The Suffolk County Water Authority’s proposed North Fork pipeline drew fire from Riverhead officials and residents alike during a tense public hearing at Riverhead Town Hall Tuesday night.
It was clear from the start that Town Board members strongly disagreed.
Town officials clashed with an attorney for the water authority during a hearing held by the Town Board to determine whether the balance of public interests supports the water authority’s claim that it is immune from the town’s zoning authority.
Supervisor Tim Hubbard argued that there are no interests to balance where Riverhead is concerned, because the town will see no benefits from the proposed pipeline — only burdens during its installation, especially along Sound Avenue from Northville Turnpike to the Southold Town line.
The water authority plans to run a 24-inch water main eight miles through the Town of Riverhead, from Flanders to Laurel — to serve customers in Southold Town. There will be no connections in Riverhead other than a planned SCWA pump station on property owned by the authority on Pier Avenue, just off Sound Avenue.
Riverhead asserts that the water authority requires site plan approval, road opening permits, easements and possibly other town permits before it can proceed to install the main.
Many of the topics discussed and debated by board members and the water authority’s lawyer related to possible alternatives to the proposed pipeline route, mitigation measures that could alleviate some of the impacts of the project on the roads and hamlets in the pipeline’s path, and alternatives to the project altogether.
Town Board members criticized the water authority’s selected route through the town, focusing in particular on the decision to run the main along Sound Avenue, which is already routinely choked by traffic. Town officials argued the installation will be extremely disruptive and detrimental to the local economy if undertaken during the peak autumn tourism season, when visitors descend on the area in search of pumpkins, corn stalks, hay rides and wine tastings.
Council Member Bob Kern said the pipeline installation will cost local businesses a bundle.
“We’re talking about, you know, probably a couple hundred million dollars with all the farms that we have. A lot of farmers here are going to suffer, and a lot of businesses are going to suffer,” Kern said. “It could cripple them.”
Council Member Joann Waski echoed Kern’s concerns about impacts on tourism. “Our farms on Sound Avenue…[are] going to be negatively impacted” because people won’t even be able to get to them when the water main installation is going on, she said. If it takes place in the fall, that’s the region’s busiest time, she said. The economic loss could be huge.
“We can’t allow that to happen here in Riverhead. We depend on tourism out here, our farmers. They need to be able to have their businesses open and running,” Waski said, noting the project might go on for months or even years.
Council Member Denise Merrifield pointed out that Sound Avenue is a major thoroughfare for residents of the town. “There’s no other road for the residents to use other than Sound Avenue in certain areas,” Merrifield said. There’s no other road for access to other major roads, she said.
Rothwell said the town’s taxpayers paid to repave Sound Avenue in the eastern portion of the town last year, “creating a beautiful ride through Riverhead.” He complained that the road restoration where the water authority installed mains in Manorville was unsatisfactory.
“If that’s the way you intend to leave our Sound Avenue corridor and the east end of the town, I think that’s a major problem,” Rothwell said. “We just invested in that road and finished it, and it’s beautiful now, and to allow you to come in and tear it up and destroy it and leave it in the same manner that you did in Manorville would be quite unfair and unjust to the taxpayers that paid to do that road recently,” he said.
Kelly McClinchy, one of the Manorville residents who for years sought the public water extension in the area of southwestern Riverhead, said Saturday the final road restoration hasn’t been done yet. Though the mains were installed, individual hookups are not yet completed, and the road won’t be resurfaced until all the hookups are done, she said. SCWA began providing water to 64 homes in Riverhead Town last year through an intermunicipal agreement.
Board members also questioned whether the project is actually needed at all, suggesting that the water authority shouldn’t undertake such a major, expensive project, based on its conclusion that the supply of clean drinking water in Southold is inadequate, unless it first implements meaningful conservation measures on the North Fork.
“Suffolk County Water Authority has stated themselves that over 70% of the water being used is for landscape irrigation, and if you’re not taking measures to conserve that,” the water authority shouldn’t be thinking of this project, the town supervisor said.
“If there’s no effort made for water conservation, the easy answer is to run a transmission line through the Town of Riverhead. The answer should be, work with these people. Work with the residents on water conservation, provide them with rain gauges and see if that can make a difference before you disrupt an entire town with this transmission line,” Hubbard said.
