Development in Croton threatens Chelsea’s water

Volume One, Issue 24, March 2 - March 8, 2007

Overdevelopment within the Croton watershed creates trash and runoff problems, infesting the water supply with pollutants such as industrial waste, car exhaust and oil.

By Chris Lombardi

The community room at Penn South’s most northwest building, at 290 Ninth Ave., was only half-full last Thursday, perhaps because of the day’s unrelenting rain. Those present were mostly from the building or those nearby. Some arrived in wheelchairs or walkers, while others came on foot. All brought with them a sense of exasperation as they listened to longtime Chelsea resident David Ferguson tell them why their water didn’t taste the way it used to, and why it was getting more and more expensive.

“People think the water is free,” Ferguson, a poet and playwright, told the Penn South residents. “But water rates went up 9.4 percent last year, and that ends up in your rent.” Likewise, he added, “They think it’s always going to be pure, and right now, it is. But ours is threatened.”

Ferguson, who is also vice president of Croton Watershed Clean Water Coalition (CWCWC), had come with the group’s executive director, Oreon Sandler, to talk about the source of Chelsea’s water, the Croton Watershed, the forests and grasses that run north from Westchester through Putnam County. Far smaller than the Catskil-Delaware watershed to the northwest, the Croton supplies only 10 percent of New York’s water by volume, but it provides 100 percent of Chelsea’s water.

Decisions made 10 years ago, said Sandler and Ferguson, now threaten the watershed’s purity by allowing big-box retail stores and massive subdivisions there, unless New York State and City act soon by purchasing more land in the area to protect it from development.

New legislation coming out of the New York City Council’s Environmental Protection Committee, which would commit the city to buying 75,000 acres of the “Cat-Del” watershed over 10 years, contains only a vague promise to do the same for the Croton “in the future.” Ferguson and Sandler urged local residents to write to their public officials to demand equal treatment for the reservoirs and mountains that feed Chelsea.

The term “watershed” refers to the unspoiled natural setting surrounding the reservoirs and pipes that supply water to homes. The forests and wetlands that supply New York, the Croton and the Catskill-Delaware (also known as the Cat-Del) watersheds, form a natural filter for natural and man-made pathogens, whether bacteria like E.Coli or industrial byproducts like phosphorus. As a result, New York is one of only four cities in the United States that has not been required to filter its water since the federal Safe Drinking Water Act was amended in 1986.

“The city has the best water in the world,” said Sandler at Penn South, “because it maintains heavy forests in the Catskill-Delaware and Croton watersheds.”

But development, be it of shopping malls, box stores, highways or real estate, can block nature’s complex, efficient protections. The other four cities — San Francisco, Boston, Portland and Seattle — have bought up a far larger percentage of the land in their watersheds, said Sandler.

New York, whose watersheds are far larger than those of the other cities, has made a commitment to buy more land in the “Cat-Del,” a million-acre swath across Pennsylvania and down through central New Jersey, but not in the Croton. Instead, in 1997 the state Department of Environmental Conservation’s new watershed plan included building a filtration plant in the Bronx for the Croton Watershed. Ever since that decision, Sandler and Ferguson told the residents, development near the Croton has expanded dramatically, while New York City has all but ignored it.

“The Croton is suffering the death of a thousand cuts,” said Ferguson, who’s been active in Chelsea housing and environmental issues since the early 1960s. In an interview last week at his home on West 22nd Street, Ferguson proudly displayed images of the “stolport” (short-takeoff and landing) airport once proposed for East 23rd Street, something he helped defeat in the 1970s by uniting community opposition. Ferguson’s activism started with housing; his building created one of the first Housing Development Fund Corporations (HDFC).

He first looked into water issues when he wondered wondering why the water bill kept going up.

“Since then,” said Ferguson, “I haven’t had time for anything but water.” The CWCWC he co-founded has 52 constituent groups, from local open-space organizations to churches and housing advocates.

At the Penn South event, residents sat absorbed as Sandler, a retired engineer who once worked at the Environmental Protection Agency, showed them images of the watershed’s streams and rivers “How do you protect the watershed? By leaving it alone.”
They saw what Ferguson calls the “measles map” of the watershed, with new developments in bright red, as well as some photos of nasty trash and runoff from construction in the area.

“As the watershed gets paved over, the water collects all the pollutants — oil, car exhaust — and it gets dumped right into the water supply,” said Sandler. The Bronx filtration plant, on which construction only began last fall, won’t be nearly as effective as the watershed, they said, and has already proved expensive.

New York City’s water rates increased last year by 9.4 percent, and that’s just the beginning, said Ferguson. “That’s an issue that New Yorkers aren’t quite aware of. They just assume that the water comes from the faucet, and that’s it…. But water is a factor when our rents go up. Or we notice the price to do a wash in the laundromat has increased, or the cost of a meal. People talk about oil prices, but water costs are real, and they get passed on to us.”

