The largest single taxpayer in the Catskills is New York City.
To protect its drinking water — 90 percent of which comes from Catskills watersheds — the city spent nearly three decades accumulating 156,350 acres of forest and fields. It’s an area larger than all the land in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Manhattan combined.
The idea was to keep human and agricultural waste out of the drinking water, so that the city could get a waiver on filtering it from the Environmental Protection Agency. Filtration would have been prohibitively expensive: an estimated $8 billion to build the facilities, and $500 million annually to maintain them.
Instead, the city and a group of Catskills communities negotiated an agreement that secured the EPA waiver. The city would fund local water-quality projects, like the construction of sewage treatment plants, but it would also be allowed to solicit and purchase properties to protect the water supply. Beginning in 1997, the city spent $518 million to assemble a vast patchwork of parcels, mostly in the northern half of the mountains.
For the towns, it was an uneasy accord. Many residents were unhappy that the city could buy almost any land it wanted, as long as the owner was willing to sell. And though the upgrades to their sewer and septic systems improved quality of life, and the tax revenue from city-owned land became critical for local budgets, much of the scarce developable land in the area was put off-limits, restricting the communities’ options for much-needed residential and commercial expansion.
Now the buying spree is over.
Last fall, the city quietly agreed to wind down most of the so-called Land Acquisition Program (it will keep the land it has already purchased). An independent review of the program by the National Academies, commissioned by the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, had concluded that the majority of further land purchases would be of little benefit, since most of the available properties contribute little pollution to the water supply.
The halt also came after years of pressure from the Coalition of Watershed Towns, a group of elected officials that has represented regional interests in negotiations with the city since the early 1990s.
When the city revealed its plan to secure a filtration waiver in 1990, Jeff Baker, a lawyer, and his partner, Dan Ruzzo, feared that it would try to implement watershed protection by force. (One of the original proposals was to aggressively pursue every piece of developable land in the Catskills.) “So we basically talked to a bunch of the towns and said, ‘You’ve got to get together. There’s no way you can fight this individually,’” Mr. Baker recalled. He has been the coalition’s lawyer since it formed in 1991.
The city’s Department of Environmental Protection, which runs the Land Acquisition Program, is now focused on the expansion of a separate Collaborative Streamside Acquisition Program, said Rohit Aggarwala, the current director.
To represent competing interests, the new program was designed with input from multiple stakeholders, including environmental groups. Under the plan, the city would buy or lease small, targeted parcels of land, but Catskill townships would need to approve any such transactions, effectively giving them final say over how the lands can be used. (Final acceptance of the plan would be granted by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, which issues water withdrawal permits.)
“We fought very, very hard for local approval,” said Ric Coombe, chairman of the Coalition of Watershed Towns. Though some stakeholders were wary, he said, “a good program with the right situation and the right purpose will be accepted by our communities. At the end of the day, if it’s part of a holistic, solid plan. It isn’t a taking.”
Mr. Aggarwala emphasized that the winding down of the original Land Acquisition Program does not signal a cooling of the DEP’s efforts to keep the city’s water supply clean. “I think we’re entering into a phase where we want to fine tune, where we want to optimize,” he said. “It is not about retreating and fostering wide, large-scale development — but I don’t think large-scale development is in the cards anyway.”
Mr. Baker, the coalition lawyer, believes self-determination over local land use would help correct an imbalance of power between the city and the Catskills communities he represents. He worries, though, that the communities are now threatened by something beyond their and the city’s control: gentrification.
The wave of second-home buying that began during the pandemic has not retreated (although “most of those people are selling their homes now to people who want to live here,” said Amy Wallace, marketing director of Coldwell Banker Village Green Realty in Catskill). Growth in housing prices is raising the value of, and the taxes on, the homes of locals, whose employment levels and incomes are below those of many of the people moving in.
Residents find themselves increasingly hard-pressed to keep their homes, and unable to afford anything comparable in the area if they sell.
“I’ve done land-use and environmental law for a long time,” Mr. Baker said, “and I’ve never found anybody who has a solution to that problem.”
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