The water authority should look at whether more storage tanks in Southold would help with supply issues, he said. “Do they have the water to pump … and fill them and keep them for…when the water was needed in the height of the season? I think that’s another avenue that needs to be explored,” Hubbard said.
Similar concerns have been raised by Southold Town officials, including at an Aug. 13 public forum convened by Riverhead officials to discuss the proposed pipeline and attended by Southold Supervisor Al Krupski and Council Member Greg Doroski.
In a phone interview Friday, Krupski said Southold is not yet convinced that the proposed pipeline is actually needed for those very same reasons: conservation measures, especially concerning irrigation, should be implemented first, he said.
Krupski also said the water authority’s decision to install the new main was premature because the U.S. Geological Survey is in the middle of assessing the quantity and quality of the North Fork’s aquifer. SCWA should wait until those results are in before making decisions on a major new water main extension into Southold, Krupski said.
All of the issues raised during the Town Board’s “balancing test” hearing — environmental and traffic impacts, mitigation measures and alternatives —will be analyzed through an environmental impact statement under the State Environmental Quality Review Act, the water authority’s attorney Brody Smith told the board.
Smith, the only person to appear at the hearing on behalf of the authority, repeated that position several times and gave a detailed explanation of the SEQRA process and the steps taken by the authority so far.
The water authority is still in the early stages of the environmental review process required by SEQRA, Smith said.
The water authority declared itself lead agency for SEQRA review purposes — a declaration which both Riverhead and Southold towns contested unsuccessfully, with the State DEC commissioner (who has statutory authority to settle such disputes) ruling in favor of the water authority.
As lead agency, SCWA determined that the project is a Type 1 action under SEQRA and issued a positive declaration, meaning a full environmental impact statement is required.
It then adopted a draft scoping statement, a document that essentially “scopes out” what must be addressed in the environmental impact statement for the project.
The Town of Riverhead submitted comments on the SCWA’s draft scoping statement during the comment period, Senior Planner Charters said in a phone interview Friday. Riverhead’s environmental consultant Jeff Seeman also submitted comments on the draft scope.
The comment period on the draft scope ended Aug. 4, after two extensions. The water authority also held public hearings on the draft scope in Riverhead, Westhampton Beach and Southold.
Once a draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) is prepared, there will be at least one public hearing on that document as well as a period for written comment in the DEIS. The water authority will then respond to each comment, Smith said. Pursuant to SEQRA, the compilation of comments and responses, together with the DEIS, comprise the final environmental impact statement.
The attorney’s explanation of the SEQRA process sounded too much like a lecture to the town supervisor, who was obviously irked by it. Hubbard thanked Smith for the “lesson on SEQRA” and assured him that Riverhead Town officials are “all pretty much up on SEQRA around here.”
The water authority having control of the entire process “smells strongly of the fox in the hen house,” Hubbard told Smith.
“You design it, you approve it, and you do it and step all over Riverhead while doing it, with no benefit to us whatsoever,” Hubbard said.
The supervisor kept coming back to that point: the proposed project offers no benefits to Riverhead taxpayers, he said.
Residents in attendance at the meeting raised many of the same concerns as those expressed by the Town Board members.
John Cullen of Northville said the residents of Southold submitted “100 questions” to the water authority and have yet to receive any answers. He also raised concerns about noise from the pump station SCWA is planning to build on Pier Avenue, just north of Sound Avenue, especially noise from a backup generator that would power the pump station in the event of an electric outage.
Some questioned the need for the large size of the proposed main, asking whether 24 inches, capable of delivering a greater volume of water than the current needs of SCWA customers in Southold, is actually sized to serve future demand.
“Maybe that goes to the question of whether it actually is being brought in for an imagined future development of housing or resorts that is not actually something that the communities of either Southold or Riverhead, want to have happen,” John McAuliff of Riverhead said.
Jamesport resident Barbara Blass, a former council member and former chairperson of the Riverhead Planning Board spoke to whether the land use proposed by the water authority is really in the public’s interest, as the Monroe Balancing Test requires. “The quantity of water seems to exceed the reasonably anticipated demand,” she said. Whether the Southold community actually wants it is an open question, she noted, as is whether it’s being delivered to those who actually need it.
There has not been “meaningful collaboration between the authority and Riverhead,” she said. “There was no application. There’s no pre submission conference, no public work session. Wouldn’t that have been the courteous, responsible thing to do? Whether you have to do it or not, is not the point,” Blass said.
