SUFFOLK CLOSEUP: Suffolk County Needs A Water Reuse Policy

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

photo Aquifer.org“If we look to western Long Island, there are a lot of lessons that should be applied to us—how a lot of mistakes were made regarding water,” environmentalist John Turner was saying. 

Turner was speaking about far-western Long Island—Brooklyn—and how it blew its underground water supply more than a century ago. 

Brooklyn then tried to tap into the aquifers under the Pine Barrens of Suffolk County for potable water but was rebuffed. So, it needed to look for water from reservoirs built upstate.

These days, the 2.6 million residents of Suffolk and Nassau Counties won’t be able to tap into those reservoirs if they blow their underground water supply because they’re functioning at their maximum, notes Turner. “Suffolk and Nassau will not be able to turn to New York City simply because there’s just not excess or surplus water that the city could provide to those two counties because of the water supply needs of New York City. Plus the cost of trying to interconnect, even if there were excess capacity, would be cost-prohibitive,” he said last week.

Thus, he emphasizes, it’s critical we preserve the water supply we have—the aquifers below our feet—our “sole source” of potable water.

Turner is senior conservation policy advocate at Seatuck Environmental Association in Islip and former legislative director of the New York Legislative Commission on Water Resources Needs of New York State and Long Island. He is also former director of Brookhaven Town’s Division of Environmental Protection.

He has been a leader in the effort to have wastewater purified and returned to the underground water table on Long Island rather than it being discharged into surrounding bays, the Atlantic Ocean and Long Island Sound—as most sewer systems on Long Island do.

Nassau County is 85 percent sewered and as a result of its releasing wastewater in this way, “the uppermost expression of the aquifer system” in Nassau has “dropped considerably,” notes Turner. Hempstead Lake now “is Hempstead Pond.”

What Turner has been warning about is not new.  

Dr. Jeffrey A. Kroessler, a historian and professor and chief librarian at John Jay College in Manhattan, wrote and lectured about the Brooklyn and Long Island water story years ago. He lived in Sunnyside, Queens and died in 2023. In 2011, in the “Long Island History Journal,” published by Stony Brook University, there was an extensive article by Kroessler titled “Brooklyn’s Thirst, Long Island’s Water: Consolidation, Local Control, And The Aquifer.”

“In the 1850s…Brooklyn tapped ponds and streams on the south side of Queens County, and in the 1880s dug wells for additional supply,” he related. “This lowered the water table and caused problems for farmers and oystermen, many of whom sued…for damages. Ultimately, salt water seeped into some wells from over-pumping. By 1896, Brooklyn’s system had reached its limit.”

“Brooklyn had to find additional sources for its increasing population,” said Kroessler. “Wary of those intentions, as early as 1884 the supervisors of Suffolk County resolved to oppose ‘the enactment of any measure which, under the plea of supplying water to…Brookyn, may presently or prospectively take from any part of Suffolk County water needed for the use of its own population.’” That legislation was enacted by the Suffolk County Board of Supervisors.

Brooklyn “was casting a covetous eye on the Pine Barrens in Suffolk County.”

“As one writer explained in 1899,” related Kroessler, “In considering the subject of the water supply of Long Island, we must first of all leave out the idea that we receive water from any other source than which falls directly from the sky.” Kroessler said: “The aquifer, therefore, can only be replenished by rainfall filtered through many layers of sand and soil. That slow process accounts for Long Island’s particularly fine water, but also points to the vulnerability of that limited resource.”

The action by the Suffolk County Board of Supervisors was buttressed by New York State. As Kroessler wrote, “Governor Levi P. Morton…signed a law sponsored by Assemblyman Carll S. Burr of Commack that prevented Brooklyn from drawing off Suffolk’s water without the approval of a majority of the county supervisors.”

Meanwhile, New York City “built a new system of reservoirs and aqueducts to deliver water from the Catskills” and “Brooklyn’s old water system was transferred to the City of New York.” 

“Only in 1993 did the state legislature pass the Pine Barrens Protection Act to conserve the valuable and irreplaceable resource” as “Suffolk approached the limit of its precious water supply, just as Brooklyn had a century before. But while Brooklyn could look to additional water from New York’s system,” concluded Kroessler in his “Long Island History Journal” article, “Suffolk has no option other than reforming its own practices and policies.”

That is truer than ever today. 

Turner is excited about the Suffolk County Water Quality Restoration Act proposed to be  on the November election ballot providing for county funding for “projects for the reuse of treated effluent”—notably for utilization on golf courses, sod farms and similar sites—to help  preserve the quantity in the underground water table in Suffolk. Turner says it “behooves all levels of government to focus on water reuse.”

