In a tense, often testy public hearing Tuesday night, Riverhead officials and residents blasted the Suffolk County Water Authority’s plan to trench an 8-mile, 24-inch water transmission line through town to feed Southold — arguing the project would bring “zero” benefit to Riverhead while upending traffic, scarring freshly paved roads and boxing out local oversight.

“This smells strongly of the fox in the henhouse,” Supervisor Tim Hubbard told SCWA attorney Brody 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.”

The hearing — Riverhead’s formal application of New York’s Monroe “balancing of public interests” test — followed one week after the town’s packed pipeline forum and months of mounting tension over SCWA’s North Fork pipeline plan.

The authority says Southold’s thin aquifer and several dozen shallow wells can’t safely meet peak-season demand and fire-flow needs without tapping the larger SCWA system to the west. Riverhead officials counter that the transmission main would function as a subterranean highway, moving water under their roads to someone else’s taps, with little say from the town that endures the construction. Southold officials are sharply critical of the pipeline plan as well.

At the center of the Tuesday night hearing was a deceptively simple legal question: Should the Suffolk County Water Authority be forced to run its controversial North Fork pipeline through Riverhead’s permitting process like any other developer — or does state law exempt the authority from local land-use control?

Smith argued before the Riverhead Town Board that the decades-old Monroe balancing test was designed precisely to shield regional projects from being stymied by a single town’s permitting gauntlet.

The Monroe test, created in the 1980s, uses nine criteria to determine whether local land-use regulations should apply to projects of regional significance. In Monroe County, the project was an airport. Here, it’s a transmission line designed to connect Southold’s 60 shallow wells to SCWA’s broader grid of 586 wells and 6,000 miles of mains.

The authority’s goal, Smith said, is to relieve Southold’s overtaxed aquifer, prevent saltwater intrusion and ensure fire safety during the summer surge when Southold consumes “over 12,000 gallons per minute” — some 3,000 gallons more than he said its wells can produce.

Smith said the SCWA “is not a private developer.

“It is a public authority that is authorized by the state of New York to provide water to Suffolk County residents. The [Riverhead] planning board is not a regional planning authority … This is a project that has impacts beyond the jurisdiction of the town.”

In a 17-page letter presented to the board by Smith at Tuesday night’s meeting, an attorney for the water authority, Kathleen Bennett, called Riverhead officials actions “confounding” and charged that last week’s forum was “entirely one-sided, intended to paint the SCWA and the [p]roject in the most negative light possible…” The North Fork Sun requested and received a copy of the letter from the SCWA.

The letter went on to conclude that Riverhead “has not and cannot provide persuasive support for its positions that it must conduct the Monroe hearing, it must determine SCWA’s immunity under the Monroe factors, or that it is an Involved Agency with jurisdiction to approve the North Fork Pipeline Project.”

‘A regional problem’

Riverhead Town Board members are uniformly opposed to the project. For every point Smith tried to make, officials pushed back.

Smith cited past projects where SCWA laid mains in Riverhead without town approval, including one in Jamesport and another in Manorville.

“The town has not required the water authority to obtain local planning board approval going back to 1992 … In fact, there’s currently 7,000 feet of main in Riverhead that’s owned by the water authority.”

Hubbard shot back: “All of those that you just mentioned provided benefit to the residents of the town of Riverhead. This 8-mile transmission line … has no community benefit to us whatsoever. Those are two very different things.”

Smith countered that whether Riverhead directly benefits is not part of the Monroe test.

“One of the factors in the Monroe test is not whether a project specifically benefits some subset of a county or a specific neighborhood,” he said — later adding that “this is a regional problem that requires a regional solution.”

When Smith said it was the SCWA’s mandate to provide clean drinking water, Councilman Ken Rothwell countered that “you’re not providing them water.

“You’re selling water to the town of Southold at the expense of Riverhead taxpayers. That’s what you’re doing.”

“That is true that people pay for water,” Smith acknowledged. “But we are not a for-profit entity. This is not a money grab. We are created to provide this service.”

‘Every single comment’

Riverhead officials were unconvinced.

Environmental consultant Jeffrey Seeman said the SCWA had offered nothing more than a line on a map, and urged the board to deny any claim of broad “immunity” from local review.

“With no strong engineering plans other than this routing line on a map, it’s been very difficult for our team to assess not only what the impacts would be, but where the location of this project is physically placed,” Seeman said. “We have no metes and bounds.”

Without site-plan conditions, he warned, Riverhead would have no “enforceable ability to hold them to those mitigating measures.”

