Negotiating a watershed

MARGARETVILLE, NY, Nov. 3, 2005 — “Behind the Scenes: The Inside Story of the Watershed Negotiations,” a collection of 12 first-person accounts of the seven-year struggle that culminated in the groundbreaking New York City Watershed Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) which was signed in 1997, has been distributed to libraries and archives throughout the west-of-Hudson Watershed and in New York City. Transcripts and photos of the interviewees have also been placed on the CWC’s website, cwconline.org/about/scenes.html.

The collection includes audio CDs and transcripts of interviews with negotiators from the watershed, the city, the governor’s office and the environmental community. The MOA allowed the city to avoid building a costly, federally-mandated water filtration plant for its mammoth Catskill-Delaware water supply, to impose stricter environmental regulations on the region that supplies the water and to purchase vacant lands from willing sellers. In exchange, the city agreed to fund environmental protection, education and other programs in the watershed, and to capitalize a watershed economic development fund to mitigate some of the negative impacts of regulations and land acquisition.

The interviews and transcripts may be found at 24 public libraries in the watershed, as well as at Hermann Memorial Library at Sullivan County Community College, Loch Sheldrake.

For more information, call 845/586-1400, ext. 29.