The Village of East Williston will not hold a referendum on an independent water supply system, a change in course in negotiations with Williston Park that all but ends the villages’ five-year water-service dispute.
East Williston’s Village Board voted 3-2 at a May 23 meeting against putting the $7.5 million proposal to a public vote, with Deputy Mayor Bonnie Parente, Trustee James Iannone and Trustee Anthony Casella in the majority over Mayor David Tanner and Trustee Christopher Siciliano.
Trustees also voted 4-1 to approve the latest iteration of a 25-year water-service agreement with Williston Park pending small changes the Nassau County Department of Health suggested. Tanner was the sole no vote.
Approving the contract gives the village a “clean, new start” without the risk of losing the agreement as a referendum moves forward, Parente said.
“We walked out moving the village forward, and we can now start concentrating on other things for the betterment of the village,” she said.
But Tanner said Iannone’s vote against the referendum broke a commitment he had made to let residents decide the issue, leaving unresolved the question of whether they want their own water system.
“As far as I’m concerned, our residents were robbed of their chance to vote, to voice their opinion, and unfortunately we’ll never know what the outcome would have been,” Tanner said.
The two village boards agreed to the major terms of the agreement at a public negotiation March 3. The Nassau County Department of Health recommended simple changes to legal language on May 16, Tanner said.
Williston Park trustees will discuss the changes and likely vote on the agreement at their next public meeting June 20, Mayor Paul Ehrbar said. The pact could be finalized and signed by the end of June, he said.
“It will be a good thing for both villages to move on,” Ehrbar said.
Siciliano declined to discuss the issue publicly until the agreement is signed.
Under the agreement, East Williston would buy water exclusively from Williston Park for 25 years, with the current rate of $4.33 per thousand gallons locked in until June 2018. Future rate hikes would have to maintain the ratio of East Williston’s rate to Williston Park’s residential rate.
East Williston residents currently pay $5.47 per thousand gallons to cover the village’s maintenance and billing costs.
East Williston will pay Williston Park $100,000 from its water fund up front to settle the two active lawsuits between the villages, Tanner said. East Williston previously agreed to pay the amount over one year into Williston Park’s water fund.
If East Williston wants to dispute a bill, Williston Park would get the full amount and hold the disputed amount in escrow while the villages settle the dispute within 60 days.
Williston Park would continue chlorinating East Williston’s water and provide emergency chlorination to the extent it can without affecting its own water supply. Both villages would continue maintaining their own water infrastructure.
To build an independent water supply system, the village would have borrowed about $7.5 million to install two supply wells and a 100,000-gallon storage tank at Devlin Field.
Accounting for bond payments and maintenance costs, residents would have paid an average of $4.76 per thousand gallons after some water costs are deducted from residents’ taxes, compared with $5.66 per thousand gallons before taxes, engineers said in January.
East Williston trustees had maintained a referendum was the most democratic approach to resolving what Tanner has called “the largest public issue we’ve ever faced as a village.”
It would have asked residents to authorize the village to borrow money for the system, with a vote against doing so being an implicit vote for the agreement with Williston Park. The village is not legally allowed to put contracts to a public vote.
Parente said she would vote against holding a referendum at the March 3 meeting, and Casella made his opposition to a referendum central to his campaign for Village Board that month. He replaced Trustee Robert Vella, who supported the water system and the referendum before deciding to leave office.
Tanner voted against approving the agreement because he felt supporters of the well should have a voice in the board’s decision, he said. Several residents have told him they were disappointed a referendum would not happen, he said.
“We’ve been saying all along that this is too large of a decision for the trustees to make,” Tanner said.
Tanner was the only trustee to vote for a separate resolution to support the well that he put forward, he said.
Parente, Casella and Iannone said they felt it was the board’s responsibility to move forward with the agreement, given the risks and costs of a drawn-out referendum process.
Most residents who came to public meetings in recent months only asked when the agreement would be finalized, Iannone said.
“Everyone who voted for us said, ‘You make those decisions,’” Casella said. “… That’s the whole idea of having trustees.”
Williston Park sent East Williston a letter in March indicating its concern about the referendum and saying it wanted the dispute settled by July, leading trustees to worry Williston Park might pull out of the deal, Iannone said.
There was also concern the state Legislature would not give the required approval to build the water system on park land and that residents of the adjacent Wheatley House condominiums would try to fight it in court, Parente said.
“Basically I could vote for certainty and putting an issue to bed, or complete uncertainty,” Iannone said.
Iannone told Tanner his concerns about holding a referendum the week before the board voted it down, he said.
Iannone always supported the agreement and agreed to hold a referendum to encourage East Williston trustees to re-engage in negotiations with Williston Park after they stalled last summer, he said.
He said March 3 that he supported the idea, but changed his mind when Parente’s opposition to it and Casella’s ascension to the board created a “lack of unanimity” on the issue.
“I was elected, like Mayor Tanner, to listen to the issues that are before our village and use my judgment to do what I feel is best for the village,” Iannone said. “That’s what I was elected to do and that’s what I did.”
Signing the agreement would end the dispute between the neighboring villages after five years, two lawsuits and several heated exchanges, some of which took place in The Williston Times’ opinion pages.
East Williston’s vote comes more than five months after the boards reached a framework for an agreement at a public negotiation on Dec. 17. Officials said then that they expected a pact to be signed by early February.
East Williston first contemplated building its own water system in the 1960s, Tanner said.
While the agreement will give the village some security, it “does not bring closure” to the issue of whether it would be better off with its own system, he said.
“The legacy is that we got the best agreement we would get, could get, short of building our own well, and that will stand for 25 years,” Tanner said.
