PRESENTATION BEFORE NASSAU COUNTY LEGISLATURE
BY ERIC SWENSON, HHPC DIRECTOR
August 17, 2004
PHASE II STORM WATER MANAGEMENT SUMMIT
The Need for Coordinated and Cooperative Planning
and
The Hempstead Harbor Protection Committee’s Compliance Program
Good morning. My name is Eric Swenson and I am the Executive Director of the Hempstead Harbor Protection Committee. For those of you who are not familiar with the Committee, we are an inter-municipal coalition that was formed in 1995 to protect and improve the water quality in Hempstead Harbor. We are comprised of the Towns of North Hempstead and Oyster Bay, the City of Glen Cove, the Villages of Sea Cliff, Roslyn Harbor, Roslyn, Flower Hill and Sands Point and the County of Nassau. The County of Nassau is represented on the committee by representatives of both the Department of Public Works and the Department of Parks.
Since stormwater is the major component of non-point source pollution and since non-point source pollution has been identified as the single-largest water quality threat that our harbor faces today, stormwater control has been a major priority of the Committee.
It is important to remember that our bays and harbors are what makes this area special and what drove many to settle in this area over the centuries. Literally billions of dollars are contributed to our local economy through the, recreation, job opportunities and real estate values that these waterbodies offer. Stormwater is the largest threat to the quality of those waterbodies and its impacts have been ignored for too long. For these reasons, we thank you for holding this hearing today.
The Hempstead Harbor communities have chosen to use an inter-municipal approach to dealing with stormwater. With this presentation, I hope to convince you and others that such inter-municipal efforts in cooperation with community, environmental and other groups are the most efficient and most effective means to achieve water quality improvement in a given watershed.
The best way for me to do this is to show you where we have been and what we have done.
Hempstead Harbor was a very different harbor in the 1980s. There were many instances of beach closures due to high bacteria levels, some due to direct discharge of sewage into the harbor from the former aging Roslyn treatment plant. Several superfund sites were discovered along its shores. Rotting wooden barges lined the lower harbor and sat there for decades before funding and responsibility for their removal could be ironed out. Sea Cliff even resorted to installing “Gunderboom” around its beach in an effort to keep contaminants from interfering with swimmers. Once the most productive oystering harbor in New York, it is now entirely closed to shellfishing. Low oxygen levels led to periodic fish kills. In response to these conditions, a citizen’s group, the Coalition to Save Hempstead Harbor was formed and they have succeeded in keeping a focus on the needs of the harbor.
At the same time, the nine local governments (including the County) which surrounded the harbor, however, continued to address the harbor issues in their communities independently, as most issues have and continue to be. However, as it became increasingly evident that pollutants know no boundaries and that small villages did not have the resources to tackle large harbor issues and the larger Towns and County had so many other issues to deal with that the tough issues where jurisdiction was complicated or unclear tended to be put on the back burner by all involved. Because of this, it became increasingly evident that there was a need for a mechanism to facilitate a more coordinated government approach to these problems.
The idea for a Hempstead Harbor Protection Committee was conceived by Assemblyman Tom DiNapoli and former Sea Cliff Mayor Ted Blackburn in the mid 1990s. In 1995 funds were sought and received from the New York State Department of State to fund a part time director and to hire coastal experts to prepare an in-depth Water Quality Improvement Plan. Each of the nine municipalities signed memoranda of understandings to work cooperatively and to contribute financially on a pro-rata basis.
Long Island’s first watershed-based inter-municipal coalition was thus born. It has been an unqualified success and has spawned the creation of at least one other inter-municipal effort, the Manhasset Bay Protection Committee.
Since its creation, much of the Committee’s work has consisted of public education; public outreach; sediment and erosion control; good housekeeping measures and other tasks that were almost a perfect fit for what the new Phase II regulations require. We were thus fortunate in being able to get a head start on these regulations and in a perfect position to guide our members through these new and otherwise confusing regulations.
As previously stated, our first effort was to prepare a Water Quality Improvement Plan. This plan divided our watershed into 12 sub-watersheds and identified the sources, magnitude and impacts of non-point source pollutants entering the harbor. It then identified remedial and preventative water quality and best management practices and capital improvements that could mitigate or resolve these problems.
Following completion of this plan in 1998, the Committee and each of its municipal members adopted the plan and its implementation began.
One of the plan’s major recommendations was to restore Scudder’s Pond, which receives large amounts of stormwater-laden nutrients and bacteria from area streets and then feeds them directly into the harbor. This Friday, we will open proposals from consultants for the development of a detailed plan and feasibility study for rehabilitating the pond and mitigating future runoff into it.
Under the same grant, we will be educating homeowners whose homes abut the pond on such issues as septic management, over-fertilization and pet waste impacts and also installing storm drain retrofits at 5 sites; conducting sampling and determining the pollutant removal efficiencies for each type of retrofit. It is our hope that our member municipalities will then use these findings and install other storm drain retrofits around the harbor. We are currently working with environmental engineering students from Hofstra University on this project.
