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Crystal Clear Solution - New York
The supply of drinking water to any major city is a huge task. How do you provide a reliable supply of water of sufficient quality and quantity to meet the needs of millions of households? New York City Department of Environmental Protection not only manages to deliver over 1.2 billion US gallons (4.5 billion litres) of water daily, but the water is of such pristine quality that it does not require filtration, saving the City and its ratepayers enormous sums of money.
Catskill-Delaware System
The main watershed supplying 90 per cent of this drinking water is the Catskill-Delaware watershed system, known as the Cat-Del system. This is located in Delaware, Greene, Schoharie, Sullivan and Ulster counties reaching over 100 miles (160 kilometres) from New York.
History of New York’s water supply
Early residents of New York drew water from wells, but as the population grew in the 19th century a network of aqueducts and reservoirs was built. In each instance, the City chose to go far outside the City to obtain the plentiful and pristine water that played an essential part in New York’s development as America’s leading metropolis. In 1905 the City once again turned northward to find new pristine sources, this time from the valleys of the Catskill mountains. In 1915, the Ashokan Reservoir and Dam, which impounded the waters of the Esopus Creek, one of the four watersheds in the Catskills, were completed. The rest of the Catskill System was completed in 1928.
Even then it was clear that new sources needed to be developed to serve the City. In 1927 the Board of Water Supply submitted a plan to develop of the upper portion of the Rondout watershed in Delaware County. This project was approved in 1928, but work was delayed by an action brought by the State of New Jersey to restrict the City and State of New York from using the waters of any Delaware River tributary. But the Supreme Court upheld the right of the City to augment its water supply from the headwaters of the Delaware River. Construction of the Delaware component of the Cat-Del system began in 1937. The Delaware system, in some places more than 125 miles from New York City, was placed in service in stages up to 1964.
Today, New York City has the largest unfiltered surface water supply in the world. Every day, some 1.2 billions gallons (4.5 billion litres) of water from this vast system is delivered to nine million people - eight million New York City residents, one million more consumers in four upstate counties and hundreds of thousands of commuters and tourists. |
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New York City’s Water Supply Map
Reproduced with Permission of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection. |
The New York City Water Supply System includes a watershed of 2000 square miles (830,000 hectares) across eight counties north and west of the City. It is remarkable that, for a city of this size, it manages to provide water from an unfiltered water source. To maintain its pristine quality, in the early 1990s, the City implemented a comprehensive watershed protection programme that focuses on both protective and corrective initiatives, to ensure that the Cat-Del system remains unfiltered and sustains its extraordinary high quality – considered to be the ‘champagne of drinking waters’.
Growing Pressures
Traditionally, the City relied on the lightly settled rural character of its watersheds to maintain water quality. However, by the 1980s the character of the watershed was changing. Industrial agriculture was replacing traditional agricultural methods and exurban holiday home development was beginning to invade the watershed, and seeking out locations that were the most unspoilt, and therefore the most environmentally vulnerable.
At the same time, public health standards were tightening. The 1986 amendments to the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) set standards for contaminants and allowed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to require the elimination of 99.9 per cent of pathogens in drinking water. In 1989 the new standards set out in the Surface Water Treatment Rule raised further questions as to whether New York’s water supply would need to be filtered. This rule requires all public water supply systems supplied by unfiltered surface water sources to either provide filtration or meet a series of water quality, operational and watershed control criteria designed to insure pristine water quality. These criteria are referred to as the filtration avoidance criteria, and comprise three main areas:
- Objective water quality criteria – the water system must demonstrate 100 per cent compliance with standards for specified constituents including bacteria, solid particles (turbidity) and disinfection by-products.
- Operational criteria – the water system must demonstrate 100 per cent compliance with certain disinfection requirements for inactivation of pathogens and viruses; maintain a minimum chlorine level throughout the distribution system and provide uninterrupted disinfection with redundancy.
- Watershed control criteria – the water system must demonstrate a programme of long-term effective watershed control that would protect against the development of new sources of contamination of source waters by pathogens and viruses.
Ideally, the watershed control standard meant that a water supplier owned all or most of its watershed. But at this time less than 30 per cent of the City watershed area was in public ownership. Outside those landholdings, the increasing exurban development meant new sources of pollution from lawn fertilisers, leaking septic tanks, spilled motor fuel, and industrial toxins and solvents. Traditional Catskill economic activities, not only family farming, but forestry, and outdoor recreation based tourism, which have low impact on water quality and are consistent with protecting natural habitat, were in decline. As they were replaced with more intensive agricultural practices and concentrated livestock management, increasing amounts of polluted runoff and eroded soils were entering the City’s source waters.
