Why the Hamptons Can’t Have (Many) Nice Sewers

One hair-trigger topic of land use on the South Fork of Long Island, now that “the Hamptons” have mostly been built out, is the construction of sewage or water treatment plants. This early February story in the Southampton Press, subsequently picked up in Newsday, concerns plans to put such a facility on 6 wooded acres in the more-rustic north section of Hampton Bays. The purpose is to treat effluent from the downtown section of the hamlet, thus allowing for more intensive development there. Sewage limitations for that commercial strip, as elsewhere in Suffolk County, constrain the capacity for new usage (read residential toilets or restaurant wastewater) in such centers. It has been a repeated issue for Southampton Village, and for Southampton township’s plans to redevelop the partly blighted Riverside hamlet and add worker housing. (It’s less of a barrier in Sag Harbor Village, thanks to a plant built–unfortunately on the now-valuable waterfront–in the 1970s in a failed effort to retain industrial jobs.) The backdrop to all such local controversies is that Suffolk County remains largely unsewered, a legacy of its agricultural days, and therefore the groundwater, lakes and estuaries are highly susceptible to contamination by widely-present septic tanks. These units rarely can accommodate intensive uses of property without costly adaptation. So sewerage is the next big step if much is to be built in core areas–an otherwise popular idea. Despite technological advances that mask much of the smell of a treatment plant–and even can leave much of the ground cover undisturbed–neighbors are quick to object. And in the Hamptons, they frequently have lawyers at the ready.

https://www.27east.com/southampton-press/news/government-news/article_73a7ae21-9792-4f60-959c-bdabb1e2d164.html