Water story worries panel

By DAVID HULSE

NARROWSBURG — Unattributed comments about New York City (NYC) plans to augment its downstream flows to the Delaware, 65 miles south of the reservoirs, have Upper Delaware Council (UDC) members worried.

A February 24 New York Times piece detailed many issues in the city’s water woe problem, but it was two paragraphs in Andrew C. Revkin’s story that caught the eye of local officials.

“It is considering buying small private water supplies south of its Delaware River reservoirs in the Catskills, which could help it meet its obligations under an interstate water compact. The city has to keep some water flowing in dry times to other users of the Delaware River in New Jersey and elsewhere downstream.

By gaining control of other water sources feeding into the Delaware, the city could satisfy its water-sharing requirement without taking as much from reservoirs holding the city’s supply.”

“There’s talk of the Mongaup reservoirs being the prime suspect,” UDC Project Review Committee chair Harold Roeder of the Town of Delaware commented on March 7, adding, “there’s all kinds of things running through people’s minds.”

The issue for the UDC is that, while the Supreme Court set mandatory flow requirements for Montague and Trenton, no such flow standards apply to the upper river, although members of the UDC have for years lobbied to have one created.

Should the city acquire a downstream source like the Mongaup reservoirs, it could conceivably retain its drinking water supplies upstream, leaving greatly reduced flows into the upstream branches and the main stem shores abutting Delaware and Wayne Counties, and most of Pike and Sullivan Counties. The results, officials say, would undo negotiated release agreements and could be disastrous for river ecology and portions of the valley economy tied to river recreational use.

The notion is a mystery to the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC), said DRBC engineer Richard Fromuth. “We’ve heard nothing of this,” he said. But Fromuth added, “any change of uses, for its allotted 800 million gallon daily withdrawal from the watershed, would not change the overall amount the city is allowed to withdraw. Whether they take it for drinking through the aqueduct or to meet flow standards by releases elsewhere, they won’t gain any more water, as far as DRBC is concerned.

But the city might be prepared to challenge that position. NYC Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) spokesman Geoffrey Ryan said, “As you know, record amounts of releases to the Delaware River were required this year, which helped to deplete the city’s reservoirs. Accordingly, one way to ease depletion of the reservoirs might be to acquire existing privately owned reservoirs, which might be managed to help maintain flows in the river.”

Ryan would not comment specifically which water source was involved or how it might be acquired. “At this time, it is much too early and too speculative a concept to answer any of  the specific questions you ask,” he said.

A spokesperson for the Mirant Corporation, which owns the former Orange and Rockland hydroelectric system, said it has not been contacted by the city, but seemed to leave the door open, “As of right now, we’re not in negotiations to sell our hydro units in New York. In the past two years and as recently as two months ago, we’ve had inquiries, but we’ve just been evaluating them and it has not gone further,” said Mirant spokesperson Jamie Stephenson.