March 25, 2008 In a Community View in today’s Journal News, Phil Tisi continues the water war between United Water and Supervisor St. Lawrence’s office. This has been going on for a month or so now, and as the two sides point and throw brickbats at each other, there is silence over the fact that they both have actively conspired to destroy the water supply that has served this region for eons.

What is crystal clear to the earth scientists at Lamont Doherty Observatory, and to the environmentalists, and, for that matter, to any who are paying attention to the urbanizing going on in unincorporated Ramapo, is certainly missing from this diversionary point/counterpoint now sputtering between Ramapo Town Hall and Suez Water.

Today, in the paper, it’s Tisi, a St. Lawrence assistant, who is struggling for the high ground as he indignantly complains about increasing rates and improper withdrawals from water sources, both of which, he points out, have been opposed by his boss. Makes you wonder if it has crossed his mind that there might be a causal relationship between high-density development and rapidly decreasing resources?

Last week it was Michael Pointing, General Manager of United Water, who accused St. Lawrence in a Journal News Community View. "It is disappointing that our proposal to buy excess water supply from the Village of Suffern has gotten caught up in local politics, with curious opposition led by Town of Ramapo Supervisor Christopher St. Lawrence," Pointing wrote. He also decried the xenophobia introduced into the debate, answering St. Lawrence’s concerns that our natural resources are being sold to a French firm with, "need we remind Mr. St. Lawrence that his own Rockland County Sewer District #1 has a multi-million-dollar contract with Veolia, a French-owned corporation?"

So between Tisi’s "It is quite unusual for the head of a private corporation to publicly attack a local elected official," Pointing’s remonstration "Mr. St. Lawrence pledged to assist United Water in meeting its supply goals," and St. Lawrence’s confidential aside, "did you know they are French?", the level of righteous indignation is almost insufferable. Especially since it’s very difficult to come across as righteous while, at the same time, you’re trying to pee on somebody else’s shoes.

The most dangerous thing about this annoying political theater is that the wells and reservoirs continue to drop as more and larger foundations are poured around Ramapo.

Cement Factory Site near 306 and 59 intersection (March 2008)

St. Lawrence is owned by a political entity that has promised to keep him in office as long as the urbanization is allowed to continue. If he has any doubts of the fickleness of the promise, he doesn’t have to look any further than Michael Bongiorno’s Macbeth moment last November when the bloc tossed him under the bus for an apparently better deal from the now disgraced Governor Spitzer. But St. Lawrence has courted this situation, and is now indentured to it out of his own choosing. Until he decides to move on and run for an office away from Town Hall, we can expect larger projects and spot downzoning that seriously threaten finite water resources that are now approaching critical levels. His rubber-stamp board is not going to stand in his way.

How critical are the supplies? Just take a look at the recent attempts by United Water to get new resources. They have opened gasoline-tainted wells, have tried to buy Suffern supplies, and are pumping water from the Lake DeForest reservoir to the western wellfields in the summer because of shortages there.

And the water company’s complicity in all this? They are a corporation driven by a bottom line that is defined by cost accountants and business strategists. It has been in their interest in the past to claim that they will have no trouble supplying the needs of any increased growth in the area, despite the simple fact that we have a fragile system that moves closer to failure every year that we keep geometrically growing the population. At Ramapo Planning Board meetings United Water always assures the board they have sufficient supplies—no matter the size of the proposal.

St. Lawrence’s role in this is at the very center. His Master Plan, his Adult Student Housing projects, his complicity with builders at sites like Bates Horton and Butterman, his downzoning in areas like Monsey where single-family lots can now have three-family houses with three additional accessory apartments—all of these have overwhelmed infrastructure like roads and sewers, and now threaten a water supply that must be replenished every year. A water resource that Lamont Doherty scientists have concluded will never be able to recover if we have two consecutive years of drought (Water Shortages, Development, and Drought in Rockland County, NY published in the Journal of the American Water Resources Association by Professors Lyon, Christie-Blick, and Gluzberg of Columbia University). A water resource that Dr. Dan Miller of the County Board of Health has testified is not sufficient for the population we have right now.

The long-term result of this shameful legacy leads to two solutions that will create the most expensive water in the State if not the entire country. St. Lawrence has provided us with the promise of "toilet to tap" water in western Ramapo, and United Water will build a desalination plant in about a decade so that we can mix Hudson River water into our reservoirs. We will be drinking recycled sewage and the Hudson River in order to accommodate the out-of-control growth—at a cost of hundreds of millions to build and then many times the price of current utility bills.

Perhaps it’s a good thing that Christopher St. Lawrence has emblazoned his name on every Ramapo sign and site throughout the town. No one should be allowed to forget how our resources were overrun and by whom.

Michael Castelluccio