As threatened earlier this year, Riverhead Town has filed a lawsuit against Southampton Town alleging Southampton’s environmental review of its newly adopted sewer district for Riverside was inadequate and a violation of the 2021 Green Amendment to the New York State Constitution, which pledges that “each person shall have a right to clean air and water, and a healthful environment.
Pictured Above: Southampton Town contends that a sewage treatment plant is essential for the revitalization of the center of this blighted hamlet.
Riverhead Town announced Thursday that it had filed the suit in Suffolk County Supreme Court on Aug. 21 alleging the “potentially significant adverse environmental impacts on the Town of Riverhead and the Riverhead Central School District arising from the future development of up to 2,300 residential units within the Riverside area.”
The Riverside Sewer District has been seen in Southampton as a critical necessity to the enactment of its Riverside Revitalization Action Plan, adopted in 2014 with much public input and support from the Riverside community.
Southampton’s Environmental Impact Statement for the sewage treatment plant, adopted earlier this year, found that the project would not have significant adverse environmental impacts, and laid out plans to address impacts that it will have.
Riverhead Town Supervisor Tim Hubbard alleged Southampton’s plan “does not take into account any of the dramatic demographic changes the area has experienced in the last 10 years or the revitalization plans of Riverhead.”
The Suffolk County County Center and Jail buildings in Riverside are hooked up to the Riverhead Sewer District in an agreement in place since the 1960s. While the later phases of the Riverside Sewer District plan call for connecting the county buildings to the Riverside Sewer, Mr. Hubbard alleged Southampton’s failure to include them now “prevents Riverhead from expanding its own sewer district service area to include West Main Street, which would prevent nitrogen from private septic systems from flowing into the river.”
The sewage treatment plant for the sewer district is expected to be placed in a small industrial park off Flanders Road behind the Suffolk Credit Union, a site that abuts the Riverhead Central School District’s Phillips Avenue Elementary School.
“Not connecting the school to the sewers was the ultimate slap in the face to the families and teachers there,” said Mr. Hubbard. “You simply don’t put a sewage treatment plant next to a school.”
Phillips Avenue staff who are members of the Riverhead Central Faculty Association called a press conference and walked out on their lunch break near the end of the last school year to protest along the school property’s boundary with the Southampton Town land where they expect the sewage treatment plant to be built, holding yellow signs that read “Will Our Kids Be Safe?”
Southampton Town Supervisor Maria Moore, who has said earlier this year that Southampton would consider including the Suffolk County buildings in later phases of the sewer district, could not immediately be reached for comment.
The $35 million Riverside sewage treatment plant is slated to be built in two phases on 11 acres of Southampton Town-owned property in the Riverside Enterprise Zone. It will consist of sequencing batch reactors, which remove bacteria and nitrogen from wastewater, and a conventional leaching field through which the treated effluent would return to the aquifer.
Southampton Town Planning and Development Administrator Janice Scherer said at a public hearing on the sewer district earlier this year that these types of small sewage treatment plants are very common, and there is a similar plant not far from the Southampton Elementary School.
The sewage treatment plant would be located on the upper left corner of the circular road in the Riverside Enterprise Zone (center right). The Phillips Avenue School, which is not proposed to be hooked up to the plant in Phase I, is directly below the Enterprise Zone property.
Two nearby mobile home parks on Flanders Road adjacent to the Peconic River, which currently have individual cesspools for each unit, would be among the first areas hooked up to the sewage treatment plant, said Southampton Town consultants at public hearings on the project this spring. The proposed district service area does not include the school, but it does include much of the property directly west of the sewage treatment plant between Flanders Road and Riverheigh Avenue, as well as the Riverwoods mobile home park on the west side of Riverleigh Avenue, and several commercial properties surrounding the Riverside traffic circle between Riverleigh Avenue and Lake Avenue.
According to Southampton Town’s map and plan for the sewer district, “due to the service area being designated as one of the most economically distressed areas in the county, it is the intention of the Town of Southampton to designate grant money to cover the construction costs” to connect the 137 properties within the sewer district to the plant, at a cost of $3,000 per lot that needs a standard gravity connection (194 lots) and $7,500 per lot per property that needs a pumping system (43 lots).
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