WaterBlogged.org » NYC Media

EPA head promotes partnership and green infrastructure in Millwaukee

karen — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 23:58:25 +0000

Can you believe it? This could not happen in NYC. The full speech is here in this pdf – EPA Administrator Emphasizes Green Infrastructure in Milwaukee Speech

Check out this excerpt:

“…………………..One of the most prevalent and fasted growing challenges is dealing with storm water runoff which carries chemicals and other debris into local waters and can damage whole stream ecosystems. Right now the conventional regulatory fixes for storm water are to store it and to treat it just like it’s wastewater, which can be very costly to cities and towns on a budget. Milwaukee has been through these costly challenges recently with the wet weather and storms that have passed through lately,” Jackson says.

Jackson says if money were not an issue, separate sanitary and stormwater systems could be a fix, but says it’s a remedy most communities can’t afford.

The administrator says it’s going to take collaborative innovation to solve the problem. Jackson pledged to weave green infrastructure policy into EPA regulations.

“Ways to use our regulatory and policy making heft, if you will, to encourage the kind of things that are already happening in places like Milwaukee,” Jackson says.

She’s talking about incorporating rain gardens, green roofs and other measures that capture and filter rain water naturally. Jackson calls it working with nature, rather than against it.

She sees green infrastructure as a tool to help clean up old contaminated sites. Jackson says her agency will back up the green talk, with money.

“Funding for states and territories and tribes to mitigate nonpoint source pollution through green infrastructure,” Jackson says.

She calls this a new era of clean water protection.

Read the whole article or listen to it:

http://www.wuwm.com/programs/news/view_news.php?articleid=6641#share

Harris Park costs rising to $14 million

karen — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 01:21:25 +0000

Interesting how the NY Post can get this exclusive, but the community can not get any answers.

Below is the article. Here is the PDF for the article: Harris Park $14 M Jan 2010

————————

New York Post – Updated: Thu., Jan. 28, 2010, 1:16 PM

Bronx field now city’s $14M

blunder land

By RICH CALDER, Posted: 2:31 AM, January 19, 2010

A city plan to rebuild one of The Bronx’s biggest sports fields has morphed into a money pit for taxpayers.

Workers renovating Harris Field in Bedford Park recently uncovered contaminated soil under the playing surfaces, helping push the anticipated cost to nearly $14 million, city officials told The Post.

The price tag for the renovation had already gone from the $6.6 million announced in 2007 to $8.7 million, records show.

Now the Parks Department is confirming that it has to add another $5.2 million for cleanup because of the high levels of lead unearthed while workers were preparing to install drainage-system tanks needed to restore the popular park’s six playing fields.

Harris Field used to be part of a reservoir before the city acquired the 15-acre site in 1917.

Department spokeswoman Vickie Karp said it is believed that the park was created with “the use of incinerator ash as fill, which would explain the presence of lead.”

The original playing fields at the park were grass, but the city plans to cover two with synthetic turf.

A Parks Department official wishing to remain anonymous said that contamination wouldn’t be an issue if all the fields were going to be grass but that replacing two with turf requires digging deeper to install the drainage tanks. Karp says this is untrue.

A fiscal 2008 mayoral report showed the Parks Department topped city agencies in cost overruns with projects costing an average of 50 percent more than the original contract price. The city average was 17 percent.

Harris Field is in line to rise by more than 110 percent.

“The project shows just how poorly the city does its due diligence on parks projects,” said Geoffrey Croft, of the nonprofit group New York City Park Advocates, when told of the costs.

The project’s long delays are crippling a popular Little League that plays there.

“The Parks Department only cares about construction, not children,” said Don Bluestone, executive director of the Mosholu Montefiore Community Center.

Bluestone said the nonprofit group’s youth baseball league has gone from 1,000 players to 500 since construction began. He ripped the department for closing the entire park and relocating the league miles away to parks filled with drug dealers and plagued by flooding.