Seeman, the town’s environmental consultant, spoke at length about the “Monroe Balancing Test” factors with respect to the project.
Seeman stressed that the town should require the water authority to comply with its site plan requirements, “like any other developer.” SCWA should be required to file engineered plans and metes-and-bounds descriptions detailing the precise locations where its mains will be installed. Without that, the town is unable to assess the impacts of the project, he said. Currently, the location proposed is “only a line on a map,” he said. The town has not even been informed which side of the road the main will run, for example, Seeman told the Town Board. SCWA should also be required to provide written notification to adjoining landowners. The project should not be exempted from any of the town’s applicable permit requirements, he said.
Smith countered that his client is “not like any other developer.” It was formed by the state for the explicit purpose of providing potable water to Suffolk County. Projects like the one proposed are routinely undertaken by SCWA as part of its ordinary course of business, he stressed.
Rothwell took issue with the idea that SCWA provides water as a public service.
“You’re selling water to the Town of Southold at the expense of you’re selling water to the Town of Southhold at the expense of Riverhead taxpayers. You’re not just providing them a service,” Rothwell told Smith.
“There’s gonna have to be some sit-downs with the Suffolk County Water Authority,” Hubbard said. “And that’s an open invitation to anyone there who wants to come out and meet with us, but I think we need to have some conversations,” Hubbard told Smith.
When Smith replied that he was sure his client wants to engage in that kind of dialogue with the town, Hubbard shot back that the town tried to have a dialogue with the water authority, “and we’ve kind of had the door shut in our face twice.”
Smith said the water authority intends to be “entirely transparent” about the project.
Council Member Ken Rothwell chided: “How transparent were you when you held a groundbreaking ceremony telling the Riverhead community that you were going ahead and putting this pipe into the ground without even consulting with us?”
The water authority later told RiverheadLOCAL the March 2023 groundbreaking ceremony was only “ceremonial” when questioned by a reporter about the status of the SEQRA process for the proposed pipeline. The environmental review process did not begin until this spring.
“Every project, every process, needs a beginning,” Smith responded to Rothwell. “I think that intention is that as a beginning, to begin this conversation. And I don’t think that it was anyone’s intention, by having a groundbreaking ceremony, to say that we’re not going to listen to anyone’s input, as we’re required to do by law as part of the environmental impact statement process,” Smith said.
Town officials’ long-simmering tensions with the water authority date back decades, at least since the Riverhead Water District first applied to the State DEC to provide water in the as-yet undeveloped area of the Calverton Enterprise Park. The Riverhead Water District already serves the developed portion of the site, built out when it was owned by the Navy and operated by Grumman Aerospace (later Northrop Grumman.)
In a 2010 RiverheadLOCAL interview, a former SCWA chief executive officer said it was “the manifest destiny of the Suffolk County Water Authority to be the purveyor of drinking water to all of Suffolk County.” That was the water authority’s “statutory mandate,” then-CEO Stephen Jones said. And that means, he said, taking over all other water supply systems in the county — including the Riverhead Water District. See: Riverhead’s water wars (May 27, 2010)
Riverhead officials over the years have remained suspicious of the water authority. As a candidate for supervisor in 2019, Yvette Aguiar accused then-incumbent Supervisor Laura Jens-Smith of working on a back-room deal to sell the Riverhead Water District to the Suffolk County Water Authority. Aguiar said in an interview she had a source inside the water authority — whom she said she was not free to name — who tells her that the town and the water authority have had discussions about a sale. Jens-Smith denied and protested the claim. No town official has ever publicly advocated for such a sale.
But the idea that the water authority covets the Riverhead district lingers. Officials mentioned Jones’ “manifest destiny” assertion during Tuesday’s hearing.
The dispute over which entity has the right to serve the undeveloped area of EPCAL has not yet been resolved. The water authority has objected to the town water district serving future development in the Calverton Enterprise Park. The dispute over which entity has the right to serve EPCAL was one of the stumbling blocks the town encountered as it tried to subdivide its land at the Calverton Enterprise Park, several years later. The State DEC told the town it must obtain SCWA’s permission to extend town mains into the undeveloped area of the EPCAL site before the DEC would approve the proposed town service. SCWA said it would not agree to it. The issue remains unresolved to this day.
See: Decade-old territory dispute heats up between Riverhead Town and Suffolk County Water Authority (Jan. 22, 2021)
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