While Newsday’s support for increasing Suffolk’s sales tax for more sewers is well intentioned, it is based upon a falsehood that more sewers lead to cleaner drinking water. https://paper.newsday.com/html5/reader/production/default.aspx?edid=3c45f57d-9b88-43bb-9063-e04ed5567961&pnum=28
If that were true, Nassau, which is 90% sewered, would have cleaner water than Suffolk. So why did Nassau just conduct a study to look into tapping cleaner water from New York City‘s reservoirs?
Sewers require a tremendous siphoning of groundwater to treat the sewage and thereafter dump the water into the ocean. This failure to replenish the groundwater supply leads to gaps, allowing salt intrusion and causes nitrates on the surface to be drawn down quickly into the aquifer.
If sewers cleansed our waterways, we would have more abundant shellfish harvests near sewered areas. However, shellfishing is nearly dead in Nassau, except for Oyster Bay, which is not sewered.
Some sewers are needed in Suffolk in areas where we have high water tables or want higher density for workforce housing or industrial complexes.
But we should not be raising our sales tax to do so. Suffolk has hundreds of millions of dollars in Covid reserves that could be used for this.
The present quarter-penny sales tax could be reconfigured to help fund sewers.The county mischievously included a 30-year extension to this program without any debate.
Slow down.
Vote against this proposal. Create a plan that targets where sewers are and aren’t needed, uses present reserves, and reconfigure our existing quarter-penny program so we can clean our environment without raising taxes.
Ed Kelly
Center for Cost Effective Government
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