Sand Wars: Has the DEC Stacked the Deck to Protect Sand Mines?

This article was completed in partnership with the Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism

Nanci LaGarenne has spent years battling her East Hampton neighbor, with no end in sight.

It’s a dispute that has sparked lawsuits, contentious town meetings, drone surveillance and intervention by lawmakers. Even now, LaGarenne, who’s lived and raised a family on the same affordable housing property that she won in a lottery over three decades ago, is regularly reminded of the source of the controversy — from the kitchen wall vibrations to the industrial trucks racing down the street.

The issues began when her neighbor asked to dig. The only problem: LaGarenne’s neighbor is an industrial sand mine, named Sand Highway. The request: excavate over 100 feet lower into the groundwater supply and scoop up the valuable construction resource from the newly created lakebed.

The bitter feud that ensued pits LaGarenne, local residents, environmentalists and the Town of East Hampton against the mine’s owner, Patrick Bistrian Jr., and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, the agency with sole oversight over mine permitting and regulation in the state.

Despite water quality and other environmental concerns expressed repeatedly by the town and other local authorities, the DEC greenlit the project, with a promise that all concerns had been addressed and the agency would keep a watchful eye over the site. It’s a decision that still irks LaGarenne as the legal fight to dig deeper works its way through state court.

“The DEC couldn’t really give a damn about this,” said LaGarenne, an author and former Brooklyn special education teacher. “They just want to stamp their permits, keep their jobs, and who are we to say anything?”

Bistrian declined to comment through an attorney.

But a nine-month investigation of the DEC’s oversight history and decision-making in its regulation of Long Island sand mines reveals a troubling pattern that extends well-beyond Sand Highway; the agency often appears unable to equally balance environmental protection and economic promotion as mandated by state law.

With any potential contamination at sand mining sites posing just one of the many threats to the long-term health of Long Island’s lone aquifer, the source of drinking water for millions, local officials and experts said the agency has not done all it can to mitigate concerns around various sites.

“In this conflict, the economic interests are winning,” said Sarah Meyland, a Long Island groundwater consultant who has served in numerous state and local policymaking roles over the last four decades, often working directly with the DEC.

Since 2019 alone, the DEC said that it has levied over $2.9 million in fines against both the 21 permitted sand mines in Suffolk County and “unauthorized” mining sites across Long Island. The DEC declined multiple requests to make officials available for interviews for this story.

“DEC oversight of mining operations includes stringent permit conditions and science-based requirements as well as frequent and comprehensive site inspections and enforcement actions when violations of existing permits are found,” the agency said in a statement. “Protecting Long Island’s sole-source aquifer is a top priority for New York State and DEC continues to rigorously monitor activities at all permitted sand mining facilities on Long Island.”

Yet, according to an analysis of the DEC’s own inspection reports over the last five years, many of the more than 100 issues inspectors flagged at permitted mines persisted across months or even years. Often, verbal warnings and violation notices failed to curb problems, the most severe of which included at least seven mines digging below their allowed depths, the refilling of dug out ground with construction and plastic debris, storing municipal waste around mines and failing to properly monitor groundwater testing wells.

Several reports also detail moments when inspectors were met with pushback, or at worst, defiance when attempting to point out issues at sites.

Many of the inspection report issues, experts said, can pose serious risks if contaminants leach into the ground, making their way deeper into the aquifer system over time. But with no historical data explicitly linking the act of mining to groundwater contamination, the DEC and members of industry largely maintain that public concerns are overblown.

Instead, opponents of reform maintain that the industry continues to serve as a vital intermediary in the local and regional infrastructure landscape, and that construction costs and large truck traffic in the region would balloon without the mines.

Sand mining on Long Island has historically been a necessary and lucrative enterprise, with the sand’s unique binding properties making it the ideal choice for concrete used in construction projects throughout the region. The annual output from the Island’s mines has also consistently helped place New York among the top states producing construction sand.

But that productivity has also come at an apparent cost.

