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Banking on Mill River

Residents concerned by slow pace of hurricane project

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Area residents expressed frustration during a recent meeting at East Rockaway Village Hall at the slow pace of planning for a major state project along Mill River to protect homes and businesses if another major hurricane were to strike.

The Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery held the meeting on Dec. 23. It was attended by nearly 20 members of a Citizens Advisory Committee and another 30 residents, and they were updated on the Living with the Bay project.

State officials did not offer plans for the initiative, saying they were “assessing the feasibility of potential improvement projects.”

That concerns Dan Caracciolo, of East Rockaway, a CAC member. “I feel like sometimes we’re spinning our wheels here,” he said, “because we still don’t really know what we’re doing. We’re talking about talking.”

Joe Forgione, of East Rockaway, a co-chairman of the Citizens Advisory Committee, said after the meeting that committee members were frustrated by a lack of information coming out of the GOSR and Tetra Tech, the California-based engineering and consulting company tasked with developing plans for the project.

“Some of the confusion is over the level of involvement we should have in the planning process,” Forgione said. “To date, not much of that information has been shared with us. It’s frustrating, but it’s important to remember our role as an advisory committee is not to plan the projects.”

Living with the Bay falls under the GOSR’s Rebuild by Design initiative. Begun in the wake of Hurricane Sandy four years ago, its goal is to make South Shore communities along Mill River — which runs from Hempstead Lake south to Hewlett Bay, just south of Bay Park — more resistant to future storms, and to improve the quality of life in those areas. The project will encompass parts of Bay Park, East Rockaway, Hempstead, Lynbrook, Malverne, Oceanside and Rockville Centre.

The CAC, which formed last April, comprises representatives from each of the communities in the river’s watershed. They serve in an advisory role in planning and implementing the project. The committee previously met with the GOSR last May and August.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded $125 million to the Living with the Bay project, with which planners hope to transform the Mill River into a corridor that stores and filters water, provides public space and recreational opportunities, and improves habitats along the river, according to the GOSR website.

“We have done watershed management planning in over 80 percent of the watersheds in the continental U.S.,” said Michael Bomar, the project manager and vice president of Tetra Tech, at the meeting. “So we have this experience.”

Tetra Tech is devising a strategy to hold back Mill River to prevent it from overflowing into local communities during big storms. The initiative is now in the first of three planning phases, Bomar said.

After studying the watershed, Tetra Tech engineers are now beginning to look at potential projects in conjunction with a Technical Advisory Committee, which comprises representatives of the villages involved, the Nassau County Department of Public Works and the Town of Hempstead.

In a PowerPoint presentation, Bomar outlined four goals for the Living with the Bay project: To increase community resilience and improve drainage infrastructure; to address the impacts of rising sea levels and the intensity of extreme weather events; to preserve the affected communities’ quality of life during natural disasters and emergency events; and to improve not only the environment and water quality, but also the public’s access to the waterfront.

Laura Munafo, the Living with the Bay program manager, explained that the assessement process to determine which projects are needed is long. “To actually implement projects, you need to know what the issues are and where the water goes,” she said. “Water knows no political boundaries, so we need to make sure, when we’re actually implementing solutions across the Mill River program area, that the solutions are going to work.”

Planning for the initiative is 30 percent done, Bomar said, and some of the parks in the middle of the watershed are in the design phase. HUD gave Tetra Tech a September 2019 deadline to complete the project.

Currently, the plan includes development of a “greenway corridor” that will link communities along Mill River with bike paths and trails, road crossings and access to educational and recreational facilities.

In the northern section of the watershed, the Hempstead Lake dam will be revitalized and ponds will be restored. In the middle section, drainage systems will be improved and underground storm-water storage tanks will be built. In the southern section, there will be coastal restoration work south of the Bay Park Water Reclamation Facility — formerly known as the Bay Park Sewage Treatment Plant — to protect the southern sections of Mill River from being inundated with water. The state parks department has already applied for funding for dam improvements in Hempstead Lake State Park.

Despite the apparently slow pace of planning, Forgione expressed optimism going forward. “Once things begin to take shape,” he said, “we all expect the GOSR to carve out opportunities for our input, and the project manager to create a larger role for the committee.”

The next public meeting on the project is expected to be in February,, and the full-scale master plan, covering more than 10,000 acres of the Mill River watershed, will be rolled out in May or June, according to Bomar.