Village of East Hills trustees on Wednesday advanced a plan to extend gas lines to any resident who chooses to convert to gas service from oil, voting unanimously to charge National Grid a one-time fee of $50,000 for all road openings rather than a separate fee for each road opening.
“Everybody in East Hills will have an opportunity to participate in this program,” East Hills Mayor Michael Koblenz said. “We have come up with a fee of $50,000 which we think is fair and reasonable, to work with [National Grid] and to show our good faith continuing the project, and encouraging the project.”
Alex Kushnir, government relations manager at National Grid, said the one-time fee would be beneficial to completing the project on time.
“That’s what this bill is going to help do,” Kushnir said. “Now we’ll have [one] fee for the whole entire scope of the work, as opposed to a new permit for every single conversion that’s going to happen.”
The project, which would allow residents to switch to gas service from oil, is set to save residents thousands in heating bills and would have a similar environmental impact of taking 15,000 cars off the road for a year, officials have said.
“Gas has been said to have certain advantages,” Koblenz said when the agreement with National Grid was announced in September. “It has a history of being clean, less expensive, [a] preferred fuel for certain appliances and can even allow generators to run uninterrupted, without being refueled by tanks.”
Village Attorney William Burton said 1,300 homes in the village already have gas available to them. The project, he said, will offer gas to the remaining 1,000 homes in the village.
Previously, homeowners converting to gas who lived more than 100 feet from a gas main were charged extra for the extension of a gas line, officials said.
Kushnir said the project includes adding more than 70,000 feet of main extensions.
Burton said the project is the first of its kind on Long Island.
Resident Richard Brummel raised concerns regarding the proposed cost savings in the current state of low oil prices, as well as environmental concerns of tearing down trees and ripping up green spaces.
But Koblenz said the concerns were unfounded.
“The first 10 feet of every lawn belongs to the village of East Hills,” Koblenz said. “To my knowledge there are no trees in our right of way. They don’t just dig a hole, it has to be approved and supervised.”
Koblenz said the process will be completed by sending underground torpedoes carrying lines and pipes through the ground, as to not fully open up and damage large sections of the ground.
Kushnir said National Grid is able to drill under the tree and avoid the roots.
Work on the design and engineering aspects of the project have begun, Kushnir said, but no ground has been broken and there has been no drilling or laying of pipe.
In September, Koblenz thanked East Hills resident Jana Goldenberg, the former president of the Country Estates neighborhood’s civic association, for her involvement “from the outset, and for being so instrumental in the project.”
Goldenberg, who was not present at the Sept. 3 news conference announcing the project, told Blank Slate Media she spearheaded the gas line project, which was first offered to residents of Country Estates and eventually the rest of the village.
“It is me and my perseverance that got this project done,” she said, noting she had amassed nearly 500 written commitments from East Hills residents for gas service. Goldenberg said she had email correspondence with National Grid and East Hills officials dating back to October 2013.
In an email to Country Estates residents on Sept. 3, Goldenberg wrote she had only been informed of the news conference that morning but was notified the project was approved three days earlier and “to keep this under wraps” until National Grid’s marketing department had the authority to announce it.
The next East Hills board meeting will be Dec. 16.
