With $200,000 in new county funding, dream of a paved bike path looping around EPCAL comes closer to reality

Suffolk legislators Monday unanimously approved $200,000 in funding to complete phase two of the EPCAL bike path.

The county funding is intended to help the Town of Riverhead extend the existing paved bike path by 2.4 miles along a town right-of-way along the perimeter of the fenced 2,900-acre former Grumman site in Calverton.

A future third phase of the bike path project would connect the newly completed portion of the path with the existing paved path that circles the site.  As proposed by the town’s alternative transportation committee, the paved path will eventually provide an 8.9 mile loop around the site for use by walkers, runners and bicyclists.

Councilwoman Jodi Giglio, the town board liaison to the town’s alternative transportation committee, which for years has been advocating completion of the bike path, spoke before the legislature Monday in Hauppauge, fielding questions about the project and advocating its completion.

“There’s nothing like it on the East End,” Giglio said.

The councilwoman said Tuesday she’s working with town highway superintendent George Woodson to find a way to use the county funding to actually complete the loop.

“There’s a cleared path between [the end of the existing pavement on the eastern perimeter of the site] and the Navy paved area,” Giglio said in an interview.

“We’re working on getting RCA donated,” Giglio said referring to base material laid down before a surface is paved with asphalt. The highway department would put the RCA in and then the town would hire a contractor to do the paving, she said. “That would allow us to stretch the $200,000 in county funding to get the job done.”

Giglio said the alternative transportation committee will meet Friday to discuss plans going forward.

“I think we can do it,” she said.

County legislators were concerned about the town retaining control over and residents retaining access to the bike path, which will cross over a handful of lots as depicted on the proposed EPCAL subdivision map, as the map is currently configured. The town would have an easement over those lots for the bike path, a concept Supervisor Sean Walter has not supported.

Walter and former councilman George Bartunek, now a member of the alternative transportation committee and a staunch advocate of completing the bike path, had sharp words for each other in a discussion of this issue at the town board’s July 3 work session. At that meeting, Bartunek questioned the logic of the subdivision lots encompassing portions of Line Road.

“I’m not having a conversation with you about the lines on this map,” Walter told Bartunek. “It took a year of my life and $100,000 to get to these lines,” he said. “Line road bisects that lot.”

“No,” Bartunek replied, growing animated. “No. That lot bisects Line Road.” The former councilman said he intended to take the issue up with the planning board and the State Department of Environmental Conservation, which angered the supervisor, who told him, “You’re not authorized to go to the DEC.”

“I don’t work for you, Sean,” Bartunek replied, adding that any conversation he would have with DEC officials would be as a private citizen and not as a representative of the town.

During a town board work session meeting with the business consulting firm Pataki-Cahill earlier this month, Walter seemed to have softened on the issue. He said changes to the subdivision lot lines might be made that will keep the bike path in town ownership — thereby removing the potentially sticky problem of marketing lots in an industrial subdivision that are subject to an easement for a recreational trail.

The county funding resolution conditions funding on the town completing its environmental review as well as entering into an agreement with the county under which Riverhead assumes all responsibility for the construction, maintenance, and repair of the trail.