and that limits capacity for growth within the town sewer district, he said.
The Riverhead Sewer District takes in most of the downtown central business district, where development underway and in planning stages is dependent on sewage treatment capacity.
The county facilities in Riverside are much closer to the site of the future Riverside sewage treatment plant than they are to the Riverhead treatment plant, which is 2 ½ miles away from the county center/jail complex, according to Riverhead environmental consultant Jeffrey Seeman, who also attended the January hearing in Southampton.
Separately, the Town of Riverhead and Suffolk County are already embroiled in a lawsuit over the rates Riverhead is charging the county for an “out of district” connection to the Riverhead Town treatment facility. After a waste treatment contract between the county and the town expired, the town sought to impose a steep rate hike on the county for use of the facility. When the rate dispute couldn’t be resolved, the county in 2021 sued Riverhead Town over the rate increase. The county has refused to pay the increased fees sought by Riverhead. That lawsuit remains pending.
Officials from the Riverhead Central School District joined Riverhead Town in voicing opposition to the Riverside revitalization plan to the Southampton Town Board at the hearings. Since Riverside is among the Southampton Town hamlets that lie within the Riverhead Central School District, any increase in school-age population resulting from high-density development in Riverside would place additional pressure on the school district’s already-overcrowded classrooms — particularly in the K-4 elementary school attended by youngsters who live in the Riverside-Flanders community.
Some parents of children at the Phillips Avenue Elementary School in Riverside also turned out to oppose the sewer plant plan because of its proposed location: on property that adjoins the elementary school property.
Riverhead Central School District teachers held a demonstration outside the Phillips Avenue school on June 25 to protest the location of the planned treatment facility.
At last week’s Town Board meeting, Hubbard said Riverhead officials met with the county executive’s office, separately and then together with Southampton Town officials.
“We just weren’t able to come to any reasonable agreement with the Town of Southampton,” Hubbard said. “And this kind of forced our hand to go this way. I don’t think any one of us really want to sue Southampton to stop a sewage treatment plant from being built, but the way it’s being done and how they’re going about it needs to be addressed,” he said. “And that’s the only way we felt we could legally address it, at this point in time.”
Southampton Town Supervisor Maria Moore could not be reached for comment this afternoon.
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