The city’s Web site says construction will be complete by the spring, but Bluestone was preparing to have his league play elsewhere this season.

rich.calder@nypost.com

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NY Daily News: DEP blasting at JPR

karen — Wed, 06 May 2009 14:39:14 +0000

DEP backtracks on excavation explosives vow

Less than nine months after telling a judge it would not use blasting on a Bronx water tunnel project, the city has gone back on its word – possibly lighting the fuse on a new lawsuit.

What No One Else is Telling You About Next Year’s Water Rate

karen — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 01:03:17 +0000

Click here for more details. Water Watch NYC – Everything you ever wanted to know about water in NYC

NYTimes Editorial April 17, 2009: Clean Water Act restoration, finally

karen — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 15:26:29 +0000

NEW YORK TIMES http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/opinion/17fri2.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

April 17, 2009 Editorial

A Clear, Clean Water Act

Clean water policy is in a terrible muddle, and the country has the Supreme Court to thank for it.

The 1972 Clean Water Act was written to protect all the waters and wetlands of the United States. Two unfortunate Supreme Court decisions narrowed its scope, weakened its safeguards and thoroughly confused the federal agencies responsible for enforcing it. As a result, thousands of miles of streams and millions of acres of wetlands have been exposed to development.

The remedy lies in a Senate bill called the Clean Water Restoration Act, which would reassert the broad reach of the 1972 law. Similar legislation has been languishing for years, and if this version has any hope, it will need a strong push from the White House.

The good news is that Lisa Jackson, President Obama’s new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, cares about clean water issues and isn’t afraid of a fight. She has already moved to restrict pollution from coal mining operations in Appalachia and is promising to crack down on polluted runoff from animal feedlots.

Without endorsing any particular bill, Ms. Jackson agreed last week that the system that has long protected America’s waterways from unregulated development and pollution is paralyzed — and will remain paralyzed unless Congress fixes it. An internal E.P.A. report furnished to Congress last year revealed that the agency had dropped or delayed more than 400 cases involving suspected violations of the law — nearly half the agency’s entire docket. The reason in every instance was that regulators did not know whether the streams and wetlands in question were covered by the law.

Until the two Supreme Court rulings, the Clean Water Act had been broadly interpreted by courts and by federal regulators to shield all the waters of the United States — seasonal streams and remote wetlands as well as large navigable rivers and lakes — from pollution and unregulated development. The assumption was that even the smallest waters have some hydrological connection to larger watersheds and therefore deserve protection. The Supreme Court, however, exploiting ambiguities in the law, effectively decreed that only navigable, permanent water bodies deserve protection.

As a result, at least 20 million acres of wetlands and as much as 60 percent of the nation’s small streams have been left unprotected, while effectively shutting down enforcement actions against developers who have been disturbing or plan to disturb these waters without a permit.

The Clean Water Restoration Act would establish, once and for all, that federal protections apply to all waters, as Congress intended in 1972. Now a new Congress and a new White House must ensure that it becomes law.

Note: see www.cleanwaternetwork.org/ Clean Water Network for more info

Clean Water Restoration Act of 2007 (Introduced in House) http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c110:h2421:

Thank you to Joel R Kupferman National Lawyers Guild- Environmental Justice Committee for the forward.

Water Infrastructure is at risk: 020309

karen — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 16:17:04 +0000

Today there is a great Op Ed in the New York Times. Here is the full story with an excerpt below – http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/opinion/03herbert.html?_r=2

. …………The American Society of Civil Engineers, in a report released last week, essentially described the state of American infrastructure as dreadful. More than a quarter of the nation’s bridges were rated structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. Public transportation systems and the nation’s dams and levees are generally in sorry shape, many of them more than a half-century old.

Listen to what the report had to say about the water we drink:

“America’s drinking water systems face an annual shortfall of at least $11 billion to replace aging facilities that are near the end of their useful life and to comply with existing and future federal water regulations. This does not account for growth in the demand for drinking water over the next 20 years. Leaking pipes lose an estimated seven billion gallons of clean drinking water a day.”

The society gave the nation’s infrastructure an overall grade of D and said it would require an investment of $2.2 trillion over five years to get it back into decent shape ………………..

