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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.

In the summer of 2024, Central Hudson customers in New York’s Hudson Valley opened their bills to discover a backbreaking rate increase. Electric bills rose 7.8%. Gas bills rose 9.1%. For many households, the increases arrived on top of years of already-increasing utility costs, a billing system snafu that had sent inaccurate bills to tens of thousands of customers, and across-the-board inflation.

The question everyone was asking was simple: why? Are utility bills going up because New York has a nation-leading climate law? Or does New York need to invest in climate even more?

On March 27 in Kingston, NY, Ulster County Executive Jen Metzger, Assemblymember Sarahana Shrestha, and State Senator Michelle Hinchey held a press conference to assert the latter. Metzger, as a former State Senator, was a driving force behind the 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA), while Shrestha and Hinchey have made climate action central pillars of their work in Albany. The press conference comes as Governor Kathy Hochul is applying pressure to adjust the law’s timeline and underlying assumptions for the first time since its passage.

Central Hudson is one of six major investor-owned utilities in New York, all operating under the same CLCPA compliance framework and the same PSC oversight. What the Central Hudson record shows in granular detail is a pattern that ratepayers across the state are already experiencing, and that the leaked NYSERDA projection of more than $4,100 annually per Upstate household projects at scale going forward.

The answer is in the documents. We analyzed every filing across Central Hudson dockets at the New York State Department of Public Service from 2009 through 2024, with more than 4,300 documents in total. From that index, we identified and reviewed the primary source documents that matter most: Commission Orders, Joint Proposals, intervenor testimony, and Department of Public Service Staff briefs across all five rate cases.

The documents tell a story of how New York’s climate transition was deliberately financed through the utility rate case process. Politicians and organizations that championed that law, and even applauded the first wave of climate-driven rate increases in 2020, are now pointing at the bill they helped create and calling it evidence of corporate greed.

In November 2023, Assemblymember Shrestha filed formal testimony in Central Hudson’s rate case arguing that it was misinformation to attribute the utility’s historic rate increases to New York’s climate law. Three months later, the state’s own regulators found the opposite: without the climate law’s capital mandates, Central Hudson’s electric spending would have fallen below what the state had already approved in 2021.

Until now, only one side of the story has been told.

Where Were Rate Cases Like Before the Climate Law?

In 2009, Central Hudson requested rate increases that feel pedestrian by today’s standards: 6% increases in electric delivery revenues and gas. 43% of the increase was attributed to property taxes, 17% was for capital investment, and the rest were for things like tree trimming, inflation, remediation and low-income programs.

In 2014, Central Hudson requested a 14.8% increase in electric and 7.4% in gas. The main cost drivers were catching up on infrastructure investments, grid modernization, right of way/tree trimming, a storm reserve, property taxes, and other small items.

In both cases, energy efficiency costs were kept off the base rate and collected through a separate, transparent surcharge. Climate mandates appear nowhere in either filing. Rate increases were premised on maintaining reliable service.

The Climate Law Arrives

In 2020, just 13 months after the CLCPA passed, Central Hudson filed its first post-climate-law rate case. The requested increases were modest: $32.8 million (8.4%) in electric, $14.4 million (12.1%) in gas, and the approved increases were small: a slight decrease in Year 1, then around 2-3% in Years 2 and 3.

For the first time, the settlement agreement included a binding CLCPA compliance clause, signed by twelve parties including Alliance for a Green Economy (AGREE), Public Utility Law Project (PULP), and Dutchess County, with CLP, the Metzger-founded organization, filing a separate statement welcoming the CLCPA provisions as a landmark step.

The proposal contained a host of climate obligations, including a 2.5 percent reduction in gas sales from 2019 levels, fleet electrification targets, decommissioning of gas combustion turbines, elimination of oil-to-gas conversion incentives, and a geothermal feasibility study. AGREE publicly celebrated, saying “To our knowledge, this Joint Proposal is the first in New York to pledge a commitment on the part of a gas company to reduce gas sales in the coming years.”