It seemed that filtration was the only answer to protect public health. Watershed programmes in the United States had traditionally failed to deal with these kinds of land use pressures and pollution sources. Filtration would have been an expensive option – the 1990 estimated cost of a filtration plant was $4 - $6 billion (£2.1 - £3.2 billion), plus annual running costs of over $200 million (£160 million). It would have led to massive increases in the water and sewage rates for New York City residents, and been a significant economic burden for its large low-income populations.
Given these considerations, the City decided it should reassess the conclusion that only a technical engineering solution could provide water that could meet legal standards. Instead, they had to find an alternative way to conserve the purity of the water, one that would not cause economic hardship to millions of people. Cost analysis indicated that a comprehensive programme of watershed protection would cost far less than filtration and would maintain water quality more effectively at its source.
Mutually Beneficial Partnership
The question was how to make such a solution work. Attempts to create effective watershed protection through top-down punitive regulation had failed. But under the guidance of Albert Appleton, the then Director of the New York City Water and Sewer system and the City’s Commissioner of Environmental Protection, a decision was made to create a mutually beneficial urban rural watershed protection partnership – one that not only benefited the residents of New York, but also provided benefits for the communities of the Catskills and Delaware. With the contentious history over water rights, the partnership had to be a balancing act, providing equality between the farmers and local landowners in the water catchment areas, the environmental regulators and the City ratepayers. This meant a mutual recognition had to be created that all parties had a vested interest in a sound, vital, well-managed rural landscape.
A period of constructive discussion and mutual education began. The environmental regulators set out to explain to the farmers about the risks of some of their farming method, not just from the environmental viewpoint, but also the economic consequences in terms of land prices. The farmers, in their turn, educated the City about the economic pressures they faced and how previous anti-pollution measures were not workable. They were concerned about the suggested restrictions and new practices that they considered to be too costly to implement.
By the end of 1991, the City and the watershed farmers had taken the first critical step towards creating an urban-rural watershed protection partnership. This included the Whole Farm Plan, a groundbreaking programme that integrated agricultural pollution control into the business plan of the farm. This programme, which now includes 95 per cent of all farms in the Catskills, has not only reduced agricultural pollution by close to 75 per cent; it has economically stabilised farming in the Catskills. The programme, which is widely regarded as the most successful agricultural pollution control programme in the United States, is now recognised as an international best practice and was the fundamental building block on which the City built its comprehensive watershed programme.
Following the breakthrough success of Whole Farm Planning, and using its partnership structure as a model, the City developed a similar partnership programme with local Catskill communities, developed a whole forestry programme, and began new programmes of sensitive land acquisition and ecologically based land management.
In January 1997, the parties tied all these prior agreements together in a comprehensive Memorandum of Agreement (MOA). Overall, as outlined in the MOA, the City committed funds of approximately $350 million (£190 million) in addition to its agriculture and land acquisition funding to support the economic-environmental partnership programmes with upstate communities, including a water quality investment programme, a regional economic development fund and a regional advisory forum for water quality initiatives and watershed concerns. The total cost of the watershed protection programme is estimated at $1.3 billion (£700 million). These programmes have guaranteed the maintenance of the City’s pristine water quality into the foreseeable future.
Whole Farm Plan
Whole Farm Planning is a holistic approach to farm management used to identify and prioritise environmental issues on a farm without compromising the farm business. Potential risks to the water supply are identified and addressed through careful planning to reduce or avoid the pollution of farm streams from agricultural runoff.
The process starts when a farmer signs a participation agreement to develop a Whole Farm Plan in conjunction with a Planning and Implementation Team. Each team is multidisciplinary, and may have representatives from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Natural Resources Conservation Service, Cornell Cooperative Extension and county Soil and Water Conservation Districts. These agencies carry out a comprehensive survey, starting with the source of pollution, for example barnyard water, and then move on to look at the crop fields and stream corridor. Any potential pollutants are categorised and prioritised, such as animal waste; pesticides; fertilisers; animal and manure parasites; nutrients; fuel storage or other toxic materials.
The Team reviews with the farmer the technical and financial options that are available and they draft a Whole Farm Plan, which is customised to each farm‘s specific requirements. This is reviewed by the local Soil and Water Conservation District to check the technical details, and a final review is carried out by full Watershed Agricultural Council before approving each Plan. The farmer then signs a contract agreeing to implement the Best Management Practices (BMPs) listed in the Plan. Continuing support is given to the farmer by the Team Programme staff to ensure the Plan’s long-term success. By successfully integrating traditional and innovative farm management approaches into a flexible and wide-ranging strategy, this programme is unique in its ability to prevent agricultural pollution while also protecting the economic viability of farming among watershed communities.
