A 12.9 percent increase in the water rate for the average household in Queens: $83.
One billion gallons of water through the New York City sewer system every day: priceless.
The presentation from the Department of Environmental Protection about a proposed increase on water bills was less of a sales pitch and more of an itemized receipt for Queens residents. Those who came to a community meeting in Jamaica on Tuesday night ready to oppose the citywide hike were met by itemized details of where billions of dollars in funding have been going.
“Your water rates have funded $13 billion in capital construction,” said DEP Commissioner Cas Holloway. “New York City’s water quality is fantastic, and we want it to stay that way.”
From nearly $5 billion for federally-mandated filtration plants to $5 billion for the ongoing efforts to build City Water Tunnel No. 3, projects to update the city’s sewer system have been on a debt system. Rate increases will help shoulder the burden of interest rates for past and future projects.Around $571 million alone was spent on infrastructure in Queens, Holloway added. “That is more than any other borough, and it’s still not going to get the job done,” he said.
In Jamaica, where flooding has been a chronic problem for decades, Holloway’s message about investments was particularly welcome. The DEP is conducting a new water flow study in the neighborhood in the hopes that a year of data will help the agency make changes to the system.
A video (shown below) of flooding after an August 2007 rainstorm highlights what residents say is a catastrophic problem in their neighborhood.
City Councilman James Gennaro fielded concerns about property flooding.
A resident at Hollis Courts pleaded for help for the rent-stabilized buildings. Her landlord has failed to pay bills for five years, she said, and the DEP refuses to fix sewage backups without a request from the owner.
“Water is coming into my building but nobody is paying for it,” Mays said, urging Gennaro and Holloway to find a solution for delinquent landlords who drive up costs. Holloway, who took the reigns of the DEP in January, has been making these town hall-style meetings something of a trademark. Despite arriving nearly two hours late, the commissioner had some in the audience gushing after his presentation.
“People don’t realize how lucky we are, this is the greatest system on earth,” said Sam Rodriguez, of Queens. “I don’t mind the increase – and don’t get me wrong, I’m on fixed income.”
The proposal will be reviewed by the Water Board after hearings in the coming months. The DEP’s next stop is in Staten Island on May 6 at Wagner High School at 8 p.m.. Hearings on the water rate increase will be help at the Thomas Edison High School in Jamaica on May 11 at 7 p.m.
As the Gotham Gazette reminded us recently, there’s less than a week left until PlaNYC 2030 turns 3 years old. The initiatives have to be reviewed every four years, and there have been a number of suggestions for updates recently – from Scott Stringer’s food plan to interviews we’ve done here at Explain The Plan about solid waste.
And two days after Tom Angotti pushed for more inclusion and community input into the plan in the Gotham Gazette, the Bloomberg administration and City Council announced a brand new set of goals: the Waterfront Vision and Enhancement Strategy (WAVES).
Rather, they announced that new goals are in the works from the Department of City Planning. They’ll be released at the end of this year, and they’ll be divided into two stages: Continue Reading
Explain the Plan recently caught up with Bill Appel, executive director of the Gowanus Canal Community Development Corporation. Founded in 1978, the GCCDC is a non-profit community preservation organization that focuses on the environmental remediation of the canal, as well as housing, economic development and commercial revitalization. Appel answered questions regarding his organization’s feelings about the Superfund and why he believes the city had a more viable clean-up plan.
In a letter to the New York Times, you expressed your discontent at the Gowanus being designated a Superfund. Could you elaborate on why you feel this way?
When the EPA first looked into designating the canal as a Superfund site, right away we thought that this would stagnate any type of responsible development in and around the canal, which it has. Early on, we supported the city’s alternative plan, which would have allowed clean-up of the canal under the auspices of the EPA. The EPA would retain the right at any time to re-designate it as a Superfund if they thought the city wasn’t keeping up their end of a proper comprehensive clean up.
New York City’s tap water has always been a point of pride, and provisions in PlaNYC aim to improve New York City’s water network to keep it that way.
Many cities have costly filtration plants to remove hazardous materials and chemicals from local water, but New York does not. Instead, it uses water from nearby protected watershed areas and pays local farmers to keep them safe and clean. In the 2009 PlaNYC Progress Report, Mayor Bloomberg’s administration announced the city has bought 8,500 additional acres of land along the Catskills, Delaware and Croton watersheds, for a total of 137,000 city-owned acres. The water pollution controls in place cost $1.9 million, and the city says it has improved septic systems in the Catskills to protect the water supply.
The NYC Department of Environmental Protection is also constructing a UV disinfection facility for the Catskill/Delaware watersheds. The city is building a filtration plant in the Bronx just for the Croton watershed, which the Bloomberg Administration says will provide up for to 30 percent of NYC’s water needs. The Administration has is also slated to improve the leaky Delaware Aqueduct and build another parallel aqueduct.
Jenny Carel wasn’t going to pay Home Depot more than $60 for all the plants she needed for her garden this year. So, Carel, 40 a part-time teacher from Riverdale, used her ingenuity. She took some milk cartons, an old fish tank light and $3 worth of seeds she bought off line to start her own nursery garden.
A few weeks later the seedlings are a few inches tall and the hobby is a hit with her 11-year-old daughter, Sera. “It’s fun to see them grow,” she said. The two were at the newly established Bronx Hydro and Garden to buy a spray bottle and some extra seeds.
