By now you may have heard that Westchester County has reintroduced its proposal for sewage diversion from New Castle to Yonkers. This was the wrong proposal when we first opposed it several years ago; it is the wrong proposal now.
There will be a meeting at Yonkers Riverfront Library (1 Larkin Center, across from the Yonkers Metro-North station) on Wednesday, March 26 at 7:00 PM, including officials representing both Westchester County and the Town of New Castle, during which public comment will be heard. I urge you to please attend.
The Yonkers Wastewater Treatment Plant, by far the County's largest such facility, has been overwhelmed for years by over 100 million gallons a day of effluent on average, from over two dozen municipalities, despite a design capacity of 92 million gallons a day. Predictably, the Yonkers plant is the site of endless spills and overflows, regularly fouling the air that we breathe, and polluting the water of our beautiful Hudson River with untreated human waste. Yet the County has so far refused to take any comprehensive look at the totality of new impacts on the Yonkers plant stemming from new development in Yonkers, White Plains, Sleepy Hollow and elsewhere, instead certifying each project as somehow having no effect on the plant's capacity. This irresponsible nonsense has got to stop.
Now, yet again, the County proposes to once more expand the area served by the Yonkers plant. Unbelievably, despite the passage of legislation in November of 2003 designating funds for a study of alternative solutions to New Castle's sewage treatment problems, both the County and the Town of New Castle have instead chosen to do nothing at all -- until now, crying "Emergency!" they again designate Yonkers as the natural solution to everyone's sewage treatment needs.
The Town of New Castle has allowed mismanaged development to threaten the Croton watershed. Despite being under court order to remedy the situation, New Castle has taken no action, instead counting on their allies to spend millions of dollars to build a big pipe so that their effluent can be pumped to Yonkers, now and in the future. But Yonkers is already besieged by a looming environmental disaster at its chronically overburdened facility! Yonkers cannot always and forever be the only solution to everyone else's self-inflicted mess.
Please pass along notice of the Yonkers meeting on March 26 (again: Riverfront Library, 1 Larkin Center, 7:00 PM), and please remind your County legislators where they should stand on these crucial environmental issues.
Many thanks,
David Pannett
Ludlow Park, Yonkers
