Seeking to prod more East Hampton Village residents and business owners to replace conventional septic systems with low-nitrogen ones, the village board made it clear last Thursday that it intends to introduce legislation that would require upgrades when a conventional system fails, upon property transfer, and when a business seeks site plan review of proposed construction.
Because nitrogen from traditional septic systems has been tied to ground and surface water pollution, environmental groups have encouraged municipalities to mandate their replacement. In February 2019, the village enacted a law that requires the installation of low-nitrogen systems for all new residences and for existing ones that expand by 25 percent or increase the number of bedrooms.
Last Thursday, Kevin McDonald and Christopher Clapp of the Nature Conservancy, and Sara Davison, the executive director of the Friends of Georgica Pond Foundation, asked the board to broaden that law. Adding a requirement to replace a failing system would bring the village code in alignment with legislation passed by East Hampton Town, Mr. McDonald noted.
"We don't want to see people replacing a conventional system . . . with something in kind, when there's the ability to do something better," said Mr. Clapp.
The village's existing law does not address commercial properties, and, although the village has proposed constructing a sewage treatment plant to service the commercial core, businesses outside of that area should also be required to upgrade when their conventional systems fail or when they apply for approval for construction from the planning board, Mr. Clapp said.
The requirement to replace a conventional system upon property transfer "doesn't mean that before you sell your house there has to be an upgrade, it means the transfer is a triggering mechanism," Mr. McDonald said. "The upgrade should occur within a certain bit of time, say within a year to 18 months."
"These are three good starting points to see how we could begin to advance these new technologies a little bit more rapidly in the village, so that we can see those improvements within our lifetimes or hopefully even sooner," added Mr. Clapp. The state, Suffolk County, and the town have incentive funds available to defray the cost of installing a new system, he said.
Arthur Graham, a member of the village board, said the board had considered adding a requirement to upgrade a failed system in the 2019 law, but had decided against it because, at the time, receiving a permit from Suffolk County to install a low-nitrogen system took far too long.
"The county now has a new procedure where you can get an emergency permit, the county will send out an engineer that day with a consultant, and you can get a grant expedited and a permit issued in a matter of days," said Mr. McDonald. "Fifty percent of the grants they've made in the last nine months have been toward failures; failures that have accelerated in many cases because of more people being home" as a result of the pandemic.
"I'm in favor of implementing all these ideas," Mayor Jerry Larsen said. "I would like to see this get fast-tracked." The rest of the board agreed.
In addition to providing money for land preservation, the Peconic Bay Region Community Preservation Fund, which receives the proceeds of a 2-percent real estate transfer tax imposed by the five East End towns, permits 20 percent of the funds to be used annually for water quality improvements. Mr. Larsen said he had recently talked to Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. about increasing that amount.
"The problem is the village generates a lot of the C.P.F. funds, and we don't have a lot of open space to buy [but] at least half of the village is in the watershed." If the percentage were increased, he said, the village would have more money available to finance the construction of a sewage treatment plant and for other water quality initiatives. Mr. Thiele is amenable to making that change, Mr. Larsen said.
Mr. McDonald had also talked to Mr. Thiele and asked him to help the village craft the new legislation to ensure "it's as good as it can be," he said. "Because if we do it right, it's very likely that other villages and towns that have been talking about doing this would copy it."
