New York’s last water chief cut a deal to open up city-owned Catskills land for renewable energy development. His successor is here to act on that new imperative, using a term that’s quietly reshaping state energy policy: “environmental justice.”
It’s a framework that, however well-intentioned, risks treating the Catskills once again as a sacrifice zone for far-off beneficiaries.
The New Logic of the Watershed
In the final months of his dual role as both New York City’s climate chief and commissioner Department of Environmental Protection, Rohit Aggarwala negotiated a new intergovernmental agreement with Delaware County that signaled a potential seismic shift for the city’s presence in the Catskills.
What does a rational, win-win energy plan look like for the Catskills, New York City and the state as a whole? Join us on February 19, 2026 at the Okun Theater at SUNY Delhi to be part of the conversation. Register now.
Among other things, it contains language that says “if… protected property is owned by the City,” they have “the right to construct, maintain and operate… infrastructure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector by replacing fossil-fuel fired electricity with renewable energy and/or the storage thereof.”
The agreement spells out that the city could clear up to 10 acres per parcel for renewables, and that the acreage limits are expandable across adjacent parcels with approval. With land swaps, parcels that were once frozen from development to protect water quality could potentially stitched together for larger projects.
Critically, Aggarwala negotiated this language in the final weeks of the Eric Adams administration in New York City. Adams’ successor, Zohran Mamdani, has spent his short political career promoting a bill called the Build Public Renewables Act, which is a mandate for the New York Power Authority to build public solar and wind power plants across New York State, at a scale and feverish pace that has caused consternation in upstate communities.
While Albany is beginning to question the affordability and reliability assumptions behind the 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), Mamdani’s transition team has doubled down on its logic, signaling a dogged commitment to reducing New York City’s emissions, regardless of cost or the grave warnings of the New York Independent System Operator.
Mamdani’s rise, combined with the city’s expanding legal rights over watershed lands, creates the risk that the Catskills will increasingly be treated as a renewable energy plantation, in addition to its role as a natural water filter.
The city owns more land in the Catskills than exists in the five boroughs combined, and a small fraction of that land could host gigawatts of intermittent renewables. That generation could be used to offset, on paper, the energy needs of a massive filtration plant the city is prepared to build once its Filtration Avoidance Determination inevitably collapses. Of course, a filtration plant would require actual 24/7 power, which at this time would come mainly from natural gas generation and imports.
As Aggarwala warned in a June speech to the Delaware Board of Supervisors, the loss of the FAD will eventually “have significant implications for DEP’s role in your communities.”
It is against this backdrop that Lisa Garcia was named the new commissioner of the Environmental Protection Agency on January 27.
The Apostle of Environmental Justice
If Aggarwala was a technocrat who approached the watershed like an actuary managing risk, Garcia may be something else entirely: a prospector, arriving not to protect the land, but to extract moral return. She is a veteran of the Obama and Biden-era Environmental Protection Agencies, a former vice president at EarthJustice, and was a high-level editor at the environmental publication Grist. As she stated as an EPA official, her personal mission “expands beyond” mere air and water resources to focus on “tackling environmental justice [and] reducing climate-change impacts.”
Garcia’s career has helped move environmental justice from an abstract concept to an enforceable, zip code-based system, where dollars, emissions and particulate matter are weighed against how different races of human beings have historically fared in America. She is credited with the 2014 launch of EJScreen, a federal mapping tool that uses 11 environmental and demographic indicators to decide which communities deserve “justice” and which are privileged. The tool was sunsetted early in the Trump administration, to Garcia’s dismay.
“You can remove the data,” she said. “But that does not change the fact that climate change is impacting vulnerable communities.”
Using a backup of the tool indicates that none of the watershed region is an environmental justice community, but much of New York City is.
In 2023, New York State’s Climate Justice Working Group built upon the EJScreen framework with its Disadvantaged Community (DAC) criteria, identifying over 1,700 census tracks across the state based on 45 indicators, including energy burdens, pollution, climate risks and racial differences. These maps also show that Catskills watershed counties are largely outside of DAC designations, with only scattered pockets qualifying. On the other hand, NYC has high concentrations of DACs in the Bronx and Queens.
Garcia said that her DEP’s decisions will be filtered through “equity and environmental justice,” but also through “finding efficiencies” so that “New Yorkers will not feel any squeeze.” For Delaware County and the rest of the watershed region, that could mean New York City will fight assessments, cut programs and turn its land into renewable energy assets, all to keep bills from rising for New York City’s residents. The Catskills, as a non-environmental justice community, would have to shoulder these impacts.
The Peaker Plant Pivot to Upstate Renewables
The holy grail of New York environmental justice has been “Asthma Alley,” an infamous area of Queens that hosts peaker plants. Some of them were built in the early 2000s to address critical shortfalls in dispatchable electricity generation in New York City. The unwarranted closure of Indian Point turned those short-term band-aids into long-term pillars of New York’s energy supply.
The environmental justice movement has long targeted these peaker plants as an existential threat to the health of New Yorkers:
“Can clean renewable energy plus battery storage also replace all the City’s older, polluting private peaker plants? … We believe we can.”
Eddie Bautista, NYC Environmental Justice Alliance
Their desired replacement for peaker plants is intermittent renewable energy like solar and wind, which is mandated by the CLCPA, financed by the BPRA, sited upstate by ORES, with the profit going to private developers. Weighed against the critical, 24/7 role that peaker plants have served in this winter’s extended cold snaps, this plan is severely questionable.
But Garcia’s dogged commitment to environmental justice suggests an increased intensity in the relationship between New York City and the Catskills. If infrastructure projects are negotiated primarily by their ability to deliver benefits to disadvantaged communities, which are exclusively in New York City, the Catskills will suffer.
It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way: Join the Conversation
Our January Catskills Energy Future event featured our new documentary Unfiltered: New York’s Watershed Battle, which insists that the relationship between the Catskills and New York City can be repaired through mutually beneficial infrastructure projects and a healthier conception of man.
The discussion afterward filled a deep need for local residents, many of whom drove over an hour in the snow to be a part of the event. With an opportunity to envision a better future, people from different walks of life got to discuss their community’s needs, their ideas, the responsibility of exporting food, water and energy for society, and a gratitude to not be arguing on Facebook.
Our upcoming event promises more of the same:
SUNY Delhi on February 28 at 8 P.M.
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Catskills Energy Future is a public screening and conversation about a quiet but consequential shift in New York City’s infrastructure strategy. For decades, hundreds of thousands of acres in the Catskills were locked up to avoid building a filtration plant, freezing development across an entire region in the name of water protection. That era is on the verge of ending.
As filtration becomes an eventual engineering reality, the logic for holding vast tracts of upstate land is changing. New York City is no longer organizing its watershed around protecting water, but as a platform for renewable energy generation, battery storage, and future transmission, tying the Catskills directly to the city’s climate and power ambitions.
This transition is not without precedent. From the earliest days of the watershed system, influential voices argued that the only way to protect city water was to restrict population, suppress industry, and limit human presence in the Catskills altogether. The cold logic of treating people and productive land use as a threat rather than a resource has shaped a century of policy. Today, it risks reappearing in a new form: land preserved not for local prosperity, but for land-intensive infrastructure serving distant needs.
The evening at SUNY Delhi’s Okun Theater will feature the second screening of Unfiltered: New York’s Watershed Battle, followed by a moderated discussion and audience Q&A examining what this transition means for land use, grid reliability, workers, and local communities and whether the region will once again be asked to absorb the physical costs of New York City’s growth without a meaningful voice in the outcome.