East Lyme — Every day, as hundreds of cars whiz over Interstate 95 and through the busy commercial zone between exits 74 and 75, what is arguably the town’s most precious natural resource inches along a southerly path deep beneath the pavement, out of sight and out of mind, until it reaches kitchen faucets and bathroom sinks.

Much of the groundwater that flows through the porous soils that define the aquifer is captured in two town wells near Gorton’s Pond that supply about one-third of the town’s drinking water.

These sandy soils are part of the watershed that also feeds the Pattagansett River — collecting raindrops, snowmelt and roadway spills into flowing underground streams.

“This town needs to wake up to understand where its water comes from,” Mark Christensen, longtime resident and a member of the Conservation of Natural Resources Commission, said last week.

“It comes from underneath the commercial district and its most heavily traveled roads," he said. "East Lyme has a lot of good assets, but far and away its best asset is its drinking water supply. I don’t think East Lyme is doing a good job of protecting it.”

With one of the largest commercial developments in years looming, the town is having to consider potential repercussions to its main aquifer and public drinking water wells as it never has before.

An application from Simon Konover Development and KGI Properties to build a 138,000-square-foot Costco discount store with parking for more than 400 cars — as well as a 12-pump gas station that would be town’s largest — is expected to be submitted to the Zoning Commission this summer.

That will set off a process that, in part, will have to consider that most of the 14.7-acre site near Exit 74 is within the town’s Aquifer Protection Area, which was established by the town in 2012.

“This is the first major development” where the restrictions and requirements of the Aquifer Protection Act will have to be considered, said Bill Mulholland, the town’s zoning enforcement officer.

While most public water systems in the region are supplied by reservoirs rather than wells fed by groundwater, three other local communities — Ledyard, North Stonington and Stonington — also have state-approved Aquifer Protection Areas for small, well-fed water systems.

These, however, are located in rural or residential areas, unlike East Lyme’s heavily developed aquifer.

Corrine Fitting, supervising environmental analyst at the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, said public water systems with wells that serve more than 1,000 people were required under a law passed in 2004 but not implemented until 2012 to map out Aquifer Protection Areas.

The law doesn't protect the entire aquifer but rather "the portion of the aquifer that's feeding East Lyme's well," or the "capture zone," she said.

To create its map, East Lyme hired the engineering firm Macguire Group to conduct soil and hydrogeological tests to determine the sources of the water feeding the public wells.

The so-called pumping tests involved the drilling of numerous test wells and a taking series of measurements of how groundwater levels changed over time when water was withdrawn.

These numbers were then plugged into formulas that modeled what was happening in the aquifer.

Long before that law, however, East Lyme identified its aquifers on zoning maps and established municipal regulations to protect those areas.

The protections specifically prohibited construction of gas stations — notorious for large spills, leaking underground tanks and accumulated drips as people fill their tanks, and the most common single source of groundwater contamination, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Just one gallon of gasoline is enough to contaminate one million gallons of water with toxic chemicals that exceed Environmental Protection Agency standards, according to the Groundwater Protection Council.

The original aquifer protection zone, however, was much larger than the current one, covering the entire aquifer as defined by soil types rather than just the "capture zone" of the wells.

“Aquifer Protection Act is a misnomer,” said Gary Robbins, geology professor in the University of Connecticut's Department of Natural Resources, who teaches groundwater hydrology courses. “It’s a wellhead protection act.”

Towns concerned about their aquifers, he said, shouldn’t rely on the limited requirements of the law, but rather should mandate development in those areas, including additional monitoring systems and filtration systems to capture stormwater and spills.

Development vs. conservation

Kim Czapla, environmental analyst for DEEP, said towns such as East Lyme could have opted to keep their entire aquifers protected under local zoning regulations, along with the smaller wellhead area identified in the state-approved maps.

For several months in 2012, East Lyme did keep the entire aquifer protected.

But in October 2012, Mulholland, the town zoning enforcement officer, sent a memo to the zoning commission asking whether keeping the two areas would create “regulatory confusion.”

In June 2013, the Zoning Commission voted unanimously to eliminate the larger area from zoning, a decision that made it possible, three years later, for the Costco gas station to be located where it previously would not have been allowed.

Preliminary plans show the gas station sits 280 feet east of the smaller Aquifer Protection Area boundary — still atop the sandy soils that define the aquifer, but outside the “capture zone” of the town well.

Engineering tests done for the developer show groundwater flows through the gas station parcel just 5 to 6 feet below the surface. 

The Costco building and parking lot are fully within the Aquifer Protection Area, where the groundwater is found from 5 to 9.5 feet below the surface.

The decision came after a March 12, 2013, letter from Theodore Harris, the attorney representing the Costco developers, to Mulholland.

In it, he urges the town to eliminate the larger aquifer protection zone, arguing that the state regulation “strikes a balance between environmental protection and economic development that the Connecticut General Assembly mandated in the Aquifer Protection Act.”

“While there is apparently no prohibition on a municipality exacting standards higher than that of the model regulations, it would seem to negate the balance sought between protection and economic activity,” Harris wrote.

