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