“I am blown away at how much operators get away with,” said Russ Means, minerals program director with the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining, and Safety. Means was among several state mining experts asked to review the findings. “That would not happen in Colorado, it would cost me my job.”

To understand the full scope of sand mining on Long Island, this reporting draws from interviews with over 30 people. That includes local and state officials, members of the industry and its trade groups, environmentalists, town residents, mining officials from other states and federal experts.

HISTORY MEETS CONFLICT 

Just days before Christmas in 2018, frustrations around Sand Highway had boiled over. After months of back and forth between the DEC and East Hampton over approving the mine’s expansion, the East Hampton Town Board, led by then-Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc, penned a letter to former DEC Commissioner Basil Seggos warning that the project would be “an environmental cataclysmic intrusion into the water table.”

The board’s claim was bolstered by the Suffolk County Water Authority, one of the country’s largest groundwater suppliers, warning that the site’s activities could damage the groundwater. State and local lawmakers also pushed back against the project. Retiring state Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. (D-Sag Harbor) was one of them, a staunch environmental advocate who served in the Assembly for 29 years until he declined to seek re-election this fall.

Even Sand Highway’s own water quality assessment, commissioned by Bistrian in early 2018 through the environmental consulting firm P.W. Grosser found examples of contamination, including four metals and a carcinogenic compound all above state water quality standards. The assessment stated that the compound may have resulted from lab error or cross contamination.  

Yet, the DEC never responded to the board’s letter publicly, instead opting to approve the project less than a year later. The town launched a lawsuit regarding the legitimacy of the expansion, and Bistrian has since initiated a countersuit to move forward with the expansion. The cases, which were merged last year, are ongoing in state Supreme Court.

But to various opponents of that expansion, including Thiele, the decision to approve the mine hitting groundwater confirmed his beliefs about the DEC’s overall attitude.

“They have taken the position that their role is to foster the mining industry, and that’s out of balance,” said Thiele. “And I think every piece of evidence that they are presented with, about protecting the environment or protecting local zoning authority, they’ve run roughshod over.”

State mining law makes DEC responsible for both the environmental oversight of sand mines and the “development of an economically sound and stable mining industry.” But Long Island is an outlier due to its sole-source aquifer. Due to this fragility, a carveout in state law gives local governments the final say over approving any new permits.

But much of the land that today’s existing sand mines dig on has been actively mined for decades, which has fostered the tension between the DEC and local towns over how to treat these grandfathered sites, many now in areas zoned for residential use. The choice is between mining for more sand by digging deeper, or reclaiming the site, which means returning the mine to everyday use and closing it.

Complicating matters is that nearly all of the Island’s mines are located over what’s known as Special Groundwater Protection Areas, the main spots where the aquifer’s resources are replenished through precipitation. 

But when it comes to implementing more stringent regulation, the status quo has largely remained as the DEC and members of industry have maintained that there is no definitive data linking the act of mining to contamination.

Though, even when presented with opportunities to examine the full extent of possible contamination or take a more cautious regulatory approach, the agency has often chosen not to.

One example is the DEC’s ongoing groundwater study at Long Island mines, which was announced in late 2020 and is meant to test for contamination from mining in consultation with the state Department of Health. But the study was heavily criticized by lawmakers, environmentalists and locals from the start because of the decision to make participation voluntary.

The DEC initially planned for up to 10 mines to take part in the study, according to early planning presentations. Just four are now doing so.

“What I would have liked to have seen in their study was them do an assessment of all the sand mining facilities, universally, so that there’s no ambiguity with the assessment,” said Ty Fuller, lead hydrologist for the Suffolk County Water Authority.

By not mandating compliance, opponents argue, mine owners with poorer inspection histories can avoid scrutiny while the results from voluntary sites won’t reveal any major contamination.

“My bigger fear is that it will be used as a cudgel to justify the further deregulation of the mines,” Thiele said.

