Planned terminal expansion has neighbors on edge in Northville
Safety. Traffic. The environment.
Residents of the Northville area of Riverhead and beyond have been concerned about all three ever since United Riverhead Terminal Inc. first appeared before the Riverhead Town Board in September with plans to expand its sprawling petroleum storage facility alongside Long Island Sound.
Over the last few months, some have harkened back more than 50 years, to the time when people then living in neighboring Northville Beach fought but failed to stop construction of the massive string of tanks that punctuates the otherwise wooded and rural landscape.
“Not only could the locals not stop the terminal then, the Town Board couldn’t either,” said part-time Northville Beach resident Kathleen McGraw, whose family joined the fight against the tank field in the 1950s. “They unanimously objected to the facility, saying it ‘would create many unpleasant conditions in the entire area.’ The terminal was allowed by the State Board of Land Commissioners.
“That terminal haunts me because had the town had the zoning it has today back in 1955 it wouldn’t be there,” she continued. “Well, now the town has zoning and today’s Town Board can and should stop this expansion.”
For their part, URT representatives point out that gasoline had been stored at the site before, as recently as the 2000s, and they already have the go-ahead from the state Department of Environmental Conservation to convert two of the 20 storage tanks that now store home heating oil on the 286-acre Sound Shore Road property to gas. The company also plans to build two new tanks for ethanol, for which they say they also have DEC approvals. On-site ethanol is needed so it can be blended with gasoline as the fuel is readied for market.
In order to build the ethanol tanks, however, URT also needs a special permit from the Riverhead Town Board. If public opinion were to dictate how Town Board members would vote on that permit, the application would likely be rejected. The file in the town clerk’s office contains more than 20 letters opposing the proposed change, most of them from residents who live near the facility or from civic and environmental organizations. There is also a public hearing scheduled for tonight, Wednesday, which will technically be a continuation of a public hearing that ran long in October.
Check back at riverheadnewsreview.com for live coverage of the hearing.
“The town doesn’t regulate gasoline storage,” Supervisor Sean Walter said this week. “They already have a permit from DEC for that.”
The tank farm was built in 1955 by Northville Industries, which operated it until 1992, when it was sold to Tosco Corporation. Tosco owned it until 2001 and, ever since, it had been owned by Phillips Petroleum, ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66 — all spinoffs or consolidations of the same company.
United Riverhead Terminal, headed by billionaire John Catsimatidis, purchased the property in 2012.
Mr. Catsimatidis is the CEO of the Gristedes supermarket chain and the Red Apple Group real estate firm. He also recently purchased Metro Fuels, which has facilities in Brooklyn and at the Enterprise Park at Calverton. Metro Fuels supplies and delivers various types of fuel, from biodiesel to natural gas and gasoline.
At an Oct. 21 public hearing on the Northville proposal in Town Hall, United Riverhead Terminal general manager Scott Kamm said the proposed change would result in 12 additional trucks per day on local roads, but that in the summer, when heating oil in less in demand, there may be fewer.
The last time gasoline was stored at the tank farm was 2000, Mr. Kamm said, when it was owned by Tosco.
“Over the years the terminal has maintained a great safety record storing and distributing gasoline at the facility by its previous owners,” he said last year. “Although we haven’t stored or distributed gasoline for several years, we were prompted to do so by government officials and emergency services following the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, which caused a gasoline disruption on Long Island.
“The gasoline project will create jobs, support our local contractors and secure the East End of Long Island from another gasoline disruption,” Mr. Kamm said.
Reached this week, Riverhead Town Board members were noncommittal about how they would vote on the special permit, which is necessary because the terminal is considered a pre-existing, non-conforming use under current town zoning.
Mr. Walter said one of the larger issues for him is traffic and how the company expects to get gasoline tankers in and out of the property and across town.
“They are moving a lot of product with 20-wheel trucks up Twomey Avenue and Sound Avenue and I am not really with that,” he said, adding that the town would like to see the trucks stay on Route 58, take County Road 105 to Sound Avenue and approach the facility from Pennys Road, to the west of the tank farm.
He also said the government officials Mr. Kamm referenced as having contacted the company after Sandy included mostly himself and local officials asking if the terminal could take gasoline, which it could not.
“When they came here the last time, they were not prepared,” Councilman George Gabrielsen said of URT’s presentation at the Oct. 21 hearing. “They’ve got to come up with something more professional. They have a lot of proving to do with me, particularly on traffic. They had trucks going up West Lane in Aquebogue. How bizarre is that?”
Mr. Gabrielsen, who operates a farm on Main Road in Jamesport, said large trucks would never be able to navigate the Main Road and West Lane intersection.
Neil Krupnick, president of the Northville Beach Civic Association, which has led the charge against the terminal expansion, said last week that residents have already seen “giant oil trucks” coming and going between the Northville terminal to Metro Fuels’ EPCAL property, using back roads.
“They have giant trucks using Edwards Avenue or Twomey Avenue and then taking Sound Avenue,” he said. “We followed them. We’ve seen them go straight to EPCAL and we’ve seen them on the Long Island Expressway.
“But definitely, the number of trucks from [the Northville site] this winter has been huge and the fact that they are big trucks is disturbing,” Mr. Krupnick said.
Councilman John Dunleavy said he has been behind three large trucks from the terminal on Sound Avenue near Roanoke Avenue, adding that he had not seen trucks there in the past.
“They are coming to and from Metro at EPCAL,” Mr. Dunleavy said.
Despite those claims, Vic Prusinowski, a former Town Board member now serving as a representative for URT, said the company has not increased its truck traffic or expanded its operation.
He also said the company was preparing a formal response to concerns raised by residents over the last six months or so, which would be presented to the Town Board at Wednesdays’ public hearing, which occurred after presstime.
The board will hold that hearing open for written comment for 30 days.
“I’m curious to see how they can mitigate the concerns of the residents,” Councilman Jim Wooten said earlier this week. “They have some real concerns, not only with the volatility up there, which they have to address, but also the whole traffic pattern. Right now, I’m on the fence.”
Mr. Wooten said residents’ concerns will weigh heavily in his decision on the special permit.
“I have only encountered two to three people who have said, ‘What’s the big deal?’ ” said Mr. Krupnick. That’s out of hundreds of emails, petitions, public hearings and comments on news reports, he added.
Bill Toedter, president of the North Fork Environmental Council, which has come out against the plan, said another chief concern is safety, because gasoline is more flammable than fuel oil.
“If someone gets careless with a cigarette, it’s a huge fire hazard,” he said.
Mr. Krupnik also pointed out that the property on which the terminal sits is zoned for residential uses.
“The whole point of the master plan was to ultimately get rid of non-conforming uses as much as possible,” he said. “That’s why EPCAL exists, for industrial uses.”
For Ms. McGraw, the direction of local legislation couldn’t be any clearer.
“This expansion will adversely affect ‘the health, safety, welfare, comfort, convenience and order of the town,’ ” she said, citing the standards of the law. “There should be no expansion of its nonconforming use.”
with Michael White