The Suffolk County Water Authority came to Southold Thursday evening prepared to explain why it believes the North Fork needs a new water pipeline. In the second half of the hearing, elected officials, environmental advocates and residents told the authority what they believe it still needs to explain.
At the second of three public hearings on the authority’s newly released Draft Environmental Impact Statement, speakers pressed SCWA to more aggressively attack the extraordinary amount of drinking water used on lawns before importing more water to the North Fork; wait for a major federal study of the region’s aquifer; give Southold’s elected trustees a formal role in the environmental review; better analyze wetlands, road salt and climate risks; and reconsider assumptions about future development and water demand.
Underlying nearly all of those concerns was a maddening statistic: Roughly 70% of the water pumped during periods of peak demand goes toward residential lawn irrigation. SCWA officials say that summertime demand is increasingly straining the North Fork’s thin freshwater aquifer, drawing down storage tanks and accelerating saltwater intrusion into local wells.
But to many of the people who spoke Thursday, that raised an obvious question: Before spending an estimated $22 million to bring more water east, how much of the problem could be solved by using dramatically less?
SCWA officials acknowledge that while the authority can use pricing, rebates, watering schedules and public education to discourage excessive consumption, it has no enforcement authority to compel customers to conserve water or punish those who refuse — authority that instead rests largely with local governments.
‘Market-based solution’
Suffolk County Legislator Greg Doroski urged SCWA to substantially strengthen its tiered pricing system so that customers who consume large amounts of water pay significantly more for it.
SCWA adopted tiered rates in 2020, but Doroski noted that the authority’s higher conservation rate is only about 15% above its regular rate. He pointed to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he said the highest water rate is roughly three times the base rate and water demand fell 20% even as population increased 10%. The legislator asked that the final EIS quantify how much water could actually be saved through stronger conservation measures rather than simply concluding that conservation cannot meet the North Fork’s needs.
“I’m really urging the Water Authority to not merely look at themselves as a supplier of water to the community — which you do a very, very good job at — but really being stewards who prioritize conservation of a very, very limited resource,” Doroski said. “In Suffolk County, our water is undervalued for how valuable that resource is. So please look at a market-based solution.”
His argument goes directly to the fault line that has run through the pipeline debate for more than a year. At a contentious Riverhead forum last summer, Riverhead Water District Superintendent Frank Mancini argued that with the majority of drinking water production being consumed by lawn irrigation, conservation should be brought under control before the region commits to greater withdrawals from the Central Pine Barrens. Southold officials at that meeting likewise questioned the wisdom of moving water between aquifer systems without first understanding the cumulative consequences.
On Thursday, Southold Town Supervisor Al Krupski asked SCWA for more time to review it, saying town staff is still working through the details. SCWA CEO Jeff Szabo said the authority expects to extend its Sept. 11 written-comment deadline, though the length of that extension has not yet been finalized.
Krupski also contended that the environmental review should not be completed before the release of an ongoing U.S. Geological Survey groundwater study that could provide critical new information about the North Fork aquifer. USGS researchers have been working with Southold officials and advisory committees on the study, including examining the confining clay layer beneath portions of the North Fork that may help protect groundwater from saltwater intrusion.
“I think that groundwater study would be really critical in helping us all understand the impacts of this and understanding the impacts of our water use here in Southold,” Krupski said. “It would be helpful for the residents and for this project if we had the results from that study before we made any final decisions.”
Krupski also asked the authority to examine road salt as a contributor to chloride contamination in local wells, address longstanding drainage problems when Main Road is reconstructed after pipeline installation and, if a potential second phase of the project is eventually extended east toward Orient, coordinate that work with long-discussed efforts to bury utility lines.
Toward the end of the hearing, Krupski raised another concern about the DEIS: its assumptions about future development. The document, he said, projects hookups based on steady growth toward buildout without adequately accounting for Southold’s continuing farmland and open-space preservation efforts. Krupski noted that the town had closed that very day on another 30 acres of preserved farmland, adding to a block of roughly 500 protected acres.