One of the mines that volunteered to take part in the study is Roanoke Sand and Gravel in Middle Island. One of the largest sand mines on Long Island, owner Jim Barker said the mine has routinely sold more than 500,000 tons of sand over the last few years to meet local construction needs. 

In prior decades, Barker said the mine would regularly sell over one million tons of sand per year — enough to fill around 5,000 standard beach volleyball courts. One ton of sand typically costs around $40. 

As part of the groundwater study, participating mines are paying out of their own pockets for the water testing. Barker said he has spent nearly $30,000 per testing cycle, which is scheduled quarterly for the next three years. The first few rounds of sampling results are available on the DEC’s website. 

The Roanoke site has been actively mined on since the 1940s, according to Barker, but Roanoke began operations there in 1984. At the site, which spans 172 acres, scooping devices called dredges are used to dig up sand from a lakebed created after the mine reached groundwater over 20 years ago. 

Driving around the perimeter of the lake, it’s nearly indistinguishable from a natural one. Dozens of ducks glide along its surface, with plenty of room to roam. The lake is so expansive that one has to strain to spot the opposite shoreline across the way. The lake itself is bordered by a dense line of trees dividing it from neighboring properties and local roadways. 

After the sand is dug up from the lakebed, it’s shot through long tubes into towering processing plants where it’s dried and sorted by grain size. The sand is then pushed out once more in small batches, falling into pyramid-like piles that resemble the real sand dunes lying further south at Long Island’s shores. At the base of the sand piles, trucks parade into the lot to pick-up customer orders. 

Stressing the necessary function of sand to fulfill local and regional construction needs, Barker said a few bad actors are largely to blame for damaging the reputation of the industry and raising public skepticism around all legitimate mining operations.

“It would be detrimental to the community to stop it,” Barker said.

In the last number of years, Barker said he has spent millions of dollars to purchase the most eco-conscious equipment possible, including processing plants that run on natural gas and all-electric dredges. He also noted his strong compliance record and the long-running relationships he’s forged with the nearby civic groups to address community concerns over the years, which has been “a model” for the DEC.

“I don’t know what more we can do,” Barker said.

A PATTERN EMERGES

LaGarenne, the neighbor of Sand Highway, has held onto dozens of letters and documents she’s received about the mine over the years, still easily accessible from a bedroom drawer when asked about them. Bringing them to the sunlit living room where an Islanders game plays in the background, the documents lay out a history of frustration with the state’s environmental agency.

One letter written to her in October 2019 came directly from the DEC’s director of mineral resources, Catherine Dickert, whose department oversees mining from Albany.

In the letter, Dickert attempts to dissuade LaGarenne of the concerns around Sand Highway’s impending expansion, noting that “DEC requires robust monitoring and mitigation measures that are designed to protect water quality and prevent adverse water quality impacts.”

What Dickert left out is that just a few miles west in Riverhead, another mine, named CMA, was applying for an expansion of its own and dealing with many of the same concerns LaGarenne and East Hampton leaders had raised around Sand Highway.

The CMA expansion, which mine owner Steve Mezynieski applied for in 2018, asked the DEC to allow the mine to dig 89 feet into groundwater. The request was vigorously opposed by town of Riverhead officials, who cited environmental concerns and zoning restrictions.

In June 2019, a DEC hydrogeologist even flagged issues with the site’s proposal, describing the language the site had used around protecting groundwater specifically as “misleading and illogical.” The mine, the hydrogeologist concluded, had wrongly stated its capabilities to the DEC since the site merely had the capability to monitor groundwater quality issues rather than protect the aquifer.

This was paired with another environmental consulting firm assessment that various metals, PFAS and, in one instance, the flammable substance chlorobenzene, had been detected in water samples above state standards at the site. Many were attributed to a nearby landfill.

Yet, the DEC cleared the way for the expansion to begin in 2020 by overruling the Riverhead Town Board’s unanimous vote to lead an environmental inspection of the site. The mine’s expansion is now stalled as a lawsuit works its way through state courts.

