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Sewer facility proposed in Stony Brook
Site on Parson Drive was treatment plant
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The former site of a sewage treatment facility on Parson Drive in Stony Brook may become the receiving station for millions of gallons of treated sewage effluent from the Stony Brook University campus.
At a meeting last week at Murphy Junior High School in Stony Brook Legislator Vivian Viloria-Fisher (D-East Setauket) and representatives from the Suffolk County Department of Public Works explained the proposal.
The location of the proposed project is directly behind the shopping center on Route 347 that includes a Burger King restaurant and Chinese market, at the corner of Stony Brook Road. The mostly wooded site would be the location of hundreds of subsurface leaching pools that would recharge 1.6 million gallons per day of fully treated effluent back into the earth.
The former treatment plant and recharge beds at the site were decommissioned in 1989, 11 years after its construction, and the sewage diverted to the then-new treatment plant on the campus of SBU. The treated waste from that plant is now discharged into Port Jefferson
Harbor, but recommendations in the recently completed Long Island Sound Study — enforced by the state Department of Environmental Conservation — would force a portion of that effluent to be discharged elsewhere by 2014 in order to reduce the nitrogen load in the Sound.
According to the DPW presentation June 29, a total of 59 potential sites were identified for the purpose, but only two were ultimately judged as "top ranked," the Parson Drive location and the "P" parking lot on the Stony Brook campus.
Questioning "the matter of fairness," Viloria-Fisher said the university's refusal to consider its site for the recharge is problematic. "We're continuing to explore this," she said this week. According to the DPW presentation, 82 percent of the flow from the sewage treatment plant is contributed by SBU.
DPW Commissioner Gil Anderson described the informational meeting as "just the beginning of the process." Anderson said he is meeting again with the DEC next week to argue for some relief from the study recommendations, since the effluent from the Stony Brook treatment plant is so clean already. He said concern by residents who live nearby the Parson Drive site "is justified" and expressed his intention to meet again with university officials to convince them to reconsider the campus location.
Another controversy arising from the public meeting hosted by Viloria-Fisher was adequate notification to the surrounding residents. The legislator said a list of all the households in the two closest election districts was obtained from the Board of Elections and postcards sent to each address. Her staff later stated a total of 1,128 households were notified. At least one local resident, who requested her name not be published, said she received the notice only four days prior to the meeting and "other neighbors did not" receive the postcard.
"Mea culpa," admitted Viloria-Fisher, in that her staff had not notified The Village Times Herald in order to publish a brief announcing the meeting. This paper learned of the event the following week. Although the legislator said the event was "pretty well attended," the local resident who was there said attendance was poor, considering the topic.
Viloria-Fisher said this week the "consensus was outrage" at the beginning of the meeting, but as the project was further explained by DPW the mood grew calmer. The legislator also promised a second meeting soon, possibly this month, and that the newspaper would be provided advance notice in order to better spread the word.
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