The City agreed to pay both staff and capital costs of pollution control investments on each farm as an incentive to farmers to join the programme. There was some debate as to whether the Plan should be carried out on a paid or voluntary, non-compulsory basis. The farmers insisted that the programme should be voluntary if they were to be the water stewards for the City. To balance the farmers’ desire for a voluntary programme with the City’s need for a critical mass of participants, it was ultimately agreed that the programme would be voluntary for any individual farmer, but that the farmers undertook to obtain the participation of 85 per cent of all farmers within five years. The incentives and benefits to farmers, as well as the status of being in a true farmer-run programme, proved so positive that within five years 93 per cent of farmers in the Catskills had joined the Whole Farm Plan programme.
Other measures taken under the 1997 MOA to improve the environment that followed on the farm programme included:
- Cleaning up seeping septic tanks.
- Upgrading sewage plants.
- Forestry management programme.
- Land acquisition of undeveloped areas, which are considered hydrologically sensitive, at a fair price determined by an independent appraiser.
- Conservation easement whereby the City buys rights in land which the farmer is unwilling to sell outright. This land can then be used for some recreational or forestry uses, whilst restricting other activities that could jeopardise water quality.
- Establishing buffer zones to act as a barrier, a filter zone or to put a certain distance between pollutant sources and watercourses.
- Preserving open spaces through land trusts. Mostly these are managed by small, private local grassroots organisations.
Results
The City has convinced the EPA that it has put in place a watershed management programme that can safeguard the public from waterborne diseases. Rigorous testing is carried out daily in laboratories at the reservoirs before the water reaches the City, and again once the water reaches New York to ensure no loss of water quality. Due to these measures the EPA has granted New York a renewable waiver on filtration up to 2007 and it is expected to do so for the indefinite future. Now New York has preserved its quality water supply at only one-eighth of the cost of a filtration system, not only saving the City billions of dollars, but also acting as a model for others.
As with most systems, there were implementation issues that needed to be considered and, over time, fine-tuned. There are mutual concerns over the City’s land acquisition programme in the Catskills, and its implications for the future economic well-being of watershed communities, and also some, in water quality circles, who regard the process is being done at a disappointingly slow pace. The process itself is complicated and can be a drawn-out affair, with bureaucratic obstacles. Gaining rights to land through conservation easements can have a negative affect on local taxes, which is a concern to local councils who depend on this revenue to provide local services. Some fear that, with a growing amount of land unavailable for development, there is less scope for employment and business opportunities. Others regard land preservation as the key to retaining the traditional economy of the Catskills, and they fear the exurban sprawl that remains the preferred pattern for many potential Catskill developers.
The linkages between various stakeholders bind rural and urban regions together in a mutually dependent relationship that is so far largely mutually beneficial. The experience with watershed programmes elsewhere has proven that a heavy-handed regulatory approach which alienates local residents will quickly undermine the best designed watershed protection plan. At the same time, the City has to persuade local Catskill residents, particularly the many who live at poverty levels, that most of the development schemes proposed for the Catskills have proven to be both destructive of the local environment and without benefits to local populations – the one unique resource they have to build an economic future around is the Catskill natural environment. Thus, fifteen years after the City began developing its Whole Farm Program, the challenge continues to convince a wide variety of both urban and rural stakeholders that the dual goals of economic development and sustainable water quality are ultimately intertwined.
Further Information
Participating Organisations
New York City Department of Environmental Protection
59-17 Junction Boulevard, 10th Floor
Flushing, NY 11373
USA
Website: http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/
For more information on New York City's Water Supply System see:
http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/html/watersup.html
References
Appleton A.F., How New York City used an Ecosystem Services Strategy carried out through an Urban-Rural Partnership to preserve the pristine quality of its drinking water an save billions of dollars and what lessons it teaches about using Ecosystem Services. Paper for ‘Forest Trends: the Katoomba Conference’, Tokyo, Nov 2002
Pires M., Watershed protection for a world city: the case of New York. Land Use Policy, 21 (2004) p161-175
The City of New York Department of Environmental Protection, New York City 2004 Drinking Water Supply and Quality Report. Available from: http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/pdf/wsstat04.pdf
Resources
Practical Action Technical Information Service
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ITDG Publishing
Schumacher Centre for Technology & Development
Bourton Hall
Bourton-on-Dunsmore
Warwickshire CV23 9QZ
UK
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Fax: +44 (0)1926 634502
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