The CLCPA was now embedded in the rate base, and not an efficiency surcharge as in years past. The bills would come later.

In July 2022, Metzger, now the Policy Director of New Yorkers for Clean Power, submitted formal comments on the Climate Action Council’s Scoping Plan.

Her comments called for the PSC to “prohibit utilities from expanding the gas distribution system into new geographic areas” and called out Central Hudson for cutting “incentives for air-source heat pumps in half in February 2022, which will only serve to slow adoption of these systems.”

Four months later, Metzger took the stage as Ulster County Executive-elect in Kingston to speak at the launch of the NY Renews coalition’s Climate, Jobs and Justice Package.

Standing with the coalition that had driven the CLCPA’s passage and whose member organizations had signed the 2020 Joint Proposal, she told the audience: “The high natural gas prices [are] driving our high utility bills… the sooner we reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and shift to a clean energy economy, the better we all will be.” She also said: “The revenue raised to fund the climate act cannot burden our residents and small businesses. It absolutely has to be done fairly.”

The programs the climate coalition demanded, such as heat pump adoption, building electrification and restrictions on gas expansion added tens of millions in new rate allowances. And the grid infrastructure needed to deliver that clean energy pushed Central Hudson’s capital budget beyond what the state had already approved in 2021.

Here Come the Climate Costs

By 2023, the bill came due. Central Hudson filed the largest rate increase request in its history: $139.5 million (31.6%) in electric delivery revenues, and $41.5 million (29.2%) in gas. For perspective, the 2009 electric request had been $15.2 million. This one was nearly nine times larger.

For the first time in recent history, no Joint Proposal was reached after a contentious process. The Commission approved $74.4 million (16.5%) in electric delivery revenue increases and $27.3 million (20.1%) in gas, then applied one-time bill moderators to reduce the immediate customer impact to $58.1 million electric and $21.2 million gas. The full revenue requirement is being collected from ratepayers.

The rate case now had an entirely new section: a dedicated “Climate Leadership and Sustainability Panel,” with a team of Central Hudson witnesses whose testimony was devoted to CLCPA compliance. Alongside the traditional cost drivers was a new category of spending that had not existed in any prior Central Hudson rate case. These climate costs included:

• Energy efficiency and building electrification – $23.2 million
• CLCPA Phase 1 capital projects – $50 million in the rate year
• 45 new employees dedicated specifically to CLCPA targets – 19% of all new hires
• A proposed blank deferral account for future climate mandate costs described in testimony as “unknown and uncertain at this time”

In response, Assemblymember Sarahana Shrestha filed formal testimony, arguing that Central Hudson was misrepresenting the source of the increases.

The state’s own regulatory staff told a different story: that without these CLCPA Phase 1 projects, Central Hudson’s capital budget would have stayed well within the levels the Commission approved in 2021.

“If the capital expenditure impact associated with CLCPA Phase 1 projects are filtered out from the Company’s proposal, its remaining capital expenditure forecast would be well below the Company’s historic actual spending levels, and the Commission-approved total electric capital spending levels approved by the Commission in the 2021 Rate Order.”

Department of Public Service Staff Initial Brief, Page 106

In other words, the CLCPA additions were not supplementing a growing capital program. They were the growth.

The Department of Public Service recommended approving the CLCPA-driven increase because they would help create headroom for over 500 MW of new intermittent renewables in the Hudson Valley. Staff also recommended cutting an $8.25 million Electric Transmission Structure Coating program to make room for the CLCPA capital, finding it “not immediately necessary at this time” in light of the climate mandate costs. Not only did the climate law add to ratepayer costs, but it displaced other suggested infrastructure maintenance to do it.

