4/28/07 - Delaware Board Issues Demands
By Patricia Breakey. Delhi News Bureau

DELHI _ The Delaware County Board of Supervisors on Wednesday demanded the Environmental Protection Agency limit New York City’s Filtration Avoidance Determination to five years.

Middletown Supervisor Len Utter said there was a lot of discussion about the shock of the EPS’s proposed 10-year FAD. The board also made five other demands:

1) Incorporate into the FAD those comments made by municipalities within the watershed with respect to those municipalities.

2) Hold hearings on flooding within the watershed and adjoining areas.

3) Require New York City to open up its lands within the watershed for recreational purposes on par with the lands owned by New York state, except for land that should be protected for legitimate security/public- health concerns.

4) Require New York City to create voids within its reservoirs to take into account rain and melting snow.

5) Require New York City to fund the Coalition of Watershed Towns in an amount adequate to establish an ombudsmen program by the Coalition to advocate for municipal needs.

Last week, state Sens. John Bonacic, R-Mount Hope, and James Seward, R-Milford, and Assemblymen Clifford Crouch, R-Guilford, and Peter Lopez, R-Schoharie, blasted the EPA’s proposed 10-year FAD.  "The EPA, whether they know it or not, is giving the city of New York a 10-year license to be a bully to the people of the Catskills," the legislators said in a media release.

"The legislators acknowledge that under current DEP Commissioner Emily Lloyd, the DEP has been more responsive than in the past to local demands, but the DEP has a long way to go before they are true partners in the watershed."

The legislators mailed resolutions to all watershed municipalities asking them to indicate their opposition to a 10-year FAD.

"The EPA has to understand this is a two-way partnership _ the water flows from our region to the city," the legislators said in the release.

"The EPA has to learn that the upstate communities need to be willing partners in the FAD, not indentured servants for the next decade.

A 10-year FAD is outrageous, and we call upon our local congressional delegation and two United States senators to vigorously oppose this and introduce legislation to limit any FAD to five years at the most," they wrote.