2026 is a pivotal year for energy and utility policy in New York State, and recent events occurring in and around the Catskills are a bellwether of the times.
New York Energy Alliance has held three “Catskills Energy Future” events that combined a screening of a film called Unfiltered: New York’s Watershed Battle with a Q&A session where local residents were invited to share their thoughts about what the future of land use, energy and development should be in the Catskills.
During this same time, in Delaware County alone:
The town of Colchester held a public hearing on a commercial solar moratorium, with Supervisor Rob Hafele moved by “pending legislation and activity in neighboring towns.” County planning staff, commenting on the proposal, referred to a coming “conveyor belt of solar.”
Andes Supervisor Ritchie Gabriel introduced a nine-month pause on utility-scale solar and battery storage, giving the town time to write rules before developers can arrive.
Walton council members discussed a moratorium targeting battery energy storage systems specifically, citing lithium fire risks, groundwater contamination, and the open question of whether the town even has jurisdiction over facilities sited on New York City-owned watershed land.
A Middletown commercial solar installation along Route 28 between Arkville and Fleischmanns recently completed significant clear-cutting visible from the road, a project that town officials had once assured residents would have “limited visual impact.” The resulting scar prompted a packed public hearing, with one attendee saying “You can’t just regrow… this whole area was clear cut once before, and we’re living in the 100 years later that it took to grow back.” The unpopular solar installation is mere a five megawatts, a tiny drop in the bucket for what would be needed to actually meet the state climate goal of 70% renewables by 2030.
An Arkville meeting of the Catskill Watershed Corporation’s Land Committee brought forth the questions raised by NYEA about the new watershed easements for renewable energy.
None of these towns or committees were coordinating with each other, or with New York Energy Alliance, but all are arriving at the same conclusion: that New York’s 2019-era vision for energy is butting up against the physical, financial and human realities of the places that were a “blank space on someone else’s map.”
This is what we have been documenting for three years. These dynamics go back much further than just the climate law; we can chart a throughline to Aaron Burr’s traitorous schemes against Alexander Hamilton’s initiative to find clean water for New York City, and even further to the days of the British-organized patroon land management system.
A Delaware County native who has been involved in the last 30 years of the story stood up and shared his perspective at our most recent event. He began with an apology.
An Apology
When a room of people gathered at the Phoenicia Playhouse on March 21th to discuss the past, present and future of the Catskills, two groups showed up: one, for a conversation about the inconvenient truths that local towns are coming up against. The other group was part of a coordinated effort to shut down the conversation with boos, hisses and shouted accusations, on behalf of the New York City and non-profit dominated status quo.
Dr. Michael Zagata, the former Commissioner of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, was part of the first group and kicked off the Q&A period with an introduction, and an apology. In 1995, Governor George Pataki appointed him as his first Commissioner of the state Department of Environmental Conservation.
He spoke for several minutes about the history of the reservoirs, about the towns that were bought and drowned, about the political machinery that had made it possible and the language that had been used to justify it.
And then, he crossed the red line: he said that the 1997 watershed deal, in which New York City froze Catskills development to save money on filtration, was going to become a much bigger problem for local residents in the future, specifically because of the limitations and tradeoffs of land-intensive renewable energy.
“I was involved in the negotiation for the Watershed Agreement,” he said. “I apologize to you, because I didn’t do as good a job on your behalf as I thought I had.”
A Controversial Career
Dr. Zagata grew up in Davenport in Delaware County, and studied at SUNY Oneonta and Iowa State. He spend decades moving between academia, conservation and the energy industry before Governor Pataki nominated him to head the DEC in early 1995. He was confirmed unanimously with credentials that included lobbying for the National Forest Management Act, representing the National Audubon Society at a federal level, pioneering the concept of wetland mitigation banking, and managing environmental compliance in the energy industry.
His appointment, as the Syracuse Herald-Journal noted in March 1995, was premised on the idea that he would “bring balance” to a DEC that had developed a reputation for regulatory inflexibility. Gov. Pataki said he had settled on Zagata because he was committed to both environmental preservation and business-friendly policies. He also was a credible negotiator in the complicated dealings between New York City, the state, the watershed towns, and the “Fifth Avenue” environmental groups represented by the likes of Robert F. Kennedy Jr and the NRDC.
Judith Enck, speaking for the Ralph Nader-founded New York Public Interest Research Group, or NYPIRG, (she later became EPA Region 2 Administrator under Obama) said that she thought Zagata’s appointment heralded “tough sledding for the environment.”
In 1996, groups like Scenic Hudson, Environmental Advocates of New York and NYPIRG issued a joint report criticizing the administration’s environmental record. The groups’ chief complaint: Zagata was giving businesses too much of an economic incentive to comply with the law, and not enough punishment.
What followed is what happens when science takes a backseat to politics. Governor Pataki, who was eyeing a possible presidential run, wanted to shore up his environmental credentials rather than be tied to Zagata’s balancing of environment and economy. It was simply easier to go along with the environmental groups and their pyrrhic “sue the bastards” strategy that began at Storm King Mountain. Zagata was a dead man walking, and Pataki’s aides would anonymously undermine him in the press.
Zagata’s own description of that period is blunt. “The environmental groups, believe me, they’re just as dirty as industry,” he said. “The only difference is one’s called one thing and one’s called the other. But they’ll both do things behind your back. They’ll both skirt the law to get where they want to go. I mean, it’s the truth. I’ve seen it. I’ve lived it.”
