At long last, Suffolk County has a county executive who fully understands the need to send highly treated wastewater back into the underground water table on which the people of Suffolk depend on as their “sole source” of potable water, instead of dumping it in nearby waterbodies including the Atlantic Ocean. 

And Ed Romaine has legislative support. Further, providing funding to do this was the passage of a referendum in the November election amending the Suffolk County Water Quality Restoration Act and increasing the county sales tax by l/8th of a penny to raise money to build sewers and install high-tech Innovative/Alternative septic systems and fund, as the measure stated, “projects for the reuse of treated effluent.”

As Romaine told Mark Harrington of Newsday last month: “All the sewers we will build will be tertiary in nature and will recharge. We’re not as stupid as they were years ago where all they did was take that outfall pipe and send it [the wastewater] out to the ocean or the Long Island Sound.”

As a Suffolk County legislator and Brookhaven Town supervisor, Romaine repeatedly emphasized the need to send treated wastewater back into the underground water table.

Five decades ago, I was writing extensively at the daily Long Island Press and in national media about the folly of a wastewater treatment plant  for the Southwest Sewer District then being built in West Babylon which would send 30 million gallons a day of treated wastewater into the Atlantic. 

Leading opponents of the scheme were Charlie Pulaski, conservation chairman of the Suffolk County American Legion, and George A. King, chairman of the Long Island Baymen’s Association. They warned this would impact adversely on the Carll’s River and many streams, and that the diversion of so much freshwater into the ocean could change the salinity of Great South Bay.  

Romaine and a bipartisan group of Suffolk County legislators were at the Bergen Point Wastewater Treatment Plant in West Babylon last month to announce that wastewater from the plant would be used to irrigate an adjacent county golf course and also for uses within the plant itself.

“This is one of 10 county wastewater treatment plants that we are currently considering for water reuse,” declared Romaine, a Republican from Center Moriches. “By utilizing what otherwise would have been a byproduct, we can decrease the pressure on our aquifer by hundreds of millions of gallons a year and even help recharge the aquifer.”

A breakthrough for Suffolk on this started in 2016 when treated effluent from the Riverhead Sewage Treatment plant began being used to irrigate the adjacent Indian Island County Golf Course to offset dumping wastewater into the Peconic River. 

At the event at the Bergen Point plant, Legislator Kevin J. McCaffrey of Lindenhurst, presiding officer of the Suffolk Legislature, said its reuse of wastewater “will let Bergen Point be known for helping water quantity as well as water quality. This is a great step forward to see if we can effectively take the wastewater and, instead of letting it flow into the ocean, use the effluent for irrigation and other purposes to help recharge the aquifer and reduce the nitrates in our water. I thank the county executive and hope all these planned projects will work together.”

“Moving forward, we need to do more recharging and water reuse,” said Legislator Steven Flotteron of West Islip, the legislature’s deputy presiding officer. “Bergen Point is just one of the many sites where a golf course is close to a treatment plant. But golf course irrigation is just one example of ways in which we are now moving forward together, the legislature and county executive, to reduce the pollutants, replenish the aquifer, and improve our water quality,” he said.

Legislator Ann Welker of Southampton said, “The success of the Riverhead Sewage Treatment Plant’s Water Reuse Program…has been phenomenal” and “Suffolk County plans to build on this success with water reuse.” 

The passage of the Suffolk County Water Quality Restoration Act amendment provides for funding for such “improvements…With that comes the possibility of more water reuse projects through the county, which is an exciting prospect.”

Suffolk Legislator Steven Englebright of East Setauket is already endeavoring to have sewage from Stony Brook University and surrounding neighborhoods used to irrigate close-by St. George’s Golf and Country Club. 

In 2023, a Long Island Water Reuse Road Map & Action Plan was advanced by the Islip-based Seatuck Environmental Association and Greentree Foundation. The plan identifies 50 golf courses in Nassau and Suffolk Counties situated within two miles of wastewater treatment facilities and thus are available for recharge, and identifies other locations including “sod farms and greenhouses, as well as for lawns at educational campuses” and “commercial centers.” Access the plan here.

Its executive summary states: “Over the past half century, water quality in Long Island’s groundwater aquifers (the sole source of drinking water for more than 2.5 million Nassau and Suffolk County residents), as well as both freshwater and coastal surface waters, has steadily declined….During this same time period, Long Island’s water quantity problem has also come into focus.”

It continues: “Water reuse (or water recycling, as it is also known) is a complementary strategy that can meaningfully help Long Island address its water issues. It involves ‘reusing’ highly treated wastewater generated from sewage treatment plants for water-dependent purposes instead of discharging it into the ocean or local coastal waters…

“The dual benefits of water reuse have long been recognized and embraced in other parts of the world, such as the Middle East, and across the country, especially in places such as California, Arizona and Florida, where supplies of freshwater are limited,” it goes on. “These states have incorporated extensive strategies to recapture and reuse valuable water resources…. According to the Environmental Protection Agency approximately 2.6 billion gallons of water are reused daily in the United States.” But “New York and other states in the Northeast have been slower to adopt these strategies.”

A 93-page hydrology report done by the U.S. Geological Survey released last year on the underground water table below neighboring Nassau County —which is 88% sewered with sewage treatment plants dumping wastewater into adjacent water bodies—is now “under stress,” it said, with saltwater intrusion moving in as the amount of fresh water in the water table being  depleted.

One can go back to the late 1800s and how Brooklyn lost its potable underground water supply—by over-pumping from the water table below it and consequent saltwater intrusion, along with pollution—and became dependent on a now fully-subscribed upstate reservoir system. 

The rest of Long Island cannot be allowed to lose its potable water supply.  Finally, a county executive and county legislators are working together to tackle this vital issue.