Last week, New York’s leaders did more to protect the Empire State’s rivers and drinking water than at any other time since the modern environmental movement began more than a half a century ago.
Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature have completed a multi-year plan known as the
Water Infrastructure Act of 2017 to invest a
whopping $2.5 billion in the Empire State's sagging water infrastructure. This new spending will solve a host of pollution problems emanating from aging water treatment plants, leaking septic systems, old landfills, lead in water supply lines, overburdened stormwater systems and the state's expanding dairy farm industry.
Finally, a newly enacted drinking water
pollution prevention program, including NY's first-ever open space acquisition fund focusing exclusively on clean drinking water, will help assure that in the coming years we’ll do far more to
keep pollutants out of our water supplies to begin with.
Together, these new enactments make New York the gold standard for state-level programs to improve water infrastructure, monitor drinking water safety and protect public water supplies at their source.
Under the newly enacted suite of laws cited above, the state health department will extend testing for emerging contaminants to all local drinking water systems covering 25 homes or more (currently, such testing only is done on systems serving more than 10,000 people). The state will also establish a Drinking Water Quality Council to determine which additional emerging contaminants should be included in this new comprehensive testing program.
New York’s $2.5 Billion Water Infrastructure Investment Act of 2017 and the expanded drinking water safety monitoring program that accompanies it are the culmination of fifty years of clean water advocacy by community activists and groups like Riverkeeper. While President Donald J. Trump proposes deep cuts to environmental spending and other states prepare to follow suit, New York has chosen a better path. Let’s hope that the benefits our residents will now enjoy -- cleaner drinking water, safer places to swim and boat, and healthier populations of fish and other aquatic life -- will inspire the federal government and other states to go big for clean water, as Governor Cuomo and the New York State legislature did last week.