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A Consensual Relationship

            Our editor's got a bumper sticker that reads "We're rural, not stupid" and if there's one guy that needed to get it and really seemed to, it's departing DEP Commissioner Christopher Ward.  Working in a culture where skillful means and the personal qualities needed to make them work don't often show up in the same person, Ward proved they can, reshaping the institutions they touch and redefining the future to include prospects that barely existed before. We're hopeful, concerned but hopeful, that the climate change he brought to the watershed will survive his departure.  When CWT chairman Pat Meehan said we'd come "a long way in a short time" under Ward, that was no faint praise but an honest assessment that the working relationship between the City and the watershed is considerably better than it's been for a very long time.
            Donald Trump once called the deal the art of the possible, and no DEP Commissioner's ever proved that as well as the one we're losing. Hired for his reputation as the City's guy who got the big jobs done ˆ Brooklyn's Metrotech redevelopment project, a new train line to Kennedy Airport, and a huge toll increase for the City's bridges and tunnels to go with its EZ-Pass system, Ward's managerial skills were, from the start, a cut above what we've been used to dealing with. Hardly your typical bureaucrat, he wrote his thesis at Harvard Divinity School about a Baptist minister who preached that salvation comes through effective social reform. No town car and driver for this guy, Ward squeezed himself into his little gas-electric hybrid, and found his way around the watershed better than anyone in his position ever managed or even tried to before him.      
            Ward takes his leave at a time when things are working pretty well for his agency in the Catskills; just last week the federal government found another $15 million a year for the next 7 years to help support the MOA. Of the issues currently in play between the parties, the largest  - and it's far from large in the big picture of things - concerns public access to the City's lands. We believe the city's parcels that aren't contiguous with its reservoirs should be open to the public to exactly the same degree that the state's landholdings are. And we think DEP, which can afford it, should simply pay DEC to hire a few extra forest rangers if necessary and administer those lands accordingly. Under Commissioner Ward, we think something like this might have come to pass, though under his successor, well, who knows. It would be an example of doing what's reasonable instead of what's expected, the kind of thing that was basically Ward's stock-in- trade.  
            A prime case in point is the Ashokan Reservoir, now on the state tax rolls at three times the assessed value it was a few months ago. That didn't happen because George Pataki finally decided to be a good guy after all these years. It happened because Chris Ward understood how ridiculous and unfair that was, reigned in his legal people, and put the word out this needed to be fixed. And so it is fixed now.  And when the dust finally settles on the large parcel issue and the courts eventually rule it doesn't apply here, people, we think, will finally understand: it's the reservoir reval that'll help keep both Onteora's and Olive's school taxes reasonable, not anything our local politicians will have done.
            As for the other significant issue in play, the City's "guidance documents" now under discussion, we believe that CWT's fundamentally right and the City's fundamentally wrong in seeking to alter any of the terms agreed to between the parties under the MOA. We think the city should back off on this and under Ward, we believe it would have, though going forward we're not quite as hopeful.
            Our interests as always, are in protecting the people of our towns and the watershed, and in making sure that funding under the MOA comes up the levels it needs to and generally hasn't even approached yet. The best shot we've got at these things is through the partnership we've forged, which needs protection just as much as the City's water does.  It IS in our clear self-interest to make this partnership and the MOA work. Because the economic strength of our communities, the continuing rise in our property values, and the increasingly precious and obvious difference in the quality of life here versus just about everywhere else each of these things directly reflects the material value of the environmental protection the City's required by the federal courts to enforce. That's the truth, even if doesn't dovetail with some of the rhetoric that keeps surfacing. 
            There's still some in the watershed who just don't GET this concept of a working partnership based on mutual self-interest. Using language better suited to the problems of Iraq or Sudan, they speak of the City as "an occupying force" seeking to "depopulate the Catskills," and characterize the relationship as a series of desperate, life and death conflicts. It isn't that, but it is in functional terms a kind of marriage, and the appropriate response isn't to threaten to file for divorce every time one of DEP's 6,000 employees leaves the toilet seat up. That's basically what we're hearing with increasing volume from Delaware County, and it isn't, in our view, either a solution to the issues in question, or especially helpful in working them out. 
            What has been helpful is open communication, mutual respect, and a recognition that nobody's going anywhere so we better get used to the idea of solving things like grown-ups. That's the relationship we have now, thanks in large measure to the respect the watershed communities have finally been accorded under Ward's stewardship. If we're lucky and Mayor Bloomberg's smart, we'll both get what we need.