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books.   

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP : "13 Magic Words" In Water Quality Restoration Act

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

Environmentalist John Turner calls them “13 magic words.”

They are 13 words that have been added to a measure likely to be voted on in a countywide referendum in November that would amend the Suffolk County Water Quality Restoration Act. The words are in a section of state legislation on what the fund for the act would finance. 

The 13 words are: “and projects for the reuse of treated effluent from such wastewater treatment facilities.”

Turner has long worked to have wastewater purified and returned to Long Island’s underground water table rather than being discharged into surrounding bays, the Atlantic Ocean and Long Island Sound.

Long Island is dependent on its underground water table, what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1978 designated as the “sole source aquifer” for potable water for people here.

In Nassau County, the water table has lowered because 85 percent of the county is sewered and all its sewage treatment plants send wastewater into surrounding waterways. In Nassau, lakes, ponds, and streams that are the “uppermost expression of the aquifer system, have dropped considerably,” says Turner, former legislative director of the New York Legislative Commission on Water Resource Needs of New York State and Long Island and director of Brookhaven Town’s Division of Environmental Protection. He is senior conservation policy advocate at Seatuck Environmental Association based in Islip. 

Hempstead Lake now “is Hempstead Pond,” says Turner.

Suffolk is 25 percent sewered with—until recent years—all its larger sewage treatment plants sending wastewater into surrounding waterways. The biggest, the Southwest Sewer District’s Bergen Point Sewage Treatment Plant in West Babylon, was built to send up to 30 million gallons a day of wastewater through an outfall pipe into the Atlantic.

However, in 2016, providing a model for change, the Riverhead Sewage Treatment Plant began sending treated effluent to the county’s adjoining Indian Island Golf Course. This has provided irrigation and fertilization for the golf course and an alternative to the discharging of wastewater into Flanders Bay.

A revised Suffolk County Water Quality Restoration Act was first advanced last year with a referendum proposed for Election Day 2023. But the Republican majority on the Suffolk Legislature voted against it because the enabling state legislation then earmarked 25 percent of the funding for sewers and 75 percent for high-tech nitrogen-reducing “innovative/advanced” septic systems. The GOP majority sought a larger percentage for sewers.

In the new revision the split is 50 percent for sewers and 50 percent for “innovative/advanced” septic systems. It now will go before the Suffolk Legislature and State Legislature, where its sponsor in the Assembly is Fred W. Thiele, Jr. of Sag Harbor and sponsor in the Senate Monica Martinez of Brentwood, and, if approved, be subject to a referendum in Suffolk on Election Day 2024.

Other than for the change to a 50-50 division and those “13 magic words,” the measure remains otherwise as it had been last year. The funding for the Suffolk County Water Quality Restoration Act would, as proposed last year, increase the current 8.625 percent sales tax in the county to 8.75 percent, or l/8^th of a penny on each dollar spent on purchases.

If the new revised act gets legislative and voter approval, funds for projects for reuse of treated effluent could be used to implement the “Long Island Water Reuse Road Map & Action Plan” issued last year. The plan was created by Seatuck, the Greentree Foundation, Cameron Engineering & Associates and a Water Reuse Technical Working Group of 28 members. It proposes that treated wastewater to be utilized for a variety of purposes, notably on golf courses, but also on sod farms, lawns and fields at educational and commercial sites. It lists treatment facilities and sites that could be used including in Smithtown. 

It declares: “The benefits of water reuse have long been recognized and embraced in other parts of the world,” and currently in the U.S. “approximately 2.6 billion gallons of water is reused daily.” But, it says, in New York “large-scale water reuse projects have been limited. There are a few projects in upstate New York and one on Long Island,” the “Riverhead reuse project.”

At a press conference last month announcing the new revision, Suffolk’s new county executive, Ed Romaine, repeated what he had emphasized as Brookhaven Town supervisor and a county legislator, that in building sewers in Suffolk “let’s not pump the effluent out to the ocean or the Sound.” Romaine, like Turner and other environmentalists, stresses a need for not only water quality but quantity. 

The sales tax increase is expected to raise in its first year $26.5 million for sewers and $26.5 million for “innovative/advanced” septic systems, said the legislature’s presiding officer, Kevin McCaffrey, at the press conference. The I/A systems have an average cost of $22,000 and, as of 2021, have been required by Suffolk County for new construction of a house in a non-sewered area or major expansion of an existing house.