Nixes stream plan
Gov Cuomo vetoes protection bill because of costs.
Saying it would be cost prohibitive, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Saturday vetoed a bill that would have required permits to alter some 40,000 miles of mostly small unregulated “Class C” streams across the state.
“While well-intentioned, this bill would have a tremendous fiscal impact on state and local government,” Cuomo said in his veto message.
Environmentalists, though, say the measure would have protected streams and creeks that often feed into larger bodies of water as well as drinking water sources.
“Governor Cuomo passed up a real opportunity to safeguard tens of thousands of miles of headwater streams and creeks in New York,” said Jeremey Cherson, legislative advocacy manager for the Riverkeeper environmental group. “This veto was a mistake, since it is cheaper to protect streams proactively than spend far more later to restore them once the damage is done.”
The state Department of Environmental Conservation’s Protection of Waters programs designates streams as Class AA, A, B, C and D for purposes of regulations. AA and A is for drinking, B is for recreational uses like swimming while C is for fishing. D is the lowest classification and standard.
But only the AA, A and B classifications require permits for activities like dredging or stream bank modification, noted Cherson.
Another set of regulations covers discharge of pollutants into all kinds of waterways, however. The proposed legislation would not have changed that.
Still, the C Class streams
make up about 40,000 miles of creeks and streams statewide and they often feed into lakes, rivers and water supplies. That’s compared to 36,000 miles of Class AA and B streams.
The Watervliet Reservoir in Guilderland, for example, is fed by numerous Class C streams.
The legislation was first introduced in 2019 by Buffalo-area Democratic Assemblyman Sean Ryan and Westchester Democratic Sen. Peter Harckham.
Stream disturbances, including manicuring banks along golf courses, building small bridges or diverting the flow away from a housing or development site can have cumulative impacts that affect the water quality and potentially harm aquatic life.
Disturbances can increase sediment and even change the temperature in a stretch of water.
“This is one of the areas where water quality suffers from death by a thousand cuts,” Cherson said.
Notably, Cherson said, the postponed Restore Mother Nature Bond Act contained provisions for fixing streams that had been harmed by dredging or bank modifications. That $3 billion environmental remediation measure was to go before voters during the last election but was pulled due to the economic challenges posed by the COVID -19 pandemic.
Cuomo’s veto message does point out that state Soil and Water Conservation Districts already have some oversight issues such as agricultural runoff in streams.
Passage of the bill, he noted, would have required adding “significant numbers of full-time staff,” to the state payroll to oversee the new regulations.