A pending overhaul of the state’s stormwater discharge general permit will require so much compliance monitoring and record-keeping by municipalities that town officials say they will have to hire at least an additional engineer to fulfill the new obligations.
The new rules are scheduled to take effect in April, which leaves the towns scrambling to figure out how to comply — both in hiring staff and funding the new positions. The draft 130-plus pages of new rules were published by The State Department of Environmental Conservation in late October — after the local budget-making process was well underway.
“This is just off-the-charts crazy,” Riverhead Supervisor Sean Walter said.
“It’s a classic example of an onerous unfunded mandate,” he said. “And you can’t hire someone right out of college to run a program like this. It’s going to add $100,000 or $125,000 to our budget with benefits, so that means it will increase our taxes almost a half-percent next year,” Walter said.
Southold officials had a similar reaction when they discussed the proposed new requirements at this week’s town board work session.
“Engineering is going to be buried in paper,” Southold town engineer Michael Collins told the board.
The town will have to hire an additional engineer to handle the responsibilities imposed by the new rules, he said. The highway department will also need a new staff member to perform a slew of new duties.
“The amount of paperwork involved with this exceeds the capacity of our existing staff,” Collins said. If the town doesn’t get prepared for this in advance, he said, “I don’t think we’ll ever catch up.”
The new rules, in addition to requiring the town to rewrite its local law and develop a new plan and manuals, require the town to “continually monitor” its own compliance, rather than be audited by the DEC or EPA every three years, as is the current protocol.
“If we don’t follow something, or we miss something, we’ll be documenting our own noncompliance,” Collins said.
Noncompliance — even paperwork violations — could cost the towns steep fines, Collins warned.
He related an incident in Brookhaven where a construction site had different type of mesh barrier than what was called out in the SWPPP permit and the change was not documented. The town was fined $37,500 for its failure to document the change, even though it there was no functional difference, he said.
“I’d go to jail before I’d vote to pay a nickel in fines,” Councilman William Ruland replied.
“It sounds like the DEC putting work on us that they should be doing,” Councilwoman Jill Doherty said.
Walter said the same thing in an interview Tuesday afternoon and suggested the towns consider litigation to block the new rules.
“You never want to do that — sue another government — but unfortunately we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place,” he said.
Officials said they agree with the purpose of the law and regulations — preventing water pollution from storm drains, which often drain into creeks and bays — but they object to the state passing the burden onto the local municipalities without funding to pay for it.
