Featured Letter: The facts on Goldsmith Inlet happenings
To the Editor:
Again, your reporter covering the Town Board meeting of May 6 has got all the facts wrong. What the Town Board approved is the expenditure of $31,000 to rewrite the scope (outline) of the Environmental Impact Statement for the proposed project to shorten the Goldsmith Inlet jetty.
Should the town proceed to spend this money, and ultimately accept the outline, the next steps would be to perform all the numerous environmental impact studies required by the outline, and then write a Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS). This DEIS would then be subject to review by numerous governmental agencies as well as a public hearing. A final Environmental Impact Statement would then need to be written and submitted for acceptance and approval by the Town of Southold and other government agencies.
Absent any legal proceedings which would add to the cost and time to complete this process, the process would take a number of years and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, before one stone could be remove from Goldsmith’s jetty.
Also, the Assessment of Jetty Shortening Alternatives performed by Offshore and Coastal Technologies in 2005 did not recommend shortening the jetty, as you reported. It was a computer modeling exercise to estimate what would happen if the jetty was shortened by 1/3 or 1/2.
The results of that exercise were that no shoreline sand accretion would occur at Kenney’s Beach, even after 10 years.
Peter Terranova, PECONIC
