Northport Village’s first grant-funded rain garden comes to Bluff Point Road

The beauty and tranquility of Northport Harbor comes with the responsibility to keep it clean and healthy, and for that reason, outgoing Northport Village Trustee Ian Milligan has been working on a project to install rain gardens in problematic areas that are prone to stormwater runoff throughout the Village.

Last week, Citizens Campaign for the Environment, a 120,000-member organization that works with communities throughout New York State to advance environmental initiatives, announced that they will be providing a grant to fund the Village’s first rain garden along Bluff Point Road.

A rain garden is a depressed area in a landscape that’s used to collect thousands of gallons of rain water from the street, allowing it to soak into the ground instead of channeling into a harbor or waterway. “A rain garden is a nature-based solution to man-made pollution,” said Adrienne Esposito, the executive director at Citizens Campaign who spoke at a press conference last week on the project.

Ms. Esposito described Bluff Point rain garden as a cost-effective and easy way to fight pollution in the harbor, using native plantings for better water absorption to improve water quality. Instead of the flooding and channels of water that send contaminants into the harbor, the area will be reimagined and put to good use as a protective measure, she said.

This first rain garden will be along the Northport Yacht Club parking lot and Bluff Point Road. The garden will absorb one inch of rain, catching the pollution that comes with it, including pesticides, fertilizers and pet waste. There will also be a catch basin system for additional overflow during a very heavy storm.

The project involves a partnership between Citizens Campaign, the Village of Northport and the Northport Yacht Club. Also in attendance at last week’s press conference was Rich Boziwick, former commodore at the yacht club, Assemblyman Keith Brown, Janice Winter from the Women’s Committee, Village Trustees Ian Milligan and Dave Weber, and Nelson & Pope engineer Rusty Schmidt.

Trustee Milligan said at the press conference that he first saw a rain garden in Rhode Island, six years ago. He started to investigate and began constructing plans, along with engineer Rusty Schmidt, for multiple rain gardens in the Village. “It’s been a lot of work, and a lot of planning, and a lot of engineering, and I’m really happy to see that this is the first rain garden that’s going in Northport,” he said. With the grant funds awarded to Northport Village, three more rain gardens will be built this year, in areas including Northport Village Park, First Presbyterian Church on Main Street, and the William Bronson building property on Laurel Avenue. Trustee Milligan hopes that rain gardens will become a regular part of stormwater runoff mitigation, with even more being installed after the first four are completed.