Shrestha’s testimony went further than the broad misinformation claim. She opposed multiple expenditures that flowed directly from the 2020 Joint Proposal’s commitments (the same agreement AGREE had celebrated as a landmark just two years prior). She argued Central Hudson “should find non-ratepayer sources of funding for electrifying a portion of its fleet” and called on the PSC to “reject Central Hudson’s capital expenditures associated with its proposal to introduce solar generation.”

The PSC As An Enforcer of the Climate Law

The next rate case, settled through a Joint Proposal filed in May 2025, should dispel any notion that climate compliance is not driving increased costs. The three-year rate plan set cumulative delivery increases totaling 16.1 percentage points for electric and 26.5 percentage points for gas.

The big ticket item was $177 million for 17 electric projects located within Disadvantaged Communities, which are CLCPA Phase 1 grid upgrades required by the law’s equity mandate. Central Hudson put a number on it in its own published rate plan brochure: ‘The impact of CLCPA Phase 1 projects equates to approximately $36.6M per year on electric rates. This includes transmission line rebuilds, upgrading substations, and replacing antiquated distribution circuitry to meet today’s building standards.'”

That figure is the clearest answer available to the question this piece started with. It is Central Hudson telling its own customers, in plain language, what one category of climate mandate compliance costs annually.

The Commission’s approval order confirmed the rationale: rate increases were necessary “while advancing Commission and State policies, including the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act.”

After the PSC approved the increases in 2025, Shrestha declared that “state regulation of investor-owned utilities is a sham for customers.” Hinchey said the PSC had “increased costs for every day New Yorkers, without significant benefits in return.” Metzger said “I appreciate the PSC’s efforts to reduce Central Hudson’s original rate request, but it does not go far enough and asks too much of ratepayers.”

All three called for the PSC to somehow deliver the same climate mandates at lower cost, without explaining how.

What Needs to Be Said

Separate from the debate over the true costs of the CLCPA, there are legitimate grievances against Central Hudson. The 2021 billing system crisis produced widespread problems for customers, and the fallout contributed to cost pressures that rightfully fell on shareholders.

But beyond the Hudson Valley, this should be a case study in evaluating the true costs and supposed benefits of the climate law. The rate increases that are condemned today were filed to comply with a law that state politicians wrote, championed, and have defended.

The organizations standing with them signed the 2020 Joint Proposal that embedded those compliance obligations and called it a landmark. The expenditures they opposed in testimony are the implementation costs of the law they champion. The PSC whose decisions they call a sham is applying the CLCPA’s own provisions when it approves those rates.

Shrestha called it misinformation to attribute the rate increases to the CLCPA. The state’s own regulators, reviewing the same record, found the opposite. Both statements are in the public record. Central Hudson ratepayers are paying for both.

When it comes to evaluating what should be done with the CLCPA in 2026, it should be clear: we are not talking about hypothetical costs. The bill for the climate law has already come due.

Last month, a bill quietly passed in the New York State Senate that few people in the Catskills know about.

Sponsored by Senator Rachel May of Syracuse and voted for by Senator Michelle Hinchey, Senate Bill S4408 would allow the Department of Environmental Conservation to grant leases and easements on state-owned reforestation lands for green energy projects like solar and wind installations.

According to DEC data, there are 87,300 acres of state forest land in and around the Catskills that could be affected by this bill, including Vernooy Kill State Forest, Burnt-Rossman Hills State Forest, the Shawangunk Ridge, and the Steam Mill State Forest.

When pressed on the Senate floor about why communities that have organized to block solar sprawl from their farmland and viewsheds wouldn’t simply do the same here, May was candid about the underlying logic: “There is a push to put these kinds of facilities in places that are out of the way.”

“[It] is up to the DEC to decide if it is compatible with the purposes of the land,” she said. Community solar installations, she said, “…only work if you can put the transmission lines through some of these remote or forested areas.”

The bill, which has advanced to the Assembly Committee on Environmental Conservation, is a continuation of a centuries-long tradition for the Catskills. The Catskills are “out of the way” and it’s up to someone else to decide what to do with them. Close to 50% of Catskill Park is controlled by either New York State or New York City, and that didn’t start with S4408.