Penn South residents also looked at images of pristine reservoirs with big-box stores nearby, and a long list of developments with names like Hillcrest Commons, Eagle River and Granite Point. Some of these have been canceled, but not without a fight.

“I feel like a colonist,” said CWCWC secretary Ann Fanizzi, also chair of the Putnam County Coalition to Preserve Open Space. The empire in question, she added, is the big-box stores and other developers. “I don’t blame it on them so much,” she said in a phone interview last week. “It’s the cities and towns, who get taken in as they promise the world.”

A resident of the small town of Southeast, near Yorktown, for the last 19 years, Fanizzi has seen development in her area increase exponentially since 1997. “The first was Home Depot, in Brewster Highlands: 60 acres, 360.000 square feet…. DEP [New York Stat

Department of Environmental Protection] gave a phosphorus offset, too,” she added, “as long as they showed a net reduction in the basin.”

So-called phosphorous offsets are part of increasingly common “pollution credits” that allow development that would otherwise be stymied because of potentially harmful phosphate levels, which tax the roots and fields that help cleanse the water.

But opponents have had some victories as well.

Through long passionate meetings before town boards, the CWCWC has managed to defeat a handful of developments, including Eagle River, a 108-home subdivision in Somers, and Patterson Pavilion, a 418,000 square foot mall in the towns of Kent and Patterson.

In the case of Eagle River, in 2004 the town of Somers instead bought the land slated for development; in the case of the Pavilion, CWCWC worked with the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG), Riverkeeper and the Watershed Inspector General of the New York State Attorney General’s Office against the conversion of nearly 94 wooded acres to 80 acres of buildings and paved parking lots. Eventually, in 2001 the developer, National Realty Development Corporation, let go of its option to buy the land.

However, now the same corporation is proposing “Patterson Crossing,” not far from where the Pavilion would have been built. Fanizzi groans when she mentions it: “You’re talking 90 acres, 439,00 square feet, Costco and Loews…”. Videos of the two days of public hearings show residents in tears, stuffed hearing rooms and weary town representatives.

Fanizzi is heartened, however, by the fact that her hometown voted last fall to pass a $5 million bond issue to buy land in their corner of the watershed. “The town of Southeast will be paying $76 a year for open space,” she said, estimating what the bond will cost each homeowner per year. “We’re willing to do our share, “ she added, but “now, New York City needs to step up.”

Fanizzi was speaking of legislation tagged as the “New York City Water Supply Protection Act” — currently in the hands of the City Council’s Environmental Protection Committee — that would commit the city to buying 75,000 more acres of the Cat-Del watershed per year, and advise the council to create a parallel program for the Croton watershed “in the near future.”

The commitment to further protect the Cat-Del is top priority for the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC), which is advising the city and state on the watershed, especially since 2007 is a “waiver review year,” one of the years the EPA decides if a watershed is still pristine enough not to require filtration. “We’re talking about a million acres of the Cat-Del still unprotected,” said NRDC staff attorney Eric A. Goldstein, co-director of NRDC’s Cities and Green Living program, speaking from the organization’s Chelsea office at 40 West 20th St.

NRDC is actually urging far more of the Cat-Del be purchased, said Goldstein. “We’re pushing a 10-year program of about 150,000 acres,” he said, which is still a relatively modest share of the entire area. While agreeing with the CWCWC that protecting the Croton was important, Goldstein disagreed with their longstanding opposition to the Bronx filtration plant, pointing out that such a plant has been in the works for many years, even before the reservoir system was built in the 1960s.

“Both watersheds are important,” Goldstein said, “but the filtration plant is necessary. And safe,” he said.

Such talk dispirits the CWCWC, despite the Council bill’s language mentioning a future plan for the Croton. Of the total allocated by New York State for land purchases, Ann Fanizzi says, “Cat-Del gets $250 million, $17 million for Croton — what are we going to do with that?” If the little town of Southeast can offer $5 million, she said, the state and the city can do far more.

Asked about the bill, a spokesperson for City Council Speaker Christine Quinn’s office told Chelsea Now that the legislation is on hold, and may in fact be strengthened, in the wake of Mayor Bloomberg’s “Sustainable New York” speech in December, which included the creation of a Sustainability Task Force including NRDC and other environmental groups. Meanwhile, New York’s Water Board will meet on April 6 to discuss the next raise in rates, which could be as high as 9.9 percent, according to the board’s Kevin Kunkel.

Residents of Penn South pledged to write Bloomberg and Quinn, urging them to allocate funds to buy land in the Croton. “Can the state legislature get involved?” one resident asked Ferguson and Sandler. “How about the New York Times?” asked another, noting that the paper’s recent articles on the watershed had also regarded the Croton as a settled issue.

Then the group bundled up and left the community room, shaking off the storm water that had dampened shoes and coats, if not their fighting spirit.