Seeman said the town asked the authority to keep the SEQRA scoping period open until after Tuesday’s hearing — only to see it close Aug. 4. (Originally, the comment period was set to end June 25. It was extended to July 11, and again to Aug. 4.)

“These are two independent programs,” Seeman said of Monroe and SEQRA. “The Monroe analysis is done first, then you enter SEQRA … Our team’s review is that they shouldn’t even be in SEQRA until they have a set of plans to present us.”

Smith replied that the authority is following SEQRA requirements and is in the middle of the required scoping process that sets the table of contents for a full environmental impact statement.

“There were three public scoping sessions,” he said, adding that a draft environmental impact statement will be published, followed by more hearings and responses to “every single comment.”

He called construction impacts “temporary” and promised roads would be restored to “the same or better condition.”

“To say that there’s not sufficient detail at this point is to say ‘you haven’t finished a process that really is just beginning,’” Smith said.

‘What are we gaining?’

Board members returned repeatedly to the absence of any upside for Riverhead.

“I have yet to see the value or how, in any way, this helps a Riverhead resident,” Rothwell said. “What are we gaining from this project? Nothing.”

Rothwell warned that Sound Avenue, a vital and recently repaved artery for Riverhead’s farm-and-winery economy, would be torn up for years. “We just invested in that road and finished it, and it’s beautiful now … to allow you to come in and tear it up … would be unfair and unjust.”

Town Attorney Erik Howard pressed Smith on alternatives: Why not more water towers? Why not tougher conservation measures in Southold and elsewhere?

Smith answered that Southold already had three storage tanks, and that the project “does not contemplate” building more. He said the authority supported sprinkler codes and conservation programs, but the ultimate solution is to connect Southold to the wider SCWA grid.

When Howard cited the SCWA’s own estimates that 70% of the water it pumps during the summer is used for lawn irrigation, Smith appeared unfamiliar with the figure — despite its frequent citation in meetings, forums and scoping sessions all summer.

“I don’t know if that’s true or not — how much people use water for landscaping in the summer. That could be. I’m not really aware of that, where you’re getting that statistic from.”

A few minutes later, Hubbard cut in.

“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 … you need to work with Southampton … I see these mansions just dousing water all over the place, wasting it like crazy. If there’s no effort made for water conservation, the easy answer isn’t to run a transmission line through the town of Riverhead.”

When Smith assured the Town Board that “our intention is to be entirely transparent,” Rothwell reminded him of what the SCWA later acknowledged was a “ceremonial groundbreaking” in Laurel in 2023 — in which the authority temporarily tore up a portion of Peconic Bay Boulevard without alerting town officials and installed a piece of water main in the ground, only to patch the hole later, after a press conference.

“How transparent were you when you held a groundbreaking ceremony telling the Riverhead community you were going ahead, without even consulting us?” Rothwell asked.

“Every project needs a beginning,” Smith replied. “The intention was to begin this conversation. It wasn’t to say we’re not going to listen.”

‘Crisis didn’t just appear’

Riverhead Water District Superintendent Frank Mancini said that the need for a new main had been identified more than two decades ago.

“This crisis didn’t just appear,” Mancini said. “There could have been tremendous dialogue working with not only Riverhead but the town of Southold to mitigate concerns. It shouldn’t have come to this crisis point.”

Again and again, the exchanges came back to Smith’s central claim — that the Monroe test is not about whether Riverhead benefits, but about whether a regional project should be subjected to local permitting at all.

Riverhead’s leaders refused to accept that framing.

“We have to keep fighting for this,” Seeman said. “The map they gave us … looks like it was drawn on a cocktail napkin.”

Hubbard demanded more answers.

“This doesn’t cut it for the people in this town,” he said. “There’s gonna have to be some sit-downs with the Suffolk County Water Authority, and that’s an open invitation to anyone there that wants to come meet with us. But I think we need to have some conversations.”

In a statement released Wednesday, the SCWA called the pipeline project “an essential infrastructure investment to ensure a reliable, high quality water supply for our customers in Southold.”

SCWA officials said that the authority “has clear statutory authority to construct and operate water supply projects, and long-standing legal precedent affirms that our work is not subject to local jurisdiction.”

Yet even Southold leaders are deeply skeptical of the project.

At a Southold Town work session earlier Tuesday, Supervisor Al Krupski and Town Board member Greg Doroski were sharply critical of SCWA’s plans.

“It seems like the [SCWA’s] intent to lay this pipe is already there, and they’re almost just going through this formality of public engagement, when there really are legitimate questions that need to be answered for us related to the costs and the benefits,” Doroski said.