Op-Ed: Sewers Can Deplete Ground Water, Lower the Fresh Water Table - And Destroy Long Island's "Sole Source Aquifer"
By Seymour Bonneau
Long Island does not have to choose between clean drinking water and healthy bays. It needs the infrastructure that will protect both.
Excessive sewering - that does not recharge fresh water into the aquifer - can destroy Long Island's fresh water aquifer.
The answer is to balance sewering, cesspools, waste water treatment and purification, and recharge basins to recharge the fresh water table, and allow a mixing of fresh and salt waters in our bays and harbors.
Making that choice intelligently requires confronting an uncomfortable history: the Southwest Sewer District was promoted through alarming claims about groundwater contamination, became entangled in proven construction fraud, and committed the region to exporting freshwater before important environmental consequences had been adequately resolved.
The lesson is not that sewers are inherently wrong, it is that public need, private profit, and official certainty must never be misconstrued into anything less than environmentally responsible development..
Today, Long Island should replace a its long established construction-centered agenda with a restoration agenda: remove contaminants, retain safely recoverable freshwater, sustain streams, and rebuild productive coastal ecosystems. This approach would create jobs across multiple industries including construction of infrastructure and its maintenance.
How an Environmental Concern Became a Construction Mandate
Voters rejected an earlier Southwest Sewer District proposal in 1967 by a ratio of 6 to 1. A second referendum narrowly passed in November 1969. The Government Accountability Office documented that sequence, underscoring that the project never began with overwhelming public agreement.
Between those votes, proponents mounted an aggressive campaign emphasizing the danger of household wastewater entering drinking-water supplies. Suffolk spent County funds for an ad campaign promoting approval of the district. One of the ads featured a woman with a disgusted face looking down at a toilet, the ad described warnings that residents would effectively be drinking from their toilets unless they approved sewers.
The district was also narrowed to just areas of the Towns of Babylon and Islip. The purpose, As was reported by Karl Grossman in his syndicated “Suffolk Closeup” Column titled “The Big Push For Sewers” in 1987, was to cut out the Town of Huntington where opposition to the sewer project was especially strong.
The County's framing of the referendum collapsed several separate questions into one: Was contamination occurring? Where was it occurring? How serious was it? Which treatment and disposal methods offered the greatest net benefit?
A legitimate concern about wastewater did not establish that the proposed district’s boundaries, contracts, costs, and ocean outfall were the only defensible response. Yet the public was encouraged to treat approval of a particular construction program as synonymous with environmental protection.
The distinction matters because overstating a danger can manufacture acceptance of a solution without proving that the solution is appropriately designed or to what extent the danger actually exists.
The EPA Later Qualified the Original Case
In its 1978 report, The Effects of Sewering on Long Island’s Shellfishing Industry, the EPA acknowledged:
“More recent data have shown that the problem of drinking water contamination was somewhat overestimated"
The EPA essentially showed that some of the certainty used to justify sewering exceeded the evidence.
The catalyst for the EPA’s report was a 1974 lawsuit that challenged ocean disposal, water-resource planning, and the adequacy of the EPA’s original environmental review.
The Court required additional examination of shellfishing effects, and the EPA subsequently acknowledged that no further study of those specific effects had been undertaken during the five years following the original environmental impact statement.
The lawsuit ultimately led to greater scrutiny resulting in a House of Representatives Subcommittee hearing at SUNY Farmingdale, an EPA financed 208 study by the USGS, and a Supplemental EPA report about how sewering could negatively impact Long Island’s shellfishing industry.
Financial Incentives Deserve Their Own Accounting
The scandal was not simply a disagreement over science.
Consulting engineer Bowe, Walsh and Associates received approximately $54 million ($220 million today). Its compensation increased if project costs increased, creating an incentive structure in which higher spending could generate higher fees. Newsday later reported that an audit attributed $31 million ($127 million today) of the firm’s billings to fraudulent claims. The audit illustrated the scale of the oversight problem.
Some construction fraud was conclusively proved. Clearview Concrete Products Corporation supplied approximately 97 percent of the project’s concrete pipe under a contract worth roughly $20 million ($82 million in today’s dollars). The federal prosecution established rigged testing, bribery of inspectors, and improper repairs intended to conceal defects. Executives Vincent DeLillo and David Francis, together with the corporation, were convicted of conspiring to defraud the United States. Their convictions were upheld in 1980.
Other outcomes differed. Deputy County Executive Michael Gotthainer and John Flynn, a professional Engineer and the Head of the County’s Department of Environmental Control who essentially served as the County’s original “Sewer Czar”, were indicted in false-filing charges concerning a double billing scam regarding equipment at the County’s Dept. of Environmental Control laboratory.
Flynn had been estranged from his wife and family who lived in Moriches and was living at his girlfriends home in Sayville. He was murdered in the early morning hours on the day he was to be arraigned.
It was said that he was planning to turn states evidence regarding the evolving Southwest Sewer District scandal. He was stabbed to death by his girlfriend, Susan Quinn who after a previous loss in a run for the Suffolk County Legislature as a Democrat, secured a position as Supervisor of the laboratory for the Department of Environmental Control at the time of the killing. The same lab that was connected to the double billing grift.
Gotthainer pled guilty to the false instrument charges but his convictions were reversed on appeal because the documents didn’t fit the determined legal definition of instrument. As a result, his pleading and indictment were dismissed.
In a 1978 New York Times interview, Flynn agreed that Suffolk County had an inherent conflict in it’s role as the ”protector of environments and builder of sewers”.