Pataki, for his part, survived three terms as a Republican governor in New York State. In 2000, he was considered a vice-presidential candidate for George W. Bush, but the fiendish Dick Cheney was chosen over him. In 2004, he introduced Bush at the Republican National Convention at Madison Square Garden, proclaiming that Bush would win the state. New York’s environmental lobby overwhelmingly went with future U.S. Climate Envoy John Kerry over Bush, who would lose Pataki’s state by 20 points. Pataki chose not to run for re-election in 2006 against Eliot Spitzer, and wandered off into political obscurity.
The Watershed Deal
The issue that consumed the latter part of Zagata’s tenure was the New York City watershed agreement. In September 1996, Zagata traveled to Delhi and, alongside three lawyers, answered questions from Delaware County supervisors about a developing landmark agreement that would govern how New York City managed its upstate reservoir system for generations to come.
Binghamton’s Press and Sun-Bulletin covered his appearance approvingly. Local residents were “cautiously optimistic.” The agreement, as Zagata framed it, was “more than just water. It’s an opportunity for people who need one another to work together for the better good.”
Within months, the same newspaper was running letters to the editor accusing him of having “sold out” Delaware County. One, signed by a Hancock resident, accused him of giving supervisors a “rah-rah speech” to ratify a deal that would destroy local farming and depress the county’s economy for decades. Another letter, headlined “Zagata leaves ruinous legacy,” accused him of facilitating an agreement that would “effectively destroy farming in the Catskill region” with “eternally devastation Watershed regulations.”
Zagata resigned in December 1996. The Staten Island Advance reported that he had become “a political liability” for Pataki, caught between the governor’s political calculations, a hostile DEC staff inherited from the Cuomo era, and an environmental community that had decided early on that his business background disqualified him from their trust.
He has a rather different account of his own departure. He described feeling like “the only thing standing between the city and the Catskills” during the watershed negotiations, and suggested that what he resisted was finalized when the deal was signed a month after he left.
“I did not want all that land bought,” he said. “Some things happened after I left.”
What he is certain of is a moment that has stayed with him for thirty years. A lawyer working on the negotiations came into his office and told him that if he didn’t sign off on the current draft of the agreement, they would find someone who would. “I should have fired him on the spot,” Zagata says. “And I didn’t.” He didn’t let the man intimidate him, he continued pushing on the language, but he didn’t fire him either.
The watershed deal is the professional regret of his life, and it led to his dramatic apology to the Catskills at our event.
The Limitations of Renewable Energy
Zagata noted at our event that New York gets about 169 days of useful sunlight a year during daylight hours. “That means we get enough solar energy to be useful a quarter of the time,” he said. “The grid has to run around the clock 365 days a year. I don’t care whether you’re Republican, Democrat, green, blue or orange, You cannot change the physics.”
As such, the land use consequences of New York’s renewable energy goals are bleak for areas like the Catskills, the Southern Tier and the North Country. In order to have the overbuild of utility-scale renewables that can charge the Hudson Valley lithium-ion battery plants that are being marketed by Catskill Mountainkeeper subsidiary New Yorkers for Clean Power, massive amounts of cheap land are needed.
Rooftops and parking lots are not cheap, and they cannot accommodate utility-scale installations that plug into the high-voltage transmission trunks that feed battery plants and eventually get down to New York City.
At the event, a discussion of this was impossible amidst the hissing and shouting of a small contingent of the audience, who ardently believe that a handful of unseen small-scale renewable installations, combined with massive utility transmission upgrades paid for by ratepayers under the CLCPA, will be sufficient to completely replace fossil fuels.
As a conservationist who has worked in the energy industry, Zagata says that renewable limitations don’t mean that finding alternatives to hydrocarbons is wrong.
“Everyone who has any understanding of energy knows that we have to find alternative to fossil fuels because they are by definition non-renewable,” he said. “It’s not the fact that we need to make a transition, but it’s the time with which we’re trying to do it. You can’t do it that quickly.”
He also addressed what he sees as the incongruity of the old-guard environmental groups. The same organizations that fought Constitution Pipeline (a story which requires several of its own articles to tell properly) which would have created about 120 miles of new right-of-way, he said, are now largely silent about renewable infrastructure that will require thousands of miles of new transmission corridors. “Green energy is going to create thousands of miles of new rights-of-way. Not 120.”
These tradeoffs are no longer hypothetical. The pipeline would have connected transmission-constrained New England to natural gas via the Catskills, has instead been replaced by burning garbage and oil for winter heat, leading to all six New England governors signing an agreement to explore advanced nuclear energy amid concerns that the offshore savior of Vineyard Wind won’t ever be completed. In New York, a Democrat-supported proposal by New York State Senator Rachel May to open up hundreds of thousands of acres of state reforestation land to transmission infrastructure for renewable energy installations has unleashed a torrent of protests.
Zagata offered his observation about the Catskills’ current situation relative to New York City’s long-term renewable intentions: “If you think you can deal with the city and come out even, you’re a fool. You’re a lamb being led to the slaughter.”
Thirty Years
The through-line of Zagata’s career, from his confirmation in 1995 to his appearance in Phoenicia in 2026, is a consistent argument: that good environmental policy has to be grounded in science and economics, not ideology, and that the environmental movement has repeatedly sacrificed both in favor of political positioning.
That argument possibly cost him his job 30 years ago, and in Phoenicia, it earned him howls of protest from a portion of the audience, but also respect from people who were to listen and learn.
“A couple of people reached out and shook my hand afterward,” he said. “There were people in the room that were listening.”
Perhaps the greatest lesson to be learned from Zagata’s speech at our event was that the lamentations from a loud minority of the audience were nothing new: they’ve always come with the territory. He has faced them for decades, and the moral of his story was that he wishes he had fought even harder.
And that’s what he apologized for. It’s the kind of accountability that the Catskills has rarely been offered.