He added that restrictions imposed if the larger area were kept could be “vulnerable to challenge by affected property owners.”

Also weighing in on the issue were the town’s Planning and Natural Resources commissions, both of which urged their counterparts on the Zoning Commission not to shrink the protected area.

“Although the proposal does potentially stimulate development, it sacrifices conservation,” the Planning Commission said in a June 10, 2013, letter to the Zoning Commission.

Such a move would be “inconsistent with the town’s plan of conservation and development” and short-sighted in considering the town’s future water resources, the letter said.

Town Planner Gary Goeschel made a similar argument in a letter to Mulholland.

Marc Salerno, Zoning Commission chairman in 2012 and 2013, said, "The commission made its decision based on the science and based on the new state requirements."

Neither Matthew Walker, the current commission chairman, nor Harris, who also represented the developers of a 400-unit apartment complex built next door to the Costco site, could be reached for comment.

Selectwoman Rose Ann Hardy, liaison to the Natural Resources Commission, along with several members of that group, believe the larger area should have been retained.

She and Arthur Carlson, commission chairman, said they mistakenly thought at the time that that wasn’t an option.

“I didn’t realize we could have kept the original zone,” Hardy said. “Very clearly, there was more interest in development than in aquifer protection.”

She and others also are critical of the plan for a big-box Costco store and gas station, because it is “far different from the original plan” approved in 2008 for a village-like development of small shops.

Christensen noted that annual reports on the town water supply show contaminants including MTBE, a gasoline additive that was phased out several years ago but persists in the environment, as well as sodium at warning levels for those on restricted diets.

The Costco project, he believes, puts town water at greater risk of contamination from road salt and spills.

He also noted that a recent water-swap agreement, in which New London sends its reservoir water to East Lyme when supplies are low in the summer in exchange for East Lyme sending water the other way in the winter, also could be at risk.

“They’re not going to want our water if it’s contaminated with gasoline,” he said, adding that he fears that it’s only a matter of time before a huge spill occurs on I-95 and reaches the public water supply.

Fellow commission member Penny Heller said the town’s water is only getting a minimum level of protection.

“The town has the responsibility to protect its drinking water resources, and not to have it cost huge amounts of money later on to clean it up when it gets tainted, just for the benefit of private enterprise,” she said.

Next steps

Margaret Miner, executive director of the Connecticut Rivers Alliance, called the Aquifer Protection Act “extremely weak” and said that other towns did opt to keep their own aquifer protections in place when it was enacted.

“It’s odd that East Lyme didn’t do that, since they’re famously water-challenged,” she said. “The law as it is now barely provides for wellhead protection. It’s a matter of serious concern that we are not protecting our high-quality waters.”

Czapla, the DEEP analyst in charge of implementation of the law, conceded that the law was weakened from its original form.

“As this progressed, we had to compromise on many, many issues,” she said.

In essence, she said, the law was pared down to a list of 28 of the most risky activities that would be prohibited in an Aquifer Protection Area.

Those include gas stations, car repair shops and hazardous waste storage facilities. Any of those types of businesses already in aquifer areas could stay as long as they registered with the town and were inspected periodically.

The state wanted additional businesses on the prohibited list, such as beauty salons, golf courses and bus lots, she said, but that did not survive in the final version.

The potential of the Costco project is just one area of risk for the town’s aquifers, said Carlson, the natural resources commission chairman.

“We have a much more massive problem than that one issue,” he said. “We have to have a much broader and deeper discussion about how to minimize the problems. You just can’t tear up all the roads.”

He said the town needs a long-range plan to protect as much open space as possible in the watersheds and aquifers that feed its wells and waterways, and to be proactive about requiring developers to install equipment to catch spills and filter runoff.

The town also needs to advocate for the installation of spill-collection equipment on I-95, which has been proposed as part of widening the highway, he said.

Mulholland said that as the Costco plan is considered, the Zoning Commission will be “very interested” in the design of the gas station to minimize risk of spills and leaks.

He also plans to request detailed information about all the activities that would occur in the store, to make sure, for example, that no road salt or hazardous materials are stored in uncovered areas, and that no auto repair shop would be included.

“I’ll need in writing that they’re not going to do that,” he said.

He noted that the Inland Wetlands Commission, which approved a permit for the project in April, is requiring the developer to install monitoring wells to ensure no contamination from parking lots or other areas reaches the Pattagansett River and other waterways.

Town Utilities Engineer Brad Kargl said he is watching the Costco project carefully as the plan progresses, to ensure town water supplies are as protected as possible.

“I have concerns about the whole development, of course,” he said. “There’s always the potential for contamination, and we have to be fairly vigilant to make sure it doesn’t happen.”

He added that increasing development in the already built-up aquifer area compounds the risks the town already faces.

The wells in the Exit 74 area are two of seven public wells, but they supply too much of the town’s water to lose.

“But looking long-term," he said, "we would probably not want to put another supply well in that area, because of its vulnerability. We’d probably look north of I-95.”

j.benson@theday.com