The enduring concern is how construction and County sewer revenue interests can influence the definition of "public necessity." Independent review, transparent contracts, and enforceable conflict-of-interest rules are environmental safeguards or financial ones.
The Missing Ledger: Freshwater
The Southwest Sewer District also exposed a fundamental accounting problem. Water pumped from Long Island’s aquifer, used in homes and businesses, and discharged offshore no longer replenishes groundwater locally.
The EPA’s shellfishing review recognized the potential consequences: lower groundwater levels, reduced streamflow and subsurface freshwater discharge, and changes in bay salinity. Removing pollutants could therefore come with a separate environmental cost if recoverable freshwater was unnecessarily exported.
Modern policy should not repeat that omission. Nitrogen matters, but so does water volume, timing, location, circulation, and habitat.
The USGS’s contemporary Long Island groundwater framework incorporates precipitation recharge, wastewater return flow, recharge basins, pumping, and discharge to streams and coastal waters. Infrastructure planning should account for the same connected system rather than measuring success solely by properties connected or gallons conveyed to a treatment plant.
What Oyster Bay Can Teach Great South Bay
The largely unsewered Oyster Bay–Cold Spring Harbor complex offers a useful comparison. Its 2009 watershed assessment described it as the cleanest estuary in western Long Island Sound, with valuable shellfish resources, substantial open space, and low-density development. A tributary survey identified the only two Nassau County habitats that support spawning brook trout.
Its value is as a comparison that demands better questions. How much freshwater reaches its streams and harbors? How much is retained within the watershed? What nutrients accompany it? How do those relationships differ from Great South Bay?
A single nitrogen target cannot capture every process that determines whether a bay supports productive shellfisheries. Only effective land and water use policies can protect natural environments.
Clean the Water Without Automatically Exporting It
Long Island already has examples of centralized treatment that returns water to groundwater. Suffolk’s inventory identifies the Selden Sewer District 11 facility as using groundwater discharge. Its significance is the disposal pathway which demonstrates that modular sewage treatment plants are feasible.
For larger facilities, including Bergen Point, advanced purification and recharge deserve an independent feasibility study.
Orange County, California, demonstrates the scale technically achievable. Its Groundwater Replenishment System can purify 130 million gallons daily through advanced treatment before replenishing groundwater. California supplies a working example, that large scale treatment and recharge is not only attainable, but preferable.
Restore Recharge Infrastructure
Wastewater reuse should accompany a systematic assessment of existing recharge basins and additional runoff-capture opportunities. The EPA recognizes enhanced stormwater recharge as a management strategy, subject to appropriate water-quality and site evaluations.
Managed aquifer recharge may also connect water retention with flood management. The Army Corps recognizes underground storage as a potential water-resource and flood-risk tool.
The goal should be restoring beneficial flows where storage and ecological gains are demonstrable.
Fund Functioning Watersheds, Not Just Construction
Potential financing pathways include New York’s Clean Water State Revolving Fund, emerging-contaminant assistance, and green-infrastructure programs. Eligibility and available appropriations must be verified. EPA’s Sole Source Aquifer program provides protective review of federally assisted projects; it is not an automatic construction grant.
Public funding should support pilot projects, independent monitoring, transparent procurement, and measurable outcomes: cleaner groundwater, sustained streamflow, appropriate salinity, reduced flooding, and healthier coastal habitats.
The Southwest Sewer District’s history does not justify rejecting every sewer proposal. It justifies rejecting the presumption that construction itself equals progress or that coastal outfall sewering should be the default for higher density development.
Long Island’s water programs should prove its benefits before being declared as indispensable. We can protect drinking water without treating freshwater as waste—and restore our bays without repeating the financial and environmental shortcuts that helped destabilize them.
The Lasting Lesson
The Southwest Sewer District should not be remembered as a good project spoiled by a few dishonest contractors. Its deeper warning concerns the relationship between necessity, money, and official certainty.
The record supports describing a project sold through fear, burdened by conflicted financial incentives, penetrated by proven fraud, and promoted with environmental claims later disproved by the Federal government’s own review.
Before authorizing further enormous and expensive public policies, residents should demand and be informed of independent evidence of need, transparent alternatives, full freshwater accounting, and enforceable conflict-of-interest rules.
Environmental protection must be demonstrated by results. It cannot be presumed because the people selling a construction project call it necessary.
As former Suffolk Legislator Robert Mrazek said in a New York Times interview in 1978, after the investigation of the House of Representatives subcommittee at SUNY Farmingdale in 1976, the subsequent USGS 208 study and the EPA’s report about the effects of sewering, ”The point is that the fundamental argument that they used to move the voters to approve the district has been proven erroneous. The problem is, how do you stop the momentum of seven years of decision making and make people admit they were wrong.”
The Grossman article proved to be particularly prescient in the following passage, “The intent was clearly to get the (sewer) project started and expand it later….It has since been demonstrated that if western Suffolk is not to be converted into a version of Queens, there was never a need for the Southwest Sewer District project as built.”
This view has been borne out considering recent expansions of the system into Wyandanch, Ronkonkoma, and Legislative approval for further connections within the Town of Huntington and the Hamlets of Oakdale and Great River.
The question today is the same. Are todays decision makers following the science, or the money?
-------------------------------------------------------------
Seymour Bonneau is a Non de Plume for a well-known environmental expert on Long Island's sole source fresh water aquifer - who is concerned about retaliation against him/her for publishing this article.