From fish kills in unprecedented numbers to alarmingly high rates of nitrogen in our waterways, many challenges to the health of the Peconic Estuary have evolved into major threats to its survival in the past several decades.
It’s been 15 years since the Peconic Estuary Program – the government program tasked with protecting our local waterbodies – first released its plan to conserve and restore the Peconic Estuary.
And this year, following massive die-offs of bunker fish and terrapin turtles last summer, the Peconic Estuary Program is updating its plan to refocus its efforts on the latest threats to the waterbodies of the Peconic Bay.
“A lot of change has happened in the Estuary in the past 15 years,” said Sarah Schaefer, Peconic Estuary Program program coordinator. “Some of the actions we felt were priorities back in 2001 maybe aren’t as relevant now, so it’s time to step back and reorganize where we’re prioritizing our efforts.”
The Peconic Estuary Program was formed in 1992 as part of a federal effort to restore and preserve significant estuaries throughout the country. Estuaries are waterbodies where freshwater from rivers, like the Peconic River, mixes with saltwater from the ocean.
The Peconic Estuary is one of 28 such waterbodies nationally chosen by the United States Environmental Protection Agency to receive funding for preservation and restoration through its National Estuary Program.
Each estuary program is required to develop a long-term plan, called the Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan (CCMP), to guide the program’s efforts and priorities, based on the needs and challenges of each estuary’s ecosystem.
Made up of local “stakeholders” – local, state and federal governments, as well as local organizations and community members – each estuary program receives funding from all levels of government to implement the actions prioritized in its CCMP.
But, as Schaefer pointed out, a lot has changed since the Peconic Estuary Program released its first plan in 2001.
“In the last CCMP, we focused a lot on brown tide,” Schaefer said. “As time has passed, other harmful algal blooms have become a lot more prevalent than brown tide.”
That includes the “red tide” of the algae Alexandrium that local scientists say killed hundreds of thousands of bunker fish last summer by depleting oxygen levels in the water, leaving none for the fish. Harmful algal blooms are much more common in the Peconic Estuary than they were in the 80s, when brown tide decimated the scallop population in the Peconic Bay and brought the public together to stamp out the threat.
These algal blooms, which have occurred on an almost annual basis in the Peconic Estuary in recent years, are fueled by nitrogen. And nitrogen levels have been increasing in the waterbodies of the Peconic every year, mostly because of outdated residential septic systems that do very little to filter nitrogen out of wastewater.
“We’re going to focus a lot more on nitrogen,” Schaefer said. “That’s the big one.”
The Peconic Estuary Program is currently working on collecting more data to determine the exact sources of the nitrogen, she said. “There hasn’t really been a good model that’s been done recently,” she said. “We want to get the data right before we actually support an action.”
The new CCMP will also focus more on climate change, which has become a much more pressing issue over the past decade than it was in 2001. “Climate change resiliency will definitely be a priority,” Schaefer said. “We’re working on assessing how the plan will change based on sea level rise and other changes that will come about with climate change.”
Currently, the Peconic Estuary Program is in the process of reaching out to local businesses, organizations, community leaders and government entities to get the public’s input on the new plan.
“We want to try to get their input on what’s important to them, what different actions they would like to see moving forward,” Schaefer said.
Part of the public input process includes holding meetings for the general public every quarter. These “citizen advisory committee meetings” are held in different locations throughout the East End to give residents of each town a chance to weigh in.
“When the brown tide blooms were happening in the 80s, this caused the public to come together and try to make a change to address those issues contributing to the brown tide,” Schaefer said. “So the Peconic Estuary Program really started from a community grassroots beginning. It’s really important to go back to that and involve the community in creating this new CCMP.”
The next citizens advisory committee meeting will be held May 18 in Sag Harbor, venue to be determined.
The public input process, Schaefer added, will hopefully make the local community feel invested in the implementation of the plan. “These people use this resource every day,” she said. “Either through their busienss or through recreational uses, everyone is tied to it in this area.”
Anyone interested in contributing their thoughts to the plan can submit a public input survey, available here, to the Peconic Estuary Program.
“The whole process is going to be very public input centered, because it’s really very important to have the people who are actually using the resource to have their hands on the CCMP that will preserve that resource.”
Updating the CCMP will be a three-year process, according to Schaefer. The Peconic Estuary Program hopes to have a plan finalized by 2018.
In the meanwhile, the Peconic Estuary Program will continue rolling out its preservation and outreach programs. The program is planting a rain garden this weekend in the downtown riverfront parking lot (volunteers are still being accepted). They fund a rain barrel initiative for local homes in the watershed, which reimburses qualifying residents for the cost of installing rain barrels, rain gardens and native plant gardens on their property.
The program schedules regular beach clean-ups at local beaches, naturalist hikes around the estuary and paddling events to bring people directly into the ecosystem. It also advocates for efforts to prevent litter from polluting the waters before the litter even gets to the source, such as the county’s proposed plastic bag ban.
This summer, the program will be installing fishing line trash cans at marine access sites along the Peconic Estuary to prevent fishing line from getting in local waterways and threatening the marine wildlife there.
