Posted on December 19, 2024
Greenport’s Stirling Harbor business community is petitioning the village to conduct a maintenance dredge at the mouth of the harbor, which the marina operators say has grown dangerously narrow and needs immediate attention.
“Historically, the harbor entrance — according to the 1978 county tax map — was about 140 feet wide,” said Sean Gilligan, regional vice president of Safe Harbor Stirling, which owns the two largest marinas in the harbor, Greenport Yacht Yard and Stirling Harbor Marina. “We’re at a point where we’re now at 64, 63 feet at low tide, and it continues to grow narrower and narrower.”
The two Safe Harbor marinas consist of a total of about 400 boat slips and nearly 600 boats, with lengths of up to 92 feet, according to Mr. Gilligan — who has spearheaded the effort to get the dredging project off the ground.
Pete Douglass of Douglass Marine said that the harbor entrance, “is getting extremely narrow, which is creating a safety issue, especially for us. We bring a lot of disabled boats in and out of Stirling [Harbor], and it’s starting to get dangerous.”
Commercial fisherman Nate Phillips, whose mother, Mary Bess Phillips, is the village’s deputy mayor, said he’s been, “fighting to get this done for years.”
In an interview last week, Mr. Phillips said the entrance, “started closing in a few years ago, pretty bad, and it progressively got worse. Safe Harbor did something to dig it back a few years ago. That helped for a year or so, but it’s gotten worse.”
Mr. Gilligan said Department of Environmental Conservation regulations prohibit dredging the harbor entrance from Jan. 1 until June, but launching the project at that time of year would interfere with commercial and recreational fishing traffic — meaning the marinas would have to wait until next fall.
Only the village has the authority to dredge the harbor mouth, Mr. Gilligan said. “It’s way too small for the federal government, and the county won’t dredge it because the land is owned by the village,” he said.
Mr. Gilligan said he has a petition with more than 150 signatures as of Dec. 11 to submit to Village Hall, along with a letter urging village officials to take action, and noted that a maintenance dredge would take between one and two days to complete. He said he has spoken to Greenport Mayor Kevin Stuessi about the issue but said, “there doesn’t seem to be any sense that it needs to be addressed.”
He said he’s trying to avoid a repeat of the last dredge four years ago, when Safe Harbor Stirling marinas and one other business owner in the harbor ended up paying for the roughly $25,000 project after the village declined to take action.
“I personally think it’s morally objectionable to ask a business to fund a public works project,” Mr. Gilligan said. “But moral objections aside, I recognize that there’s no political motivation for the village to undertake this thing.”
Mr. Gilligan made the same assertion about a lack of political will prior to bankrolling the 2020 dredge, telling the Suffolk Times then that under former mayor George Hubbard, “the political will didn’t exist to get it to happen.”
Reached on Friday, Mr. Stuessi said it would be, “premature” to say whether the village would conduct or help fund a dredge of the harbor entrance, pending a planned presentation about the issue at a Village Board work session next Thursday, Dec. 19.
Asked who was giving the presentation, Mr. Stuessi initially said he didn’t yet know, before saying that trustee Patrick Brennan from the Waterfront Advisory Committee would do it. In a separate interview, Mr. Brennan told The Suffolk Times that he feels the village should take responsibility for dredging the harbor entrance. Mr. Stuessi said he is trying to get someone from the New York DEC to join the meeting, but hasn’t heard back from the agency.
Complicating the issue is the fact that two village board members own businesses in the harbor — Mr. Brennan owns Wooden Boatworks on Sterling Street, and Deputy Mayor Phillips and her husband, Mark Phillips, own Alice’s Market on Atlantic Avenue.
Mr. Brennan agreed that the mouth of the harbor is narrowing and said bi-annual dredges would be good. “Its width is decreasing, so it makes it more challenging for two-way traffic, especially in the summer, so I think it probably needs to be done in a two-year cycle.”
Speaking for himself, not the board, Mr. Brennan said he felt, “it’s fine for Safe Harbor and others to petition the village to try and get action on that.”
He suggested a cost-sharing partnership, but acknowledged that even that could be a challenge. “I appreciate that [marina owners] did it in the past, and I think this may be a case where a kind of a public-private partnership on this could help. I do feel like it’s the village’s responsibility, though. The village maintains a mooring field in there. It’s a community asset, as far as I’m concerned.”
But Mr. Brennan does have broader concerns about how the project is ultimately paid for and by whom. “The concern I have about one private entity largely funding the work is that I want to avoid any appearance of impropriety, where it could suggest a quid pro quo,” he said. “Absolutely, it could be viewed as a donation to the village, right? If somebody substantially funds this, is there an expectation of something in return? So we need to be careful about that.
“I think maybe a better way to handle this would be to do some sort of assessment of all the commercial operators that are in the basin, and ask them to participate on some kind of pro-rata basis.”
Mr. Brennan said he doesn’t know whether or not the mayor is in favor of funding the project. “The village obviously has a lot of things that it needs to maintain and repair, and there’s limited resources, but I’m not going to speak for the mayor. I don’t know … whether the mayor is inclined to do it or not.”
Ms. Phillips, who noted she was speaking as a family business owner, not a village official, said in an interview on Friday that, “there isn’t a need for a presentation, other than to discuss the economic engine of Stirling Harbor coming before the village board to work out a way to meet the deadline of Dec. 31 to do some type of opening of the [harbor] mouth.”
She said the overall harbor mouth narrowing issue requires a long-term strategy and a short-term solution. For the former, the village’s maintenance permit for the harbor doesn’t expire until 2029, giving the community time to, “create a better situation where [the harbor entrance] does not fill as fast as it has been.
“The short-term issue, which is what is being presented by the businesses in this economic engine section of the Village of Greenport, is that we have to do something before Dec. 31 because we will not be able to do anything till next October,” Ms. Phillips said.
Mr. Gilligan said that he understood how his campaign could be viewed unfavorably by skeptics, given that his business would directly benefit from the project. He said he didn’t want anyone to think he was being “sneaky” about seeking village funding to dredge the harbor. Mr. Gilligan noted that Safe Harbor Stirling has permit applications pending before multiple government agencies — including the village — for a dock reconfiguration that would allow larger vessels to access the harbor.
“But those permit applications and those drawings predate our current concern over the harbor dredging,” he said. “That is, we’re not looking for the harbor to be dredged out so that we can have better business. We’re simply wanting to maintain the harbor entrance.”
He said he has spoken with the other businesses and residential interests in the harbor and that they are willing to contribute to the cost of a maintenance dredge if necessary.
Still, he contended, the harbor itself is village property. “My parallel has been: if the street in front of Claudio’s restaurant was crumbling, it would get paved.”
While it’s not clear where the sand buildup at the harbor entrance is coming from, Mr. Phillips, a veteran fisherman, has a theory. He said a tuna fisherman who ties up in Gull Pond thinks it must have come from there because, “the beach at Gull Pond has shrunk tremendously over the past three years.”
Mr. Phillips also said that in years past, members of the harbor business community likely would have completed the dredging project themselves. “I’m kind of old school. I said, ‘Well, we should just go down there with a bunch of guys with shovels and dig it out, right?,’” Mr. Phillips said. “But, unfortunately, if we do that, I think somebody’s going to get arrested.”