And, there is an interesting video I found mentioned in the comments section: http://www.liquidassets.psu.edu/

New York Times: Cooper’s Every Dip is Felt in Arizona (11/08)

karen — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 05:15:19 +0000

November 28, 2008
Copper’s Every Dip Is Felt in Arizona
By JOHN COLLINS RUDOLF

MORENCI, Ariz. — For this isolated mining town, which lives and dies by the price of copper, the last few years have been a roller coaster ride of steep climbs and sudden dips. Over all, however, the direction seemed to be up.

Copper’s dizzying climb began in 2003, when prices surged in response to booming demand from China and other fast-industrializing economies. The price spike spurred a major revival of Arizona’s once-battered mining industry, and towns like Morenci, once devastated by layoffs, returned to flush times.

This past summer, even as the dire housing market contributed to widespread job losses and other economic woes in Arizona, copper prices reached a record, drawing thousands of new workers to the mines, where jobs were plentiful.

But the arrival of the credit crisis this fall has stalled the mining boom. Reeling financial markets stripped copper of 60 percent of its value in only a few months, and expansion projects in Arizona, the nation’s leading copper-producing state, are being postponed.

A sense of anxiety permeates Morenci, where almost everyone follows copper’s daily rise and fall on financial cable shows and the Internet. “Everybody is just wondering day-to-day what is going to happen,” said Hector Ruedas, a Greenlee County supervisor and member of the Morenci school board who once worked in the mines.

The speed and the depth of the price plunge has taken even longtime industry observers by surprise. “The end has come just incredibly abruptly,” said Nyal Niemuth, chief mining engineer for the Arizona Department of Mines and Mineral Resources. “There weren’t many of us predicting this collapse.”

In late October, Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold, the copper industry’s largest employer in Arizona, announced plans to lay off 600 mine workers in the state. Those layoffs came in addition to hundreds of independent contactors already let go by the company.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/28/business/28copper.html?_r=2&scp=1&sq=price%20of%20copper&st=cse

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NEW YORK TIMES: MONTANA DAM IS BREACHED, SLOWLY, TO RESTORE A SUPERFUND SITE

karen — Tue, 27 May 2008 19:45:11 +0000

MONTANA DAM IS BREACHED, SLOWLY, TO RESTORE A SUPERFUND SITE

By JIM ROBBINS, New York Times, Science, May 27, 2008 — MILLTOWN, Mont. — Milltown Dam, a symbol of industrial progress that became a symbol of destruction, was recently breached, and two parts of the Clark Fork River were joined again.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/science/27dam.html

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NY Daily News: Water Board ponders 14.5% hike

karen — Thu, 08 May 2008 14:12:10 +0000

This morning, our good friend from the News at City Hall, Frank Lombardi, describes the strange method by which the people of NYC are taxed once again. Thank you Frank for providing us with vital information concerning the costs, especially the fact that the DEP is spending MORE than it COLLECTS! The simple enough solution to cut costs is lost among the powers that be. Read and Enjoy!

WATER BOARD PONDERS 14.5% HIKE

FRANK LOMBARDI, Daily News City Hall Bureau, Thursday, May 8th 2008

As the Water Board mulls a 14.5% rate hike, the puzzled public wonders: Who, or what, is this (bleepin’) agency?

Think of a stacked deck in a poker game; the house – in this case, City Hall – always wins.

. . . .The collective bill to its 825,000 rate payers for the fiscal year ending June 30 is $2.24 billion. It jumps to $2.54 billion next year, hence the rate hike.

. . . . So, you could say another soaking is in the cards for the city’s property owners.

Listing of board members can be found Web site:

http://home2.nyc.gov/html/nycwaterboard/html/board_members/index.shtml.

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NY Post: CITY POLS IN WATER FIGHT

karen — Tue, 06 May 2008 15:35:26 +0000

CITY POLS IN WATER FIGHT

By TOM TOPOUSIS, New York Post, May 6, 2008 — A proposal to raise water and sewer rates by 14.5 percent came under fire yesterday from city lawmakers who accused Mayor Bloomberg of using some of the increase to pay for other services, such as for cops and teachers.

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