As long as lawn irrigation remains a major driver of water consumption, he argued, preventing land from being developed can itself reduce future demand.
“The land preservation efforts are going to mitigate a lot of that over time, as they have in the past,” Krupski said.
Trustees want a seat at the table
Southold Town Trustees Eric Sepenoski and Nick Krupski focused their comments on the town’s legal authority over wetlands and the environmental consequences of extending public water farther east. Nick Krupski said the trustees are concerned that Southold is listed only as an “interested agency” in the DEIS rather than an “involved agency” under the state environmental review process.
The distinction matters because the trustees exercise jurisdiction over activities near town wetlands and beaches, including underwater lands in Peconic Bay. Yet under the current environmental review, Krupski said, the trustees would merely be notified about work near wetlands rather than being asked to issue a wetlands permit.
He called that especially troubling because approximately six acres of wetlands identified by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lie within the buffer area of the project’s potential Phase Two extension toward Orient.
“We request that the Trustees of Southold Town be considered an involved agency,” Krupski said, arguing that doing so would allow the board “to protect this vital habitat and uphold the authority granted 350 years ago to the Town of Southold.”
Sepenoski then raised one of the most persistent fears surrounding the pipeline: that extending public water could facilitate development that otherwise would be constrained by limited groundwater supplies.
“With that pipeline proposed for Orient, should it go through, you’re going to see increased development because the incentives, the profit motivations, are there,” Sepenoski said.
He warned that development could bring more irrigated lawns, fertilizers and increased runoff into surrounding surface waters — precisely the impacts the trustees are charged with trying to prevent.
“You’re going to see increased water usage … on the waterfront as people install sod lawns and irrigate them, and then treat them and fertilize them … Something that we fight very hard against on the town trustees [is] to prevent nitrification of our surface waters, to prevent runoff into our surface waters that damages our nationally recognized estuary.”
Greenport: ‘We cannot afford to delay’
Greenport officials offered a counterargument.
Mayor Kevin Stuessi and Deputy Mayor Patrick Brennan both supported the pipeline, emphasizing not development or lawn irrigation but fire protection.
SCWA officials displayed data showing the village’s 300,000-gallon Moore’s Lane storage tank falling to only a few feet of water during summer mornings, when irrigation systems are running and demand is at its highest. SCWA Deputy CEO Joe Pokorny said those low levels leave far less water immediately available if firefighters face a major blaze.
Stuessi said that is a risk Greenport cannot accept in a densely built historic village where homes and commercial buildings sit close together and the population swells with visitors.
“When I see that tower … and know that there are times where there’s only five feet or two feet worth of water in it, that is an emergency we cannot afford to delay,” Stuessi said.
He pointed to Greenport’s volunteer fire department, hotels, Eastern Long Island Hospital and Peconic Landing as examples of facilities and institutions dependent upon a reliable supply.
“I, as village mayor, would rather be on the side of caution and planning, and see this pipeline get built,” Stuessi said. “Our fire department … can’t afford not to.”
Brennan similarly said the project would add “a layer of robustness” to both the quantity and quality of Greenport’s water supply and provide greater protection for firefighters, residents and visitors.
But even Greenport’s support came with a conservation caveat. Brennan urged SCWA to find stronger ways to “incentivize conservation and disincentivize waste.”
New pipeline route
SCWA officials spent the opening portion of Thursday’s hearing recapping a project that has been debated publicly for more than a year. The authority says Southold’s roughly 60 small wells cannot reliably meet peak demand without increasing the threat of saltwater intrusion. Its proposed solution is a 24-inch transmission main capable of moving up to 6,000 gallons per minute east from SCWA’s much larger South Shore Low Zone.
The preferred route now begins in Flanders, crosses beneath the Peconic River, travels north along Route 105 and then east along Main Road to an existing connection near the Southold town line in Laurel. A booster station would be constructed near Routes 105 and 25. Construction is expected to take 12 to 18 months, with work scheduled to avoid the busiest summer and fall periods.
That is substantially different from the route residents were debating a year ago.
