Williston Park’s Village Board unanimously approved a final water-service agreement with East Williston on Monday, clearing the way for an end to the villages’ five-year dispute.
“It’s a good event for both villages,” Mayor Paul Ehrbar of Williston Park said. “We can both move on with other issues and use our resources elsewhere.”
Ehrbar said his village would send East Williston the agreement, which village trustees negotiated in public, by the end of Tuesday. It will officially go into effect after he and East Williston Mayor David Tanner both sign it, which they may do together, Ehrbar said.
Tanner said he hopes the villages can sign the agreement by the end of this week to avoid scheduling conflicts in early July.
“Essentially, for all practical purposes, it’s done,” Tanner said. “The signing is just a formality at this point.”
Williston Park’s approval follows the East Williston Village Board’s split votes last month to approve the agreement and not to hold a public referendum on a $7.5 million plan for an independent water supply system. The move broke with the village’s pursuit of “parallel paths” to resolving its water issues, a stance it has maintained since 2014.
The vote also comes more than six months after the boards agreed to the agreement’s major terms in December at the first of two public negotiations. The villages expected to have the agreement signed by February, but disputes emerged and were settled at a second negotiation in March. Previous closed-door talks made little progress.
“The whole process, from day one when I started this six years ago until today, took a lot longer than I ever anticipated,” Ehrbar said.
Under the agreement, East Williston would buy water exclusively from Williston Park with the current rate of $4.33 per thousand gallons locked in until June 2018. 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 maintenance and billing costs.
East Williston will pay Williston Park $100,000 up front to settle the active litigation between the villages, Tanner said. 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.
“It’s the best agreement we could have gotten absent our building our own well,” said Tanner, the only East Williston trustee to vote against approving the pact last month.
The villages’ dispute started in 2011, when Williston Park instituted the first of two rate hikes that brought East Williston’s water rate from $2.99 per thousand gallons to $4.33. East Williston sued over both, but a judge ultimately sided with Williston Park. Williston Park then filed its own suit asking East Williston for late payments and interest.
Tanner said discussions of building a well in East Williston date back to the 1960s. “It’s really a 50-year issue,” he said.
Tanner has maintained that a public vote on whether to install two supply wells and a 100,000-gallon storage tank at Devlin Field would have been the “most democratic” path toward a resolution. But his fellow trustees disagreed last month, saying the agreement provided more certainty than a multimillion-dollar project that would have required permission from the state Legislature.
“Time to put that behind us,” Tanner said. “We have an agreement and (are) looking forward to some price stability.”
