A group of concerned residents wants to formalize their organization to access grant funds and assist the Town in assessing the health of Menantic Creek and devising strategies to clean it up.
[Note: This post was reformatted to fix a technical error. The Town Attorney also clarified recent changes to vacation rental regulations. Read about that in our post: “Town Attorney clarifies misunderstood change to vacation rental regulations.” ]
At its Tuesday work session, the Town Board heard from Alice Deupree, who recalled as a child playing along Menantic Creek scooping “all kinds of live stuff out of there, but now there’s nothing.”
The group, informally known as the Menantic Creek Keepers, has contacted Kaitlyn Cunningham of the USGS Water Science Center, who gave guidance about a possible citizen science project.
During the work session, the Town Board also clarified the impact of recent changes to rental regulations, briefly discussed options to limit house sizes now that a six-month moratorium is in place, and discussed the Comprehensive Plan Update.
The board also held a brief special meeting to enact resolutions; skip to the bottom of the post for details.
Citizen science project
Deupree told the Town Board the group had already procured equipment to conduct regular automated testing for dissolved oxygen content, salinity, and temperature in Menantic Creek (using her dock as a base).
Under Cunningham’s supervision, the group would assume responsibility for cleaning and re-deploying the equipment and making standardized visual observations to augment the automated data.
The immediate goals are to:
- identify baseline water quality and trends
- increase public awareness of the issues
- work toward viable strategies and solutions to restore the health of the creek
By collecting data now, Deupree says the group will be better able to assess the impact of dredging scheduled for October.
In addition, she said her group met with the Town’s Water Quality Improvement Advisory Board (WQI). It vets applications for grants funded by the 20 percent of Community Preservation Fund revenues set aside annually for water quality projects.
The Menantic Creek Keepers are looking to cover equipment costs. So far, members have put up about $2,900. But that’s sufficient to fund just one of three needed monitoring stations.
The WQI advised Deupree that the group must formalize to qualify for grants; Deupree said they intend to do so, but the process will take some time. In the interim, they hope to work with the Town as a task force along the lines of Fresh Pond Neighbors. That group worked with Town Engineer Joe Finora to find solutions for damage caused largely by nitrates in effluent from aging septic systems.
The Menantic Creek Keepers have been concerned for many years about water quality but were galvanized into action when the Town received data indicating that effluent high in nitrates from aging septics in the Town Center flows toward Menantic Creek.
The Town studied the groundwater flow as part of a plan to centralize wastewater treatment for municipal buildings. The project would collect wastewater from seven municipal buildings and pump it about a mile away for treatment to a new facility on a Town-owned lot on Manwaring Road. That area drains into the Gardiners Creek subwatershed.
An independent firm found the system would reduce nitrates in the effluent to levels far below the state standard, having an immediate beneficial impact on groundwater in the heavily burdened Menantic Creek subwatershed and no significant adverse impact in the Gardiners Creek subwatershed.
At Tuesday’s work session, Town Attorney Stephen F. Kiely said he’d investigate options and make a recommendation for a Town partnership with the Menantic Creek Keepers.
Meantime, Deupree said she’s hosting a meeting for anyone interested in joining the group or assisting with the work; that’s scheduled for Sunday, May 28, at 4 PM at her 16B South Midway Road home.
Large house moratorium
The Town Board also discussed the next steps for regulating house size now that a six-month moratorium on large homes is in place. Shelter Island property owners have a right to build homes of up to 5,999 square feet of living area (SFLA) so long as the proposed structure meets all other building and zoning regulations.
For dwellings of 6,000 SFLA or more, owners must apply to the Town Board for a special permit. But the Town Code is short on specifics to guide decision-making. As a result, while the Town Board imposes additional conditions on larger homes, it hasn’t been especially effective in limiting their size.
Faced with increasingly frequent permit requests for large homes, the Town Board voted to impose the moratorium pending the completion of the Comprehensive Plan Update, expected later this year. The Suffolk County Planning Commission endorsed the request, encouraging the board to keep the hiatus to six months.
Supervisor Gerry Siller says the Town will use the time to decide which strategies to pursue to limit house sizes. Kiely suggested that the Town Board move away from using Town Board-issued special permits and instead require applicants to apply for area variances.
“Let those applicants go before the Zoning Board and make the case that on their particular lot, the benefits to them would outweigh the detriments to the community.”
As Kiely said, area variances are harder to get and less likely to be overruled in court. Rather than going through each suggestion listed by board members, he recommended the Town Board form a subcommittee to study options and make recommendations. He also urged the board to direct the consultants working on the Comprehensive Plan update to focus on the matter sooner rather than later, as any land use changes must be supported in the document.
Councilwoman Meg Larsen, who served on the Planning Board before joining the Town Board, asked for a review of how the Town arrived at the 5,999 SFLA limit. And she volunteered to create a side-by-side comparison to demonstrate the relative effectiveness of retaining special per\mitting with additional guidelines versus switching to reliance on zoning variances.
Comprehensive Plan Update
The Town Board also heard how discussions at Monday’s Comprehensive Plan Advisory Committee meeting bogged down in wrangling over the use of demographic and other data (with side quarrels about the value of the various data sets).
Siller said he was concerned whether CPAC members agreed about materials being sent to the consulting team for revision.
“We don’t have unanimity, but there’s consensus,” said Councilwoman BJ Ianfolla. She’s a Comprehensive Plan Task Force member along with Larsen and Planning Board representative Julia Weisenberg. Larsen agreed, saying, “People have differing points of view and perspectives, which is good because that leads to debate.”
All but three of the 12 chapters have been reviewed and submitted to the consultants. Next, CPAC will complete its rough draft of the “Natural Resources” chapter and then take up “Housing” and “Zoning, Land Use & Open Space.”
The team next meets Friday, June 16, at 6:30 PM. Attend at Town Hall or via Zoom; see details here.
Larsen said the goal is to get the admittedly rough material to the consultants so they can condense, organize and revise the content while creating a workable draft for further public review.
Town Board special meeting
In a special meeting that followed the work session, the board approved a request by The Beach House LLC c/o Adrien Angelvy to operate a launch service on Town property at Crescent Beach through September 10, subject to numerous conditions. (Read them here on the meeting agenda.)
It also approved noise ordinance exemptions for Sylvester Manor’s 10th Annual Farm to Table Benefit on June 24 from 6 to 11 PM, an event for about 350 people with an estimated 150 vehicles.
And it permitted Tom Hashagen and the Shelter Island Recreation Department to organize music on the beach events at Wades Beach on Wednesdays, June 28, July 26, and August 16, from 4:30 to 7:30 PM, for approximately 100 attendees and approximately 30 vehicles, with rain dates on Wednesdays, July 5, and August 2 and 23.
