State issues permit for Riverhead’s Manor Lane sand mine

Three years and $40,000 later, the Riverhead Highway Department is removing sand again from its site on Manor Lane in Jamesport.

“I finally got my permit,” Highway Superintendent George Woodson said Friday. The town can remove 1,000 tons of sand per year from the 20-acre site, he said.

The town highway department had removed sand from the site for at least 20 years before the State Department of Environmental Conservation issued Riverhead a violation for the activity in 2009, Woodson said.

It was always a backup source for sand needed for town roads during snowstorms, Woodson said. The winter of 2008-2009, the sand being purchased through the county contract was “unusable,” he said. “It was junk,” Woodson said. “It wouldn’t even go through our graders.”

So the newly elected highway superintendent — Woodson, a Democrat and longtime highway department employee, was first elected in 2007, defeating former councilman Ed Densieski in a hotly contested race — began mining sand from the Jamesport site. He thought nothing of it because it was something that had been done for as long as he worked for the highway department.

Woodson was surprised when in the fall of 2009 — as he stood for re-election for the first time, he notes — DEC officers issued the highway department a notice of violation for the activity.

Mining sand requires a permit from the state environmental agency, and Riverhead never had one.

“It was a setup,” Woodson says, not without bitterness. “They show up here in the middle of a campaign. It was just politics.” He realizes there’s no way to prove it, he says, but he blames local political forces for reporting the activity to state regulators.

Woodson won re-election in 2009, despite the illegal mining activity — for which he was roundly criticized by his opponent, Joe Densieski.

The town applied for the mining permit and had to pay the state a $20,000 fine for the illegal mining activity. The costs of obtaining the required permits added another $20,000 expense.

“I could have paved somebody’s road with that money,” Woodson laments.

Supervisor Sean Walter, who was at the top of the Republican ticket in 2009 and defeated incumbent Democrat Phil Cardinale that year, said Woodson is correct in his conclusion about the DEC’s enforcement action.

“It was political,” Walter said today. “He’s right.” Walter said he told “the people who wanted to run with it” at the time, “Don’t do this. It’s not a good thing for the town. And it hasn’t been.”

Walter said “the guy that ran against him and the [Republican] leadership at the time” were pushing to make an issue of it.

“I stayed as far away from it as possible,” Walter said today. “I knew it was going to be a sticky wicket at best.”

The supervisor said he believes the town is better off having obtained the required permit. Having the source of sand to deal with snow is a good thing, he said, and using local sand cuts costs, fuel consumption and air pollution from transporting sand.

Walter and Woodson are often at odds. This morning the supervisor expressed regret about that.

“My disagreements with Gio are not personal. I’m sorry if it sounds that way,” Walter said. “Gio is a good guy and he works very hard for the town.”