Thursday, July 10, 2025
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 Long Island depend as their sole source of potable water, instead of dumping it into nearby bodies of water including the Atlantic Ocean. And Ed Romaine has legislative support.
The passage of a referendum in last November’s election provided the funding to do this. It amended the Suffolk County Water Quality Restoration Act and increased the county sales tax by one-eighth of a penny to raise money to build sewers, install high-tech innovative/alternative septic systems and to fund, as the measure stated, “projects for the reuse of treated effluent.”
Last month, Romaine was at the Bergen Point Wastewater Treatment Plant, in West Babylon, to announce the use of wastewater from the plant to irrigate an adjacent county golf course and within the plant. It was built to serve the Southwest Sewer District, and to send 30 million gallons of wastewater a day through an outfall pipe into the Atlantic.
As a Suffolk legislator and Brookhaven town supervisor, Romaine repeatedly emphasized the need to send treated wastewater back into the water table. “This,” he said at Bergen Point, “is one of 10 county wastewater treatment plants that we are currently considering for water reuse. 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.”
There was a breakthrough for Suffolk on wastewater reuse in 2016, when treated effluent from the Riverhead Sewage Treatment plant began being used to irrigate the adjacent Indian Island County Golf Course instead of being dumped into the Peconic River.
As county executive, Romaine intends to have all sewer systems built in Suffolk do recharge. “We’re not as stupid as they were years ago,” he said, “where all they did was take that outfall pipe and send (wastewater) out to the ocean or the Long Island Sound.”
Romaine was joined at Bergen Point by a bipartisan group of Suffolk legislators, including the Legislature’s presiding officer, Kevin McCaffrey, of Lindenhurst, who said reuse would “let Bergen Point be known for helping water quantity as well as water quality … I thank the county executive and hope all these planned projects will work together.”
Legislator Steven Flotteron, of West Islip, the deputy presiding officer, said, “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.”
Five decades ago, as the Southwest Sewer District was taking form, I wrote extensively about the folly of its sending a massive amount of wastewater each day into the Atlantic. Leading opponents of the scheme included Charlie Pulaski, conservation chairman of the Suffolk County American Legion, and George A. King, chairman of the Long Island Baymen’s Association, both of whom have since died. They warned of adverse impacts to many streams, Carlls River and the Great South Bay.
In 2023, the Islip-based Seatuck Environmental Association advanced a Long Island Water Reuse Road Map & Action Plan. The plan identified 50 golf courses in Nassau and Suffolk counties within two miles of wastewater treatment facilities and thus available for recharge, along with other locations including “sod farms and greenhouses, as well as for lawns at educational campuses” and “commercial centers.
The plan can be viewed through a box titled “Water Reuse” at seatuck.org. Its Executive Summary states: “Over the past half century, water quality in Long Island’s groundwater aquifers … as well as both freshwater and coastal surface waters, has steadily declined. During this same period, Long Island’s water quantity problem has also come into focus.”
An 83-page hydrology report done by the U.S. Geological Survey was released last year about the underground water table in Nassau County — which is 88 percent sewered, with sewage treatment plants dumping wastewater into adjacent water bodies. It stated that the water table is now “under stress,” threatened by saltwater intrusion as the volume of freshwater is being depleted.
In the late 1800s, Brooklyn lost its potable underground water supply by over-pumping from the water table below it and allowing saltwater intrusion, along with pollution — and became dependent on a now fully subscribed upstate reservoir system. Losing its potable water cannot be allowed to happen to the rest of Long Island.
Now, Romaine and Suffolk legislators are tackling the county’s vital water-supply issue.
Karl Grossman is an author, a TV program host and a professor of journalism at the State University of New York at Old Westbury.
