It was announced last year that New York City was preparing to spend $49 million to build a sewage treatment plant and the connections to it in the Shokan hamlet of the Town of Olive. Under the preferred plan, the proposed treatment plant would handle the sewage produced by over 500 properties in a sewer district in Shokan and another 130 or so in a district in Boiceville, whose waste would be pumped almost five miles along Route 28 from Boiceville to Shokan.
Lamont Engineers had determined that alternative would be more cost-effective than the operation and maintenance of separate plants for the two districts. The existing Boiceville plant behind the former garden center will be converted to a pump station capable of forcing Boiceville waste up to Shokan for treatment.
This project is by far the most expensive undertaken in the Ulster County portion of the Ashokan Reservoir watershed. It’s deemed necessary because the two hamlets are located so close to the reservoir. Jason Merwin, executive director of the Catskill Watershed Corporation (CWC), local project administrator for New York City’s DEP (Department of Environmental Protection), cautioned that costs had risen since the $49-million estimate was made. His guess, which he conceded might be optimistic, was that the project would probably be completed five years from now.
Ashokan Reservoir water may pour out of New York City faucets within 60 days of leaving Ulster County, posing a potential threat to public health, DEP says. The Big Apple’s quarter-century largesse toward its upstate watershed has stemmed from its understandable desire to avoid paying the billions of dollars that filtration of its water would cost. The costs of a treatment plant in Shokan and the network of sewer lines needed to connect to it throughout the 3.9-square-mile Olive project area is peanuts compared to what New York City would have to pay in interest on the bonds that the costs of filtration would require.
“We’re looking at Shokan as the new business center for Olive,” then-town supervisor Sylvia Rozzelle said back in 2017. “Boiceville floods too much.”
For the past 20 years, the Boiceville businesses within the 100-year flood plain have struggled. Some buildings have been razed. Some owners are determined to stay as long as possible. Others, most recently the physicians’ office on the north side of the hamlet, have accepted buyouts offered by New York City.
“Every situation is different,” explained present Olive town supervisor Jim Sofranko.
In 2020 Olive’s town board authorized participation in the pre-construction phase of the Shokan wastewater management project.
Final design drawings for the project are almost complete now, the CWC’s Merwin said this week.
Watershed conference
When was the last time you attended a conference where an unsharpened lead pencil was distributed with a thick sheaf of papers enclosed in a dark blue folder? The one at the Bearsville Theater on July 29 offered such a package.
Dark blue with a white eraser at one end, the pencil must have been intended as a politically correct writing instrument. The words “Ashokan Watershed Stream Management Program” and a logo of a stream running through a landscape were embossed on the pencil, as were the words “100% Wood.”
The event was the Ashokan Watershed Conference. Five speakers listed on the addressed the morning session to provide information to new landowners. After a catered lunch, no less than eight afternoon presentations provided additional food for thought in what was billed as a landowners’ forum.
The cavernous theater, as most Woodstockers know, was built for musical performances to Albert Grossman’s specifications. At this conference, a check-in person offered name tags, and another person carried a mic around to provide volume to those who wished to ask questions of the six experts gathered up on the stage.
There were 20 people in the audience that Saturday.
One couldn’t have staged a better example of social distancing, the practice of keeping away from other people as much as possible. The practice was more appropriate during the pandemic than it is now.
Earlier in the week, I had received a phone call from a Siena College poll worker who had questioned me closely on what I thought of the DEP and the CWC. Was I familiar with them? Were they doing an excellent, good, satisfactory, bad, or very bad job?
It was pretty clear who was paying Siena to take the poll. Those organizations know where to find me. They could have called me themselves. They preferred a pseudo-scientific sampling with questionable results.
The poll provided another example of well-intentioned social distancing. In our old-fashioned but fairly sophisticated exurban area, you don’t call Siena College when you want to know what your neighbor is thinking. You ask them.
Reach out to us, the folks up on the stage encouraged the 20 landowners. I’ll give you my card. I’ll be glad to come out to look at your situation.
A changed region
The first few years after DEP formed the CWC in 1997 were hard. The locals of the two-thousand-square-mile watershed were suspicious of the hidden intentions of their big brother. The hamlet of Phoenicia even voted to turn down an offer of Big Apple money. Many folks feared that an end to practically all economic activity within the watershed would be one consequence of New York City avoiding filtration.
