Environmentalist John Turner calls them “13 magic words.”
They are 13 words that were added to a measure approved in a countywide referendum in 2024 on an amendment to the Suffolk County Water Quality Restoration Act.
The words were added to the act to set forth something else funds raised, as part of the sales tax in Suffolk, could finance. The 13 words were:
"and projects for the reuse of treated effluent from such wastewater treatment facilities."
Turner has long been a crusader for having 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” of potable water for people living here.
The result of this dumping of wastewater is a lowering of that water table and also saltwater intrusion into it.
In neighboring Nassau County, there has been a lowering of its water table because 85 percent of the county is sewered and all these sewage treatment plants rely on outfall or the discharge of wastewater into surrounding bays, the Atlantic Ocean or Long Island Sound.
As a result, in Nassau the level of water in lakes, ponds and streams, which are the “uppermost expression of the aquifer,” have dropped considerably, says Turner.
“Hempstead Lake now is Hempstead Pond,” he says.
And, as the U.S. Geological Survey has already reported:
"The coastal-aquifer system of Manhasset Neck, Nassau County, New York, has been stressed by pumping, which has led to saltwater intrusion and the abandonment of one public supply well."
Turner is senior conservation policy advocate at Seatuck Environmental Association located in Islip. He previously was legislative director of the New York State Water Resources Commission, director of Brookhaven Town’s Division of Environmental Protection and was also a founder of the Long Island Pine Barrens Society.
Suffolk County is 30 percent sewered with—until recent years—all its larger sewage treatment plants utilizing outfall, too.
The biggest, the Southwest Sewer District’s Bergen Point Sewage Treatment Plant in West Babylon, sends millions of gallons a day of wastewater through an outfall pipe into the Atlantic Ocean.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
In Suffolk County in 2016, the Riverhead Sewage Treatment Plant began sending treated effluent to the adjacent Indian Island Golf Course, and this has provided irrigation and fertilization for the golf course.
A lesson for all of Long Island is how Brooklyn—on Long Island’s western end—lost its potable water supply more than a century ago by over-pumping, causing the water table below to be hit by saltwater intrusion, and also pollution.
So, Brooklyn needed to get its potable water from reservoirs that were built upstate.
There has been talk in recent years of Nassau County buying water from those New York City-owned reservoirs. But they are near capacity, says Turner, so the city “has not been welcoming Nassau County with open arms.”
Under the amendment to the Suffolk County Water Quality Restoration Act as passed on Election Day 2024, money from the sales tax collected here could—because of the “13 magic words”—be used to implement the Long Island Water Reuse Road Map & Action Plan.
This plan was created by Seatuck working with the Greentree Foundation, Cameron Engineering & Associates, and a Water Reuse Technical Working Group of 28 members.
It called for treated wastewater to be used for a variety of purposes, notably on golf courses, but also sod farms, lawns and fields at educational and commercial sites.
The plan lists locations throughout Long Island that could be used for water reuse.
Where do things stand now?
Turner says that very promising should be the results of a feasibility study that Suffolk County Executive Ed Romaine has had the county’s Department of Public Works make on routing the effluent from the Bergen Point plant to the adjacent Santapogue Creek County Golf Course—like what happened in Riverhead. (Until this year it was called the Bergen Point County Golf Course.)
Another project that Turner and others, including Suffolk County Legislator Steve Englebright of East Setauket, have been advocating is to have effluent from the waste treatment plant at Stony Brook University routed to St. George’s Golf Course in Setauket.
Meanwhile, although a multi-billion dollar New York State Clean Water, Clean Air, and Green Jobs Environmental Bond Act was approved by voters statewide in 2022, the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation has not been “forthcoming” in having some of the funds utilized for water reuse, says Turner.
Requests to the state to loosen what would be a fraction of the billions of dollars for water reuse projects have “fallen on deaf ears.”
The Long Island Water Reuse Road Map & Action Plan says:
"The benefits of water reuse have long been recognized in other parts of the world."
And in the United States, “approximately 2.6 billion gallons of water is reused daily.”
But in New York State, “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, which in 2016 started to “redirect highly treated wastewater, as much as 260,000 gallons a day” from the Riverhead Sewage Treatment Plant to “irrigate the nearby Indian Island County Golf Course” instead of, as had been the practice, dumping wastewater into Flanders Bay.
“Reusing water, for some other valuable purpose, provides numerous benefits,” says the Long Island Water Reuse Road Map & Action Plan.
“These include protecting public wells from saltwater intrusion.”
The plan then calls for highly treated wastewater to be used for a variety of purposes to offset the lowering of the water table and also deal with saltwater intrusion.