The Committee has also completed GIS mapping of all known stormwater outfalls around the harbor and all their known inter-connects and basin and pipe sizes. This information has been placed on the County’s GIS system. Often village storm drains will connect with Town-owned drains and then feed into County drains before entering the harbor. Prior to this, there was no real coordinated effort to map these inter-connections much less place them on a computer database accessible to all.
Similar to the Scudder’s Pond project, we have also recently received a grant to develop a plan to address what is known as Powerhouse Drain. This facility, located at the foot of Glenwood Road in Glenwood Landing, discharges an average of over 1 million gallons of untreated stormwater into the harbor a day. This grant also contains a public education component.
Just last week, after a four year effort, the Committee completed a Harbor Management Plan, which looked at all the competing water usages, jurisdictions and enforcement efforts and developed a long term plan for the use of the harbor and steps needed to achieve these goals. We are only the third inter-municipal group to complete such a plan and the largest such group to do so to date.
We on the Committee believe that the more the public understands about the harbor and its resources and issues, the more active or at least supportive they will be in protecting it. Toward that end, we just recently completed the design of a series of five coastal interpretive signs which ultimately will be placed in public areas around the harbor. These professionally design signs are similar to the ones you see in national parks and zoos that graphically explain to the viewer what he or she is seeing and what is important.
Any water quality improvement effort requires water quality monitoring so that you have a compass and a benchmark to know where you’ve been and where you are heading. Fortunately for us, the Coalition to Save Hempstead Harbor had developed a very extensive and high quality volunteer citizen monitoring program. Rather than re-invent the wheel, the Committee teamed up with the Coalition and made their monitoring program ours. This relationship has been a win-win. The Town of Oyster Bay supplies a boat and staff to take the Coalition volunteers out for weekly sampling. The County and the Town both donate laboratory services to analyze the samples. To augment the program, the Town of Oyster Bay purchased and installed a permanent monitoring probe in the harbor and the University of Connecticut donated a computer, a website and wireless communication equipment to take the continuous readings from this permanent probe and post them in real time on the internet along with other similar stations around Long Island Sound. The Coalition maintains the probe and analyzes the data. We are the only harbor on Long Island to have such a device.
As you may know pet waste is a significant contributor of bacteria in stormwater runoff. Through pet population surveys, we have estimated that there are 10,500 dogs in our watershed and that they produce an astounding 3.94 tons of waste a day. Unless properly disposed of, rainwater can carry this into storm drains and ultimately into the harbor untreated. To address this, next month we will be holding a press conference to announce the kickoff of our pet waste campaign entitled “My Pet Protects Hempstead Harbor”. Through a grant from the EPA / Long Island Sound Study Office, we were able to purchase 6 pet waste stations which we will install around the harbor which will provide pet waste disposal bags and an educational sign. We have also developed a brochure and a slogan – “Protect Hempstead Harbor – Its Your Doody!”.
In the next few months we will also begin the process of bringing all the municipalities together to develop coordinated ordinances for such things as sediment and erosion control, steep slopes and waterways ordinance enforcement.
On the enforcement side, none of the municipalities have the resources to devote full time patrols to the harbor. If our Town, City and Village ordinances are coordinated and allow
for mutual enforcement, we can devise a schedule whereby the two Towns and the City can each take turns patrolling the entire harbor and in effect create full time enforcement.
These are some of the efforts that we have initiated. To date the Committee and its members have invested over $20 million in water quality improvements in the harbor. As a result, water quality is dramatically better than it was in the 1980’s. The rotting barges are gone. The Roslyn sewage treatment plant has closed and is now sending its waste to the County’s Cedar Creek facility. Superfund sites have been and continue to be cleaned up. The Gunderboom is no longer needed. Waterfront zoning has been adopted in some municipalities. Wetlands plantings have restored portions of the shoreline. Wildlife is back and abundant. Harbor trails have been created all along the harbor.
I strongly believe that the sharing of resources allows each of us to achieve more than would be possible otherwise. This inter-municipal cooperation has many other benefits as well.
One significant advantage is that it greatly improves the chances of receiving state and federal grant monies. Granting authorities greatly prefer coordinated approaches to funding several smaller uncoordinated projects.
By pooling resources, municipalities can also afford to hire a part or full time person to coordinate these efforts. From personal experience, I can tell you that a lot of what our Committee does would not be possible without a paid director. There is just too much to do to expect it to be done by municipal employees in addition to their other duties.
Coordination also saves time and effort and often results in better outcomes. Putting people together from different perspectives often causes you to look at things a little differently than you ordinarily would. More ideas are expressed. Someone is the group is more likely to have the experience or resources that you are looking for. As a result, solutions tend to be more creative.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, projects become more affordable. By sharing costs and in-kind services, we are in a better position to receive grants for projects that we individually could not afford otherwise.
While the harbor has really begun to bounce back, we have only really just begun. Many of the recommendations contained in the Water Quality Improvement Plan involve long range and capital-intensive projects. The goals and steps are there. The inter-municipal framework and cooperation that is needed exists and is working well. To achieve all that is envisioned for the harbor requires continued focus and support by all parties including the Nassau County Legislature. The fact that you are holding this summit today is an excellent sign that we are all on the same page.