SCWA originally proposed sending the pipeline east along Sound Avenue, triggering fierce opposition from Riverhead officials, farmers and residents concerned about construction through the historic agricultural corridor. The authority shifted the preferred alignment to Main Road when it released the DEIS in July, shortening the project by more than a mile and eliminating one planned booster station.
Szabo said Thursday that the change demonstrated that SCWA had listened to public comments during last year’s scoping process. Environmental consultants Carrie O’Farrell of Nelson Pope Voorhis and Marianne Taylor of CDM Smith said the DEIS examines groundwater, wetlands, ecology, land use, traffic, historic resources, construction impacts, noise and alternatives, while proposing mitigation ranging from directional drilling beneath wetlands to erosion controls, traffic management and full repaving after construction. Their groundwater modeling found only minor effects from additional pumping in the South Shore zone and from reducing or shutting down North Fork wells, with changes falling within historical natural variability.
Pokorny said the imported water would allow SCWA to shut down some North Fork wells most affected by chlorides and reduce pumping at others, helping them recover while adding water from outside Southold’s hydrogeologic system.
Critics question the DEIS itself
Several speakers, however, questioned whether the environmental review adequately analyzes the newly preferred Main Road route.
Mattituck resident Joel Klein argued that much of the DEIS still relies on analysis performed for the abandoned Sound Avenue alignment. He also challenged SCWA’s inclusion of the potential East Marion-to-Orient extension as “Phase Two,” despite the authority acknowledging that it currently has no plans or funding to build it.
Klein warned that approving its environmental review now could allow SCWA years later to argue that a separate review was unnecessary even though traffic, development, groundwater and other conditions may have changed.
“All you’re doing is setting up a situation where you can avoid going through an environmental review process should you ever choose to build Phase Two,” Klein said.
Valerie Virgona of the Peconic Estuary Partnership raised another route-specific concern: a $2.2 million wetland restoration project at Meetinghouse Creek along Main Road in Aquebogue. She said the DEIS does not sufficiently explore what construction and dewatering could mean for the newly restored wetland or adequately explain impacts from a proposed staging area in another wetland. Then she returned to the statistic that shadowed nearly every conservation argument of the evening.
“If 70% of this water is being used for watering lawns,” Vergona asked, “what is to stop 70% of the new flow of water that we have coming in from just being used on palatial estates?”
Other environmental advocates joined in with additional requests.
Anne Murray of the North Fork Environmental Council asked SCWA to explain in the final EIS why it cannot wait for the pending aquifer study and to assess how sea-level rise and severe storms could threaten a future pipeline across the Orient causeway.
Alexa Annunziata of Peconic Baykeeper asked how excavated soils would be tested and handled if crews encounter legacy contamination and what long-term pipeline maintenance would cost and entail.
Nancy DePas Reinertsen and Ralph Reinertsen of ReWild Long Island – North Fork urged SCWA to work directly with environmental organizations promoting native landscapes as alternatives to water-intensive lawns, while Margaret de Cruz of the North Fork Environmental Council asked the authority to examine graywater systems and more aggressively discourage turf.
Southold Water Advisory Committee chair Caroline Yates, a hydrogeologist, questioned why preserved farmland had been excluded as potential locations for additional public wells, arguing that the pending groundwater research could identify usable freshwater beneath some protected properties.
Taken together, the comments reflected how much the North Fork pipeline debate has shifted since last summer. Last year, much of the fight centered on Riverhead: whether SCWA could trench through the town without submitting to local land-use authority, why Riverhead should absorb construction impacts from a pipeline providing it no water and whether withdrawing more water from the Central Pine Barrens was prudent in the first place.
The move from Sound Avenue to Main Road has mitigated one of the project’s most politically explosive elements, but it has not settled the larger argument about whether the project is treating the symptom of peak demand without sufficiently confronting its largest cause.
The one point that SCWA officials and many of their critics actually agree is that the North Fork has a summertime water problem, and that an extraordinary amount of that drinking water is being sprayed onto lawns.
