Suffolk County Legislature sued over Blydenburgh County Park dam project

Six environmental groups filed a lawsuit on Saturday against the Suffolk County Legislature, arguing the lawmakers’ decision in the spring to greenlight the Blydenburgh County Park dam without a thorough environmental review contradicted state law.

The dam project has been a point of controversy since the previous dam partially collapsed in a heavy rainstorm in August 2024. The breach allowed the impounded waters of Stump Pond to rush toward Long Island Sound, draining the basin and leaving 100 acres of mudflats, traversed by a meandering stream, in its place.

From the start, Suffolk County Executive Edward P. Romaine and some local legislators vowed to rebuild the dam and refill the pond. Long Island’s environmental groups argued that the dam’s collapse offered an opportunity to allow a healthier, more natural habitat to establish itself along a newly free-flowing stretch of the Nissequogue River in the Smithtown park. Residents lined up on both sides of the debate, offering impassioned testimony at public meetings.

The coalition that filed the petition, which includes Seatuck Environmental Association, Four Harbors Audubon Society, Save the Sound, Long Island Trout Unlimited, the Open Space Council — all based on Long Island — and American Rivers, a national group, said the legislature failed to properly consider the project's impact when it voted in March to dispense with an extensive environmental impact statement. The legislature’s decision did not follow the law, the petition alleges.

Romaine’s spokesman Michael Martino told Newsday he could not comment on pending litigation. The legislature’s presiding officer, Anthony Piccirillo (R-Holtsville), did not reply to a request for comment on Sunday.

The county planning department’s review of the project, which was presented to the legislature before its vote, argued that a dam would not substantially harm the environment, that it would provide recreational fishing and boating and that a passageway would allow migrating fish to bypass the dam.

The state’s Environmental Quality Review Act requires that if a proposed development or infrastructure project is likely to cause even one substantial harm to the environment, a full environmental assessment must be completed.

The law also specifies that the legislature must consider a project’s possible harm to conditions as they exist at the time, the petition notes. Yet the county’s environmental review and the legislature repeatedly argued that the proposed dam would restore the area to conditions that existed before the dam was breached.

The petition argues this was not the correct baseline for a consideration of the a new dam's environmental impact and that the law’s requirement for a "hard look" at the project’s possible harms had not been fulfilled.

Instead, the petitioners argued, the legislature should have considered the dam’s impact on present conditions at the site, including increased groundwater levels and flooding of nearby properties, blocking the passage of migrating fish, deteriorated water quality, flooding 100 acres of newly established freshwater wetlands, and the plants and wildlife that have proliferated there since the dam collapsed.

The lawyer representing the petitioners could not be reached for comment on Sunday.

In January, an analyst with the state Department of Environmental Conservation outlined the agency’s concerns about the impact of the dam, including damage to freshwater wetlands and endangered Atlantic white cedars, and advised the county that the full impact study was warranted, as Newsday previously reported.

The environmental groups want the legislature’s declaration of no impact to be annulled and a full environmental impact statement prepared.

Last month, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced the state would give the county $8 million toward the dam, although the county has yet to complete the applications for the multiple permits a new and larger dam would require, according to the DEC’s permit database.