In the four years since, the CMA site has been flagged for several issues by DEC inspectors. Among them include that the mine dug below its permitted depth in 2022, for which it received a notice of violation. That same year, Mezynieski was told to remove a stockpile of crushed brick, concrete and “a whole cinder block” stockpiled on the mine floor. A year later, inspectors saw some of the same materials again mixed into soil at the bottom of the mine, despite the DEC warnings. These were later removed again.

Mezynieski declined to comment through an attorney.

While experts said the troubling pattern of violators disobeying inspectors presents a clear lack of enforcement strength on the part of the DEC, what’s concerned onlookers even more so is the agency’s decision-making over the last few years toward certain mines.

Chief among them is Sand Land, a mine in Southampton that stirred up the most attention in recent years for violations and was the subject of a 2018 contamination investigation as a result of waste processing at the site.

The investigation, which was conducted by members of the water investigative unit in the Suffolk County Department of Health, showed levels of numerous metals and contaminants, including iron, manganese, thallium, nitrate and ammonia well above state standards. It kicked off a period of intense scrutiny toward the mining industry in the years after.

The DEC defended the detection of metals including iron and manganese at various sites over time, noting that they are naturally occurring throughout the Island. The agency also said “isolated detections” of other substances are not necessarily a cause for concern and can often be attributed to “improper collection” or “miscommunications” between field and lab scientists.

But in 2018, rather than moving the site toward reclamation for future use, the agency carved out a deal with John Tintle, Sand Land’s owner, without public participation to allow the mine to continue digging 40-feet deeper.

Years of lawsuits followed, resulting in a 2023 state Court of Appeals decision ruling that the mine’s existing permit was invalid and that the DEC had to check with Southampton before approving any permits moving forward. Despite this, the mine continued to ship out sand from the site for months after the court’s ruling. In early February 2024, a DEC spokesperson told this reporter that the mine was no longer trucking out sand as a result of its enforcement efforts.

Tintle and his attorney, Greg Brown, did not respond to requests for comment. But the mine has maintained to other outlets that it was removing already stockpiled material, rather than excavating it. Tintle told The New York Times last year that the site still has a long mining future ahead of it.

But the Sand Land ordeal, and the DEC’s approach toward the sand mining industry, has not surprised experts like Ron Paulsen, a hydrologist and retired 30-year veteran of the Suffolk County Department of Health’s water investigations team who led the 2017 investigation of Sand Land.

“I’ve been to meetings with these guys, I sit at the meetings, and I can’t tell the difference between a DEC person and a mining person,” said Paulsen.

Paulsen qualified that he has only noticed this stance by the DEC toward the mining industry specifically. He said the situation when he arrived at Sand Land in 2017 was a “free for all” with nobody — including the DEC — keeping sufficient watch. Ultimately, Paulsen said the DEC’s history of leniency toward the industry at the expense of the environment is putting the aquifer at risk.

“When you come down to it, we should be protecting this resource that we all need,” Paulsen said. “We have to draw a line somewhere. the economy will be fine.”

Looking down into Sand Land today from the surrounding woods, it largely sits abandoned, but one can see the history of digging there with the naked eye. Steep ridges that have been reclaimed with bushes and sporadic trees appear like carved steps moving upwards from the pit. On the mine’s floor, equipment remains dormant alongside piles of sand and a large hole filled with gallons of murky runoff water.

One driving through the surrounding roads would likely never know that such a place exists behind the thick wall of trees, beyond the few “Private Property” signs nailed to them.

REFORM EFFORTS

As part of the firestorm that followed the 2017 Sand Land report, a special grand jury empaneled under then-Suffolk County District Attorney Tim Sini was formed the following year to examine a scheme of illegal waste dumping on Long Island and the sand mining industry as a whole.

In August 2019, the grand jury’s final report was released, which led to a number of indictments for illegal dumping and historic legislation passed by Albany to curb the practice. But when it came to sand mining, the results were quite the opposite.

