Twenty Southold residential water accounts consumed nearly 32 million gallons in just 13 months — with every property on the list using more than 1 million gallons of public water, according to Suffolk County Water Authority records obtained by the North Fork Sun through a public records request.

Together, the 20 accounts used 31.7 million gallons between July 1, 2025, and July 31, 2026 — nearly 14 times what 20 typical Southold residential accounts would have used over the same period.

New calculations provided by SCWA at the request of the Sun show the average residential account across its system uses 125,882 gallons a year. In Southold, consumption is even lower: its 9,709 residential accounts average 105,626 gallons annually — about 114,428 gallons over 13 months.

The town’s highest-consuming account — 9205 Bay Ave. in Cutchogue — used nearly 2.9 million gallons, more than 25 times the amount an average Southold residential account would use over the same period. Even the lowest-consuming account among the top 20 used about nine times the Southold average.

None of the account holders identified in the records broke any law or violated any SCWA regulation. The records establish how much metered public water passed through each account, not how it was used, and leaks may have contributed to the totals for several properties.

But taken together, the water-use figures put Southold’s heaviest residential water use squarely in the middle of the debate over SCWA’s proposed $22 million pipeline and whether greater conservation could reduce the need for additional water. Driving that debate is a statistic that frustrates everyone: 70% of the drinking water the SCWA pumps during the summer goes to lawn irrigation.

Frank Mancini, superintendent of the Riverhead Water District and a hydrogeologist who spent a decade working for SCWA, was emphatic about the chief culprit behind residential water consumption measured in the millions of gallons.

“It’s entirely outside irrigation,” Mancini said. Pools, car washing and ordinary household use cannot account for consumption on that scale, he said. In Riverhead, daily water production can jump from 2 to 3 million gallons during the winter to nearly 20 million gallons on the hottest summer days. “The only difference is outside irrigation.”

Mancini said automated irrigation systems run multiple times a day without homeowners even realizing it, and contended that public water remains too inexpensive to discourage the East End’s biggest residential consumers.

“It’s just so cheap that, particularly for wealthy people on the East End, it’s nothing.”

‘I had to fill up my pool’

The Sun made extensive efforts to contact all 20 account holders, mailing letters in early September and following up a week later by email and telephone when contact information was available. When no email address or phone number could be found, a reporter visited the property and left a message seeking comment. For accounts held by LLCs, letters were sent to the mailing addresses listed on the properties’ tax records. One property, listed by SCWA as 780 Private Road, could not be physically located.

Most of the account holders ignored the Sun’s missives. Attorney Daniel Buttafuoco (#14), whose account consumed 1.169 million gallons of water during the 13-month period, dismissed a detailed email request for comment with a brief reply: “I had to fill up my pool. Not interested.”

At Joshua Sirefman’s property at 2150 Park Ave., builder Jared Lettieri said no one was living at the property at the time because it was under construction. An old water line serving a demolished guest cottage froze and burst, running undetected beneath excavated dirt for about a month. An SCWA spokesperson confirmed the leak.

The authority also confirmed a water-service-line leak at 13350 New Suffolk Ave., where a contractor had told the Sun that a vehicle drove over the property’s right of way and damaged the line this spring. The contractor pointed to the home’s solar panels, geothermal heating and low-nitrogen septic system, arguing its water use should be weighed against those environmental efforts.

At Jeffrey and Danielle Karpf’s Wunneweta Road property, where SCWA recorded nearly 2.3 million gallons of use, landscaper Conni Cross said an irrigation-system leak discovered about six months ago may have contributed to the total. And at 2345 North Road, owner Jeff Lax said workers discovered a damaged coupling in a private water line about six feet underground that may have been leaking for much of the 13-month period, and provided pictures and video to the Sun.

Denis O’Leary, whose name appears on two neighboring Cutchogue accounts with different spellings, totaling about 2.46 million gallons, said in an email that the properties encompass three homes on five tax lots spread across nearly 11 acres. He said two of the lots contain no homes and were instead planted with roughly 1,100 trees and shrubs, most of them native.

Head of the Harbor LI LLC sold 19620 Soundview Ave. last month, after the 13-month measurement period. The new owners, who are not named here, had nothing to do with the property’s reported water consumption.

A fight over conservation

Water authority officials say the pipeline is necessary to ensure adequate drinking water and firefighting capacity during periods of peak demand. Many local officials and residents fear it could fuel significant development on the North Fork by making substantially more public water available.

Southold has already taken some of the most aggressive steps in the region to address irrigation.

The town adopted Suffolk County’s first comprehensive irrigation law, restricting automatic sprinklers to odd/even watering days and prohibiting daily irrigation. New systems must have smart controllers and rain sensors, while existing systems must be retrofitted with at least one of those devices by 2028. Sprinklers must remain off for two days after at least a half-inch of rain, and the Town Board can halt irrigation altogether during extreme drought. But enforcement relies largely on complaints, and violators must first be warned and given an opportunity to correct the problem before a citation is even written.

The town has a Water Advisory Committee, has expanded public education on reducing lawn watering and is now exploring ways to recharge the aquifer by reusing treated wastewater.