Carel’s gardening is one we learned about in grade school, but hydroponics – soilless gardening – is not just for green thumbs anymore. Specializing in this process, the store sells equipment for simple, cost-effective indoor gardening. The process has a few steps: water is infused with nutrients and then pumped through a system, which oxygenates the water; this is necessary for plants to grow and explains why stagnant water in a bucket just grows algae.
PlaNYC has initiatives on greening the city like MillionTreesNYC, reforesting parkland, and planting roadside gardens. But no rooftop gardens or hydroponics. The city provides GreeNYC tips to encourage residents to be more environmentally conscious, by buying local produce, eating organic, and planting trees.
Aaron Morre, 27, opened the store last November and is opening another one in the Greenpoint, Brooklyn later this month. Morre grew up on a farm in Orangeburg, South Carolina and moved to Brooklyn in 2001 to study Economics. He graduated from Brooklyn college in 2005. His store sells everything you need to start your own indoor garden.
Here’s some audio of Mr. Morre, talking about his store. ”This is the green economy….”
TIME magazine wrote, “The EPA’s decision and the stigma that comes with it have deferred dreams of a Gowanus renaissance, if not quashed them altogether.”
In its weekly column of trivia and observations, The Brooklyn Eagle notes that pollution in the Gowanus Canal has been in the news for over a century. As early as the late 1800s, Harper’s Weekly magazine described the scene at the canal as “numbing because of all the oil refineries along the water’s edge spewing forth thick smoke.”
New York Press reported on a rather expensive, but interesting way to get rid of the toxic sludge – by turning it into glass.
On the 14th, The New York Times printed a letter from Bill Appel, executive director of the Gowanus Canal Community Development Corporation. In his letter, he expressed his disappointment in the Superfund designation.
For a while, community farms around the city have been gaining popularity – there are now about 600. And especially over the past year, there’s a growing trend: farms are moving to NYC rooftops in most of the boroughs.
Roberta’s Pizza in Bushwick, Brooklyn, also boasts rooftop greenhouses and a small farm nearby, where they grow their own produce for their restaurant.
A group of greenthumbs have put out a call to Mayor Michael Bloomberg–they want a garden outside New York’s city hall. If they get the green light, they hope to create a garden tended by public school students that “will represent the vision of a more sustainable, livable City for all New Yorkers, and will contribute to achieving the intents of PlaNYC by 2030.” Check out their blog.
Explain the Plan went to the Go Green Expo this weekend. Take a look at some of our coverage, like this video with Riverkeeper‘s Craig Michaels. You can find more on the Expo here and here.
Streetsblog this week had a rather scandalous piece on, of all things, transit budgets. It looks at how funds from the city have been reallocated for upstate transit rather than to addressing the MTA’s myriad budget woes. Would the $100 million Streetsblog says should have gone to the MTA have helped stave off the end of student Metrocards or rolling out this new sign that got shelved? Would it have saved the V train? It’s hard to know…
Despite the at least 100 rezonings passed in the city since Mayor Bloomberg took office, a new report from NYU’s Furman Center says the city has created room for only 200,000 new people–the city anticipates 1 million more residents by 2030. Check out the article, and graphic, at the NYTimes.
When it rains in Meadowmere and Warnerville, it pours.
After more than a century these two Queens communities wedged between John F. Kennedy International Airport and Long Island are finally getting a sewer system. But along with a $37.5 million pumping station, residents have gotten a flood of charges from the city: over $5,000 for to a licensed plumber plus $1,500 to $2,000 to the city to get hooked up.
The costs have highlighted the lack of a basic infrastructure for two neighborhoods closely tied to Jamaica Bay, where most residents work at the airport or as fishermen. And while toilets and drains empty out into septic systems or into the Bay itself, residents have been scrambling to get connected to the new system by early June or face fines from the Department of Environmental Protection. The new sewer system also fits into Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s goal to clean New York City’s waterways by the year 2030.
“It’s not like anyone is saying ‘we’re not going to hook up’,” said Larry Seaman, 66, who makes his living catching eels, crabs, and fish in the waters here. “We will hook up, just give us a way to pay for it.”
The original deadline of March 6 was pushed back, but some residents here were so desperate to avoid the $10,000 fine that they ended up paying a plumber nearly as much to connect their pipes to the city’s new sewer. Some neighbors have banded together to negotiate a lower price closer to $5,000, but an additional fee for a spur will be assessed on everyone’s taxes.
In the meantime, some residents have been paying for infrastructure they never had.
“There are 10 homeowners we know of so far who have been paying the sewer tax all along,” said Donovan Richards, chief of staff for Councilman James Sanders, Jr., who represents the area. “That’s $84 [per quarter] that they’ve been paying for who knows how long.”
Sanders’ office has been working with the DEP to lower the fees for those who have been paying the tax. The DEP would not return several calls for comment, but Richards said the agency would be lenient with those who miss the June deadline.
“They were the forgotten people, I think they were the last people in the city without a sewer,” Richards said of the Warnerville and Meadowmere residents in a phone interview. “It should have been done years ago, I mean come on — years ago.”
The plumbing problem in these Queens neighborhoods is not the only one in the country. Matt Robinson from Explain The Plan took a look areas from Connecticut to Florida that recently had to pay to get hooked up:
Matt Robinson, Uche Abanobi and Alana Casanova-Burgess contributed reporting to this post.