Twenty-six years later, the atmosphere has changed. Commuting to work outside the watershed has become more widely accepted. Tourists and weekenders are more plentiful than ever in the watershed, and bed-and-breakfasts seem to be everywhere. The post-pandemic economy is accustomed to remote work, and the number of new young people settling in the watershed seem to just about equal the number leaving it.
The DEP and CWC are accepted, albeit sometimes grudgingly. They’re a given presence n the watershed. They’re like the rich relatives in town, tolerated because they contribute to good causes and feared because of the influence they can muster if they don’t get what they want..
Among the CWC programs are grants or loans to provide seed money to watershed entrepreneurs. Included this past year were two Shandaken businesses, Maeve’s Pretty Face near Mount Pleasant on Route 28 and Ladew Corners, the intended lodging place and restaurant at the former La Duchesse Anne in Mount Tremper.
Getting people involved
The biggest problem now, as the low attendance at the carefully prepared conference on July 29 in Bearsville attested, is that the interactions between CWC and the local communities, are – to put it diplomatically – clumsy.
The CWC directors, for the most part composed of town supervisors (Richard Parete of Marbletown and Jim Sofrako of Olive are the two Ulster County members), meet monthly and aided by competent staff go over CWC activities meticulously.
But those strong connections don’t seem entirely to suffice. The sense of social distancing remains tenacious
Maybe it’s the change in the sense of community in the digital age. Maybe it’s the bureaucratic ethos casting a shadow over public service. And it may be only the water that keeps us strong, as the lyrics of the Lionel Richie song suggest.
Getting people involved is a two-way street. Human-relations textbooks stress the importance of the role of two-way communication in a comprehensive communications strategy. Listening to concerns before they become grievances is essential.
The town supervisors all live on two-way streets. How can they create a culture at the CWC more like their everyday experiences in their individual towns?
$1.5 billion invested
It’s not that the DEP and CWC don’t have the money or are unwilling to spend it. They sure do and they sure are. Funded by DEP, the CWC had an almost $60-million budget this year. Its 2022 budget reported $137.3 million in cash and loans, and an additional $39.3 million in fixed assets. Its 27 employees administer a wide variety of programs.
The DEP office on Smith Avenue in Kingston has hundreds of employees. Altogether, the DEP’s upstate budget contains 1100 positions. The DEP has about 30 employees at the facility it shares with CWC in Arkville and plans to add 14 to 20 additional jobs there. This geographic dispersion will probably eventually lead to some degree of greater understanding between the locals and the watershed warriors. But it’ll take time.
Since 1997, New York City has invested more than $1.5 billion in watershed protection programs, including nearly $55 million to help homeowners repair or replace failing septic systems, and nearly $125 million to construct new wastewater infrastructure in communities with concentrated areas of substandard septic systems. The success of these programs is a main reason why New York City remains one of only five large cities in the country not required to filter the majority of its drinking water.
The 2017 Filtration Avoidance Determination (FAD) requires DEP to maintain the level of staffing, funding and expertise necessary to support all elements of the watershed protection program.
Looking for that balance
Olive has always been a town of small hamlets. It has five fire companies widely scattered on both sides of the Ashokan Reservoir. That’s a lot of firehouses for a town with an estimated 2022 population of 4246. By far Olive’s biggest taxpayer is New York City. Last year it also contributed close to a million dollars through the CWC for a new Boiceville firehouse on higher ground that the old brick firehouse in the flood plain.
Many of the score or so businesses in the Boiceville flood plain have thrown in the towel rather than construct new buildings higher in the same hamlet.
Like other area supervisors, Jim Sofranko wants affordable housing for the people of his town. He’s alarmed by the number of recent building permits for million-dollar homes in Olive. He says he wants to keep home prices within reach for the local population. A supporter of the Ulster County Housing Smart Communities Initiative, a county program that supports communities across the county to meet their housing needs, Sofranko is looking for ways to keep home prices and rentals within reach for the local population.
Sofranko is wrestling with how the new Shokan treatment plant might ameliorate the local housing problem in Olive. He recognizes that Olive’s relationship with the DEP and CWC might provide a window of opportunity. How can a balance be achieved between New York City’s continuing desire to restrict land use in order to protect its watershed and Olive’s need for reasonable development envelopes?
“We’re trying to find that balance,” Sofranko says.
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