After more than a year of pressing Southold Town officials to direct Greenport’s required 10% share of Community Preservation Fund benefits toward village water quality projects, village leaders this week got something they have long sought: a clear public signal that the town is now actively committed to funding some of those projects.
At a Town Board work session on Thursday morning, Southold Land Preservation executive assistant Lilly McCullough outlined two recent meetings between town and village officials and described a process to identify priorities, gather project data and update the town’s CPF project plan to comply with the 2024 state statute.
For decades, Southold’s CPF has been dedicated exclusively to open space and farmland acquisition. Town officials say Southold has invested heavily in stormwater controls, drainage work and other water-quality efforts town-wide, with non-CPF funds.
Greenport Village Mayor Kevin Stuessi — who has led the campaign to convince town officials to open up CPF spending to include more than solely land preservation — and Village Trustee Lily Dougherty-Johnson attended the work session to hear McCullough’s presentation.
Water quality and historic preservation
McCullough said town and village officials have met twice this year and developed a working chart to organize Greenport’s priorities.
That chart, she said, captures “the village’s broad goals for open space, water quality improvement projects and historic preservation.”
The talks have centered on what McCullough described as “figuring out what the village’s needs are … regardless of funding, big picture, and what resources are available to meet those needs, and how the town can leverage its resources, including CPF, including staff knowledge and expertise …”
The comments were the most concrete public accounting yet of how Southold plans to address the 2024 amendment requiring towns to direct at least 10% of annual CPF revenue to benefit disadvantaged communities. In Southold, that designation applies only to Greenport Village.
McCullough said that the money can be spent “on a limited set of uses,” including property acquisition, water quality improvement projects and stewardship projects.
No ‘magic bullet’
McCullough also said that “CPF isn’t a magic bullet. It’s not gonna solve all the problems. So there’s a variety of resources that we have to look at collectively and figure out how they’re going to work together.”
The second of the two town-village meetings focused on water quality projects, organized into three categories: wastewater treatment, stormwater management and habitat restoration.
Village officials said wastewater work is the top priority, according to McCullough, including sewer expansion, pump station elevation, pipe replacement and septic upgrades. But before any funding decision can be made, she said, the town needs enough information about each project to quantify them, analyze them and fold them into an updated CPF project plan.
“If we’re gonna update the project plan to include water quality improvement projects,” she said, that requires “identifying categories of projects, prioritizing categories of projects and then prioritizing specific projects. There is no way to get money to a project without doing all of those things.”
She said village officials will provide the town with additional material, including a village sewer study, maps of sewer infrastructure and connections, and other infrastructure-related information that staff can use to refine its analysis.
Once that information is in hand, McCullough said staff will update its recommendations and bring them back to the Town Board, likely first in the form of an internal review and later in a broader session involving village officials.
No guidance
Councilman Brian Mealy asked whether the town was waiting for more outside guidance on the disadvantaged-community provision or moving ahead on a parallel track.
“We can’t really wait,” McCullough replied.
“If we were going to get top-down guidance, it would have been in the statute,” she said. “So what’s in the statute is all of the guidance we’re getting from the top. So now it is on the towns to come up with something that makes sense.”
McCullough said the project involves a heavy workload, but after months of tension and repeated village appeals, Greenport’s push for CPF-funded water quality paid off.