As a way to protect the health of the aquifer system and prevent further large-scale environmental harm, the report laid out a slew of recommendations to be taken at both the county and state levels in relation to sand mining, almost none of which have been implemented to date.

But what was perhaps the chief recommendation related to the passage of a bill in the State Legislature. The bill, originally proposed by Thiele and former state Sen. Todd Kaminsky, sought to prevent the DEC from issuing sand mining permits to sites where contamination to groundwater exceeded state or federal standards and only in areas that draw their water from a sole-source aquifer.

Yet, despite receiving near unanimous approval by the legislature in July 2020, the bill never became law.

Instead, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo received a flurry of lobbying money from the construction industry and letters opposing the bill from industry trade groups and sand mining company owners. This reporter reviewed over 100 letters sent to the governor, which expressed concern that the bill would disrupt the construction industry and leave the task of regulation to unqualified local governments.

DEC officials continued to discuss the bill for months after its passage, according to the calendars of high-ranking DEC staff members obtained via the Freedom of Information Law. After the DEC eventually provided a veto recommendation to the governor reiterating many of the concerns of the industry, Cuomo issued a veto at the tail end of 2020.

Thiele said that Cuomo’s office never reached out to discuss a potential path forward during the five months between the bill’s passage and veto, and that despite the bipartisan backing of the legislature, he still felt he was fighting an uphill battle. A representative of Cuomo did not respond to a request for comment.

“My sense of it was that the DEC was already predisposed to recommend a veto because of the way they view the mining industry,” Thiele said.

Yet, instead of issuing an outright veto, Cuomo announced the creation of the voluntary groundwater study, placing the DEC in charge of its implementation. The move diverged greatly from how the state had handled the study and treatment of the aquifer system prior.

In 2016 for instance, Cuomo announced the creation of an Island-wide aquifer sustainability study, led jointly by the U.S. Geological Survey and the DEC. The study, which is also ongoing, has at times been funded by fines levied against DEC-regulated sand mines on Long Island, according to a cease and desist letter obtained by this reporter.

The USGS sustainability study largely seeks to model how quickly groundwater is being drained from the Island’s aquifer, and will not track specific contamination sites. Phase 1 of the study’s findings were released in August, which does not cover Suffolk County.

But the aquifer has weathered numerous instances of contamination in the past, raising further concerns about its long-term health that have required major investments. For example, in early 2017, the state announced an investigation into a toxic groundwater plume that was created by an old naval weapons plant. The resulting cleanup has cost the state over $100 million.

But when it comes to mining, there appears to be a different tenor. And as trails of payments from state agencies to various Long Island mines show, ultimately the state also needs the valuable sand from many of the same mines it’s required to oversee.

One instance came in May 2014, when the state office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation paid East Quogue-based East Coast Mines more than $11,000 for “building and grounds supplies.” The payment came less than three months after a fatal employee accident occurred at the same mine, resulting in a federal investigation faulting the owner, Tintle, who also owns Sand Land, for maintaining mine slopes that were too steep.

In the years since, the state has made five more payments to the mine for its sand, including two directly from the DEC, according to state comptroller records. This was all prior to a 2020 cease and desist letter order issued to the mine for digging 273,000 yards of sand outside the mine’s permitted depth, for which Tintle was assessed a $750,000 fine.

The DEC only addressed the three payments made by other agencies when asked, noting that “competitive procurement by another agency has no impact on DEC’s enforcement of applicable regulations.”

In 2021, a second fatal accident occurred at the same mine after Tintle did not “provide adequate site-specific hazard awareness training,” according to federal investigators. The two deaths at East Coast Mines make up just six that have occurred throughout the state’s mines since 2014, according to the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration database. No charges have been brought against the mine for the deaths. At the time of the 2014 incident, East Coast Mines co-owner Carrie Tintle told the Riverhead News-Review that, “it was totally just a freak accident.”

