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A watershed paradox - New York City's water quality protection efforts

American Forests, Wntr, 1998 by Eddie Nickens

AS NEW YORK CITY STRUGGLES TO PROTECT WATER QUALITY AND UPSTATE FORESTLANDS, THE CHOICES ARE CLEAR: EVERYBODY WINS OR EVERYBODY LOSES.

It is a paradox of seemingly impossible proportion: How can New York City, with 8 million people packed onto a sliver of riverfront and barrier island, boast one of the nation's purest municipal water supplies?

The answer lies 125 miles away, in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. Here lies a 1,600-square-mile watershed where palisades fall in forested flanks to meadowed valleys. Storied trout streams fill six mountain lakes that provide New York City with 90 percent of its water supply. Three-quarters of the City's Catskills/Delaware watershed remains forested; family farms and church steeples punctuate what remains. The Catskills landscape is a pastoral ideal and a natural water purification system, and has been ever since Washington Irving penned the tale of the slumbering Rip Van Winkle.

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But not long ago the sleeping issue of the City's water quality was roused by the sharp elbows of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In 1990 the federal government decreed that all public supplies of surface water be filtered for microbial contaminants. For New York City, the nation's sole million-plus municipality that did not already filter its water, that meant the construction of a $4 billion to $6 billion plant to filter the waters that flow from its upstate watershed.

What has happened since then is as improbable and fantastic as turning a South Bronx water tap and getting a clean drink. After years of open warfare, last year the City and some 30 watershed communities signed the New York City Watershed Agreement, a $1.4 billion deal to protect the working landscape of family farms and woodlots that have protected the Catskills/Delaware watershed for decades. (Water from the city's heavily developed Croton watershed will have to be filtered.)

Simply put, the plan frees New York City from filtering water from the watershed, provided it can otherwise meet 66 EPA "filtration avoidance criteria." In return, Catskills communities and landowners - under threat of drastic regulatory control of development and resource use - get a pot of badly needed gold to help pay for programs designed to simultaneously protect water quality and shore up traditional land uses. The City will spend $550 million to improve water quality in dozens of watershed communities, such as upgrading more than 100 aging sewage treatment plants and repairing or replacing failing septic systems. Another $666 million is earmarked for land and conservation easement acquisition and partnership programs. New York state will kick in $53 million to foster partnership projects and aid innovative agriculture and forestry programs designed to protect water quality.

The New York City Watershed Agreement epitomizes a burgeoning new emphasis on rural-urban common-ground agreements for watershed protection and water supply. In California, the historic Delta-Bay Accord of 1994 created Called, a combined effort of state and federal agencies to study water issues in the vast estuary where the delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers meet San Francisco Bay. Since then, rural communities from far northern stretches of the state have worked to become vocal participants in California water supply decisions (see A Watery Issue, Winter/Spring 1997).

Few communities, regardless of their region, are immune from conflict, and in New York, dollars are making the difference. "Money to the kazillions is driving this deal," says Nancy Wolf, a New York City environmentalist instrumental in crafting common ground for the City. That money will raise the typical city water bill by about $35 a year by the year 2002 and pay for programs as diverse as logger training, timber-management workshops for absentee urban forestland owners, and Best Management Practices for dairy farms and woodlots. And that has melded urban and rural perspectives.

"It's always easier to perpetuate an Us versus Them mentality," says Alan White, forest program manager for the Watershed Agricultural Council (WAC), charged with administering the agreement's farming and forestry components. "But this is really a 'we.' It is their watershed, but it is our livelihood."

And lest anyone forget, says Wolf, the land in question deserves protection on its own merits. City dwellers get more than clean water in this deal, she says. They get land protections that will provide outdoor recreation and prevent the kind of development that has despoiled the Croton watershed.

The New York City Watershed Agreement addresses three sets of interests: watershed communities, the Catskills agricultural community, and the forestry industry and forest landowners. Catskill dairy farmers first approached the City about crafting mutually beneficial, nonregulatory watershed protections after the City's 1990 list of proposed restrictions contained rules so stringent the agricultural community feared collapse.

A watershed paradox - New York City's water quality protection efforts

American Forests, Wntr, 1998 by Eddie Nickens

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