Work on tap at Cooper Lake
Kingston water board eyes improvements and possible expansion at local reservoir
KINGSTON, N.Y. » The Board of Water Commissioners is expected to decide next week whether to embark on a multi-million dollar project to make state-mandated improvements to the dam at Cooper Lake in Woodstock, the city’s primary reservoir, an official said this week.
Water Superintendent Judith Hansen said the board will meet in special session at 4 p.m. Monday, Sept. 25, to discuss the potential dam improvements at the city reservoir. The meeting will be held at the Kingston Water Department’s headquarters at 111 Jansen Ave. in Kingston.
But while a decision is expected to be made on whether to proceed with the dam project, funding for the project, estimated at $4.77 million, is up in the air, Hansen said.
Additionally, Hansen said, the board is expected to focus some discussion on whether the reservoir’s capacity should be increased.
The combined cost of improving the dam and increasing the lake’s capacity would be between $7.68 million and $9.86 million, Hansen has said.
“At this meeting, the board’s engineer will be reviewing the options for the work at Cooper Lake along with the associated costs for that work,” Hansen said in an email this week. “They will then likely make a decision on which project that the Department will pursue and direct the staff and engineer to submit a schedule to the NYS DEC (Department of Environmental Conservation) for the project.” “This is a multiyear project in terms of design, permitting, bidding and construction, so the first step will for the board to define the project so that a schedule for the remediation (of the dam) can be submitted to (the state),” Hansen said. Still, Hansen said, that funding is not easy to come by. In the past, she has said that if the Water Department could not find grants or low-interest loans to offset the cost of the $4.77 million dam project, it would have to ask the Common Council to borrow the entire amount. If that happens, Hansen had said, users’ water rates could rise by as much as 18 percent.
“We are still trying to work on the funding piece to mitigate the impact on our rates,” Hansen said.
Hansen said the department is continuing to work with state Assemblyman Kevin Cahill, D-Kingston, and state Sen. George Amedore, R-Rotterdam, to secure state funding for the project. Hansen said as far back as June 2015, the dam has not been in compliance with state regulations.
The necessary work will involve “taking the dam and doing certain things that need to be done to bring it into compliance with current design standards,” Hansen said at the time. “I don’t want to give the impression that the dam is not safe. It is safe. But the DEC (state Department of Environmental Conservation) wants all dam owners to go through this process and do what needs to be done to bring dams into compliance with current standards.” Hansen said an engineering report found no problems with the structural integrity of the dam.
The majority of the needed repair work at the dam isn’t complicated, “but it is expensive,” she said.
The board has been considering raising the lake’s water capacity by 2.5 feet, which would increase the maximum amount of water it could hold from 1.2 billion to 1.5 billion gallons. Another scenario would raise the lake by 5 feet, to a capacity of 1.7 billion gallons. Cooper Lake’s capacity has been increased three times since the Kingston Water Department bought the property in 1897, she said.