As both locals and industry backers have noted, some problems stemming from the mining industry may circle back to a regional DEC office that is simply under-resourced with too much territory and too many issues to cover at once. This is coupled with monetary restrictions that have resulted in a regional office with too few inspectors, said former DEC deputy commissioner Steven Russo.

“States can’t print money like the federal government, they have to have balanced budgets,” said Russo. “So, who gets cut, DEC employees.”

While the DEC now operates with a budget of more than $1 billion annually, a 2021 State Comptroller report also noted rising concern about the agency’s ability to fulfill its many roles

throughout the state. Inspection reports dating back to 2000 show that the same DEC inspector performed nearly every sand mine inspection on Long Island for almost two decades. A new inspector who remains with the department has largely overseen inspections since 2019.

But to some environmentalists who have remained steeped in the sand mining issue for years, like Bob DeLuca, president of the nonprofit Group for the East End, it comes down to an agency that he said has lost sight of its mandate over time.

“It’s like if you take a train and it leaves the station and it’s one foot off in the first mile, but it keeps going, and by the time you go 1,000 miles, you’re completely away from where you thought you were going.” DeLuca, a former senior environmental analyst with the Suffolk County Department of Health Services, said. “Nobody even remembers anymore when this all started.”

Though across the country, the regulation of sand and gravel mining looks quite different. In interviews, mining regulators from several states stressed that they’ve scarcely seen mine owners defy repeated inspection violations and have rarely, if ever, heard of a mine refusing to comply with court orders.

In Colorado for instance, Means, the minerals program director, said his office’s efforts at compliance include hefty fines, periodically shuffling the investigators inspecting mines to ensure parity and showing a willingness to shut down mines if necessary when environmental concerns arise.

Colorado’s permitting actions are also overseen by a seven-member board, which includes members of industry, government and environmentalists. Other states, including North Carolina, have similar oversight boards in place and maintain transparency around permit updates by keeping a running spreadsheet.

In Wisconsin, the Department of Natural Resources shares many of the permitting responsibilities with local counties. This means the state handles permits revolving around environmental issues at mines (like wastewater), while local governments handle reclamation. Enforcement experts also emphasized the importance of not allowing environmental hazards to pile up over months or years.

“If there are no serious consequences for violations, and particularly for repeat violations, then there’s no incentive not to do it again,” said Walter Mugdan, a former regional administrator with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency who served in enforcement roles with the agency for nearly 50 years.

The DEC maintained that it “does not tolerate” permit violations and takes “immediate and appropriate enforcement actions” when issues arise at mines, which includes several ongoing compliance actions at sites with a history of violations.

WHAT LIES AHEAD

Amidst the stack letters and emails then-Gov. Cuomo received in late 2020 from industry and mining operators imploring him to veto the sand mining bill, a handful encouraged him to sign it into law. One of those came from LaGarenne, who pleaded with Cuomo to prioritize the Island’s groundwater over “big business.”

Four years later, with the Sand Highway dispute still winding its way through the courts, LaGarenne said it’s still “hard to understand” why the state has made the decisions it has around the mining industry. But despite that, she remains hopeful.

“They never expected that we were going to last, and keep coming at them and never give up, so we haven’t,” said LaGarenne.

But to various experts and environmentalists, the window is closing fast to strike the right balance between stronger regulation and support of the industry. Without that, some warn Long Island is sleepwalking toward disaster.

“We don’t have to wait until we’ve already failed,” said Meyland, the local water quality expert who most recently directed the Center for Water Resources Management at the New York Institute of Technology.

In December 2015, Meyland was among a slew of water experts, local government officials, environmentalists, sand mine lawyers and DEC staff who all filed into a small auditorium on Long Island for a State Assembly hearing. The hearing, which lasted over five hours, sought to address the impact of sand mining and illegal dumping on water quality.

“If you look at our practices today, I think we can summarize it easily by saying: A hole in the sand is a terrible thing to waste,” Meyland said at the hearing.

Nearly five years later to the day, the governor issued his veto.