Last
Chance
It’s
been nearly ten years since our Watershed communities signed
the Memorandum of Agreement with the City, which allowed nine
million downstate taxpayers to avoid the staggering cost of
filtering their drinking water. When the MOA was signed, it
created a ten-year period in which the US Environmental Protection
Agency would retain final enforcement authority over the terms
of the agreement. That period is coming to an end; this is
the last year in which EPA will retain authority to tell the
City what it does or doesn’t have to do, to live up
to its obligations under the MOA. By next year, that authority
will pass to the New York State Department of Health. Since
we expect the next commissioner of that department to be appointed
by Eliot Spitzer, we are not concerned about a downshift in
enforcement, quite the contrary in fact. But before that happens,
the Watershed communities need a very specific going-away
present from EPA. Call it a Prime Directive perhaps, but what
we need is an unequivocal instruction from the Feds to the
City, compelling them under penalty for failure, to allocate
whatever funds are required to maintain the quality of the
water.
The City has never been obligated to do that and without an
enforceable directive to that effect, we certainly don’t
believe they will in the future. They didn’t do it five
years ago when the FAD was first renewed. And because EPA
hasn’t insisted on it, DEP has dragged its feet on funding
programs they know full well the watershed desperately needs.
The result has been that for nearly ten years we’ve
been limping along with seriously inadequate funding for critical
water-quality programs. There are three glaring areas of funding
inadequacy; wastewater treatment, septic remediation, and
streambank stabilization. All three directly impact water
quality in City faucets, none have been properly funded either
in the original MOA or under the first FAD renewal five years
ago. Together, the dollars required represent a completely
insignificant amount of money for DEP.
The case studies for this failure are the wastewater treatment
plants proposed for Phoenicia and Boiceville. Both now face
identical problems in that DEP refuses to pick up the full
operating and maintenance costs for commercial hookups. People
in both hamlets need and want these plants but believe our
small local business owners shouldn’t be personally
asked to subsidize DEP’s obligation to insure that human
waste doesn’t enter its drinking water supply. And the
agency’s response has been if we don’t like the
deal, they’ll just build the plants for some other communities
instead and let our effluent wash into the Ashokan reservoir.
All we can say about that position is that DEP’s been
very lucky nobody around here’s proposed a live, televised
“crap-in day”, to bring the matter to the public
and City government’s attention.
The funding of wastewater treatment is one of a number of
issues that needs to be resolved in the coming months, and
this FAD renewal process is our last chance to get the City
to commit to what’s actually needed here. Any commitments
we haven’t obtained by sometime this fall, we’re
never going to get. And if we don’t get them, it’s
nobody’s fault but our own because our political leadership
in the watershed will have completely failed us. Thus far,
that leadership under the Coalition of Watershed towns has
been all but silent on the key issues like funding wastewater
and septic programs, while fixating on things like hunting
and trapping on city lands and lobbying state government on
behalf of the doomed Belleayre Resort proposal. But judging
from the political temperature of the watershed and elsewhere,
renewal of the City’s FAD next year is a foregone conclusion.
We have no problem with the FAD’s renewal, neither it
now appears, does the Coalition. That was an enormous gesture
of conciliation on their part; whether DEP will respond in
kind by finally moving to solve some of the long-standing
problems here remains to be seen. But let’s step backwards
for a moment to view all this, as it were, from a distance.
This sixteen hundred square mile resource we’re talking
about protecting has a value beyond all monetary value. It
keeps nine million people and our nation’s largest city
alive. At some point in the future, it will probably also
have to support five million more people on Long Island whose
aquifer is essentially polluted beyond reclaim. Elsewhere
and soon enough, people will be fighting wars over access
to water and watersheds. Not in New York State we trust but
still, this is the reality of the decades ahead. The City’s
job is to protect this precious resource and insure its own
survival. But ten years under the MOA has proven the City
is not farsighted enough to voluntarily spend the money it
needs to do that. Some,yes. Enough, no. In general, it’s
responded only to orders from federal courts and federal agencies.
The feds however, are stepping out of the picture and the
state is stepping in. Occasionally, as we’ve seen recently
with the issue of dam safety, the City will respond responsibly
when they see a huge political and public relations nightmare
ahead of them. But they’re not seeing this with the
FAD renewal and so their impetus to solve the problems that
remain is limited. Unless, that is, the EPA requires that
they do that now. Our job in the watershed is to make the
City understand that our self-interest and theirs are served
by the same thing and our futures are bound to each other
by mutual self-interest. That thing that binds our self-interests
is protecting the quality of the water. For us, that translates
directly to protection of our environment, our property values,
and the quality of life here, including the long-term economic
viability of our communities with things like wastewater infrastructure.
The sooner everybody gets it, the more secure the future of
the City and its watershed will both become. BP