Earlier this month, Town Supervisor Al Krupski issued a press release calling for additional efforts to conserve, including exploring the reuse of treated wastewater from Greenport’s sewage treatment plant for irrigation, rather than discharging it into Long Island Sound. Greenport Mayor Kevin Stuessi didn’t reply to the Sun’s request for comment. Greenport Village Trustee Mary Bess Phillips said the village had already studied the potential reuse of treated wastewater in 2022, but was unable to find grant funding to move forward.

Suffolk County Legislator Greg Doroski said in an interview last week that he fully supports Krupski’s proposal and would go further, calling for wastewater reuse at new sewage treatment plants and plants receiving county water-quality improvement funding.

‘100% compliance’

Doroski said the figures obtained by the Sun underscore the need for SCWA to take a more aggressive approach to conservation, particularly through the price it charges its heaviest users.

The authority already charges a higher “conservation rate” once customers exceed a certain threshold, but Doroski said the higher rate is not nearly high enough and does not kick in soon enough to significantly change behavior.

The legislator pointed to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he said the highest water rate is 3.6 times the base rate, compared with SCWA’s conservation rate, which is about 40% higher than its regular rate. He suggested SCWA could start by roughly tripling its conservation rate, and then measure the effect on consumption.

“The beautiful thing about market-based solutions is that you have 100% compliance because it’s in your bill,” Doroski said. “The Suffolk County Water Authority needs to more accurately price this valuable, valuable resource.”

‘[Water]’s just so cheap that, particularly for wealthy people on the East End, it’s nothing.’ Riverhead Water District superintendent Frank Mancini

SCWA CEO Jeff Szabo said in an interview that the authority sets rates based on the cost of supplying water, removing contaminants and maintaining its system — and that imposing punitive rates on heavy users would conflict with its role as a not-for-profit public benefit corporation.

“I have a tough time going to the board to say I need these funds to operate, and then I want another 20% as a penalty for people who use too much water,” Szabo said. “That’s something that’s completely foreign, and I don’t think that’s something that we would pursue here.”

Drinking water for lawns

Mancini contends that, beyond relying on higher rates to curb the most extreme users, SCWA should consider giving residential customers consuming extraordinary amounts of water one year to remove their irrigation systems from the public drinking-water supply and install shallow irrigation wells.

“That’s where we’re failing,” Mancini said.

He argues that shallow irrigation wells would relieve pressure on the deeper aquifers tapped by public water suppliers and pose less danger of saltwater intrusion.

Doroski said he would “absolutely” support such a requirement for extreme residential water users, and said it could initially apply to new SCWA hookups and potentially to properties above a certain size.

“The idea that we should be treating groundwater and then applying it to lawns — it’s absurd,” Doroski said.

Szabo said that moving irrigation systems onto private wells would reduce demand on SCWA’s system, but would not necessarily reduce the amount of water being taken from beneath Long Island.

“The water would still be drawn from the aquifer,” Szabo said. “If we’re looking for overall aquifer protection, preservation and long-term supply, I don’t know if that’s necessarily the answer.”

For now, the proposed North Fork pipeline remains tied up in litigation with Riverhead Town.

Doroski said that the delay provides an opportunity to confront the underlying question before millions of dollars are spent bringing additional water east.

“Let’s use this time to actually have a serious conversation about water conservation,” Doroski said.

What’s working elsewhere

Other communities confronting heavy outdoor water use have tried many of the same approaches now being debated or implemented in Southold, and some have produced measurable results.

One of the closest comparisons is Port Washington, another coastal Long Island community dependent on groundwater and vulnerable to saltwater intrusion. Like Southold, it restricts irrigation to alternating days and requires water-saving technology on automatic sprinkler systems. But Port Washington now already requires every automatic system to use a smart controller, while Southold is phasing in similar requirements through 2028.

California’s Irvine Ranch Water District has gone further, combining individualized water budgets and sharply escalating rates for excessive use with recycled water, leak detection and other conservation programs. Average customer water use has fallen nearly in half since 1990, according to the district, which now serves roughly 445,000 people — nearly four times its 1990 population — while supplying only about 23% more water.

San Antonio, Texas has combined watering restrictions with conservation incentives, irrigation-system removal and aggressive leak detection. The San Antonio Water System reported consumption fell to a record-low 111 gallons per person per day in 2025, despite six consecutive years of severe drought.

There’s a local precedent for Krupski’s proposal to reuse treated wastewater. Since 2016, Riverhead Town’s Water Resource Recovery Facility has supplied treated wastewater to Suffolk County’s Indian Island Golf Course for irrigation, replacing as much as 100 million gallons of groundwater use during a typical season. The system can provide up to 450,000 gallons a day.

Similar programs have been used on a much larger scale elsewhere. Orange County, California supplies recycled water to about 100 parks, schools, golf courses and other sites rather than using groundwater or imported drinking water for irrigation. In 2016-17, the program supplied 1.16 billion gallons of recycled water, reducing groundwater pumping and imported-water demand while helping protect the coastal aquifer from saltwater intrusion.