It starts in 1708, with a land grant.

The Hardenbergh Patent and the Patroon System

In 1708, Queen Anne of England’s wicked governor Viscount Cornbury awarded over a million acres of the Catskills and Hudson Valley to Johannis Hardenbergh, forming the “Hardenbergh Patent.” Rather than awarding the land to people who would actually live on it and cultivate it, the patent handed control to a small group of wealthy speculators, creating, as one historian put it, a “swath of land monopoly and aristocratic domination.”

In 1749, the land was divided amongst New York City merchant oligarchs like Hardenbergh, Robert Livingston and Gulian Verplanck, who were trusted to maintain a monopoly over the colonies, alongside the Van Rensselaer family, who had existing holdings grandfathered in from the Dutch crown. To develop the vast, unprofitable wilderness, the proprietors needed labor and capital. Both were in short supply. As an intermediate step, the only thing the landlords could offer was were, at the time, favorable lease terms: zero down payments and four to seven years of zero rent, which induced poor men to build farms rather than work as day laborers. However, once the free years were up, the tenants were transitioned into perpetual leases, paying rent in wheat and “fat fowls.”

The Agricultural Crisis and the Anti-Rent War

As long as grain prices were high, this system worked well enough as a developmental step to develop many of the villages and towns we know today. But by the 1820s, a profound crisis emerged. The soil wasn’t rich enough to support more than subsistence farming, and it was hit hard by the scourge of the Hessian fly. This collided with an economic crisis, when the Erie Canal connected much more productive grain farmland in Western New York to New York City, cutting the cost of shipping by 90%. Flooded with cheap western wheat, the teetering farms of the Catskills and Hudson Valley became completely unviable.

In order to pivot and keep paying rent to the patroons, farmers needed access to capital for new technology, and to transportation infrastructure to get their products to market. But because the landlords still held the rights to the land, farmers couldn’t use their land as collateral to access credit. And while the Delaware and Hudson Canal helped somewhat, railroads were not yet advanced enough to reach the many remote areas of the Catskills. The quasi-feudal lease system was on life support and needed to change with the times. But instead, a new generation of patroons (who replaced the more lenient “Good Patroons” like Stephen Van Rensselaer) cruelly demanded immediate back rent to be paid, an impossible demand.

Farmers, pushed to the brink, turned to Jacksonian mob politics through the Anti-Rent War, while surviving financially by extracting the region’s tanbark and timber resources.

After much struggle, the Anti-Renters wore down the landlords and acquired the deeds to their property. But their victory just meant that they were the owners of “miserable bush pasture”, with tanning bark extraction as the only profitable industry. Whether they were tenants or owners, farmers needed infrastructure to bring products to market, and they needed access to credit. For much of Delaware County, the 1850s advent of the Erie Railroad was a quantum leap, connecting Deposit to New York City.

Many locals abandoned failing wheat crops and pivoted to grazing and dairying, helping Delaware County farmers reach a market hundreds of times larger than before. This led to Delaware County becoming the dairy capital of the nation, and created many successful intergenerational farms.

However, not all of the Catskills were so lucky. The canals and railroads infrastructure wouldn’t reach the more challenging mountain areas, leading to names like Zadock Pratt of Prattsville, Colonel H.D. Snyder and James Simpson in Phoenicia, and Pratt & Sampson in Shandaken becoming synonymous with stripping millions of feet of hemlock annually to supply bark for massive tanning operations, leaving peeled logs to rot in the woods. The tenant farmers of yesteryear were left to fend for themselves as owners of poor farmland.

It was at this time that Hudson River School Painter Sanford Gifford completed Hunter Mountain, Twilight, a sublime juxtaposition of a beautiful evening in the Catskills with the aftermath of slash and burn tannery operations.

Gifford’s painting represented the nadir of the tanbark era of the Catskills; it was soon reported that there was simply no bark left, and the tanning industry moved West and South to do the same thing all over again.

The Railroad Bonding Disaster

At that same time, the “robber baron” era of the post-Civil War was in full swing. Federally and state-funded Hamiltonian infrastructure projects became a thing of the past. Instead, the New York Legislature passed laws that dared small municipalities to bear the massive financial risk of private railroad construction. In the spring of 1866, the state legislature passed two disastrous bonding acts, authorizing towns along the proposed routes of the Wallkill Valley Railroad, as well as the New York Oswego Midland Railroad to issue bonds for up to thirty percent of their total assessed property value, and invest the proceeds in railroad stock.

This was a complete inversion of how New York had previously built the Erie Canal and Delaware and Hudson Canal, which were fully or partially financed (respectively) by the state with the intention of public benefit. The railroads would be exempt from local taxation for ten years, while local communities remained responsible for making interest payments. Towns like Shawangunk, Gardiner, and New Paltz were explicitly named in the bills.

After taking on massive debt to backstop the railroads, the financial Panic of 1873 hit at the worst possible time. The Midland railroad collapsed, and the Wallkill Valley Railroad was not yet profitable. Many property owners, having stripped off all of their hemlock bark in years prior, simply walked away from their ruined land rather than pay the bloated taxes. Their land was reverted to the county, leaving local officials holding the bag.

How Ulster County’s Debt Became a Forest Preserve

Several Ulster County towns were in a deep financial hole in the 1870s. The worst example was the Town of Shawangunk, which had issued $114,000 in bonds to buy stock in the Wallkill Valley Railroad. For perspective, their their town’s entire property value was a mere $774,000. In order to make an interest payment on their debt, their taxpayers had to cough up $42,000, on top of the normal taxes for the operation of the town.

Several other towns were in the same boat, and by the late 1870s, Ulster County was the only county in New York State that could not pay its obligations to the state treasury office. Albany then passed a flurry of legislation between 1879 and 1883 that made Ulster County’s treasurer personally responsible for the arrears. By 1884, the county (and the treasurer owed the state $40,000 with no mechanism to repay it.

The local man who went to Albany to solve this was a Shawangunk farmer and supervisor named Cornelius A.J. Hardenbergh, elected to the Assembly in 1884 on an anti-tax platform. His family name was not a coincidence; he was a direct descendant of the very same oligarchical patroon to whom Hardenbergh patent was awarded to a century ago. The patent’s legacy of absentee ownership and underdevelopment was directly part of what had produced the fiscal crisis Cornelius was now trying to solve.

He arrived in Albany just as the state legislature was heavily focused on creating the Adirondack Park. An expert commission toured the Catskill region and was left completely unimpressed compared to the rich forests of the Adirondacks; the tanbark industry had left nothing behind, and the experts concluded that the forests would never yield merchantable timber again. They determined that protecting the Catskills was of “less general importance” than preserving the Adirondacks.

But the Catskills ended up being preserved anyway, not because science demanded it, but because Ulster County needed a bailout. On April 20, the legislature passed Chapter 158 of the Laws of 1885, which wiped Ulster County’s debts to the state. In exchange, all of Ulster County’s delinquent parcels were conveyed to New York State.

Within a month, the Forest Preserve Act was passed, designating all state-owned lands in Ulster, Greene and Sullivan Counties, as well as those in the newly minted Adirondack Park, as “forever wild.” In 1894, the “forever wild” language was written into the State Constitution.

“The lands now or hereafter constituting the forest preserve shall be forever kept as wild forest lands. They shall not be sold, nor shall they be leased or taken by any person or corporation, public or private.”

New York State Constitution, Article XIV

The state suddenly found itself holding roughly 135,000 acres of detached, scattered parcels across the Catskills, many of which were entirely unsuited for a preserve. They wanted to sell these useless parcels off, but their own new constitutional mandate forbade it unless the land fell outside of “park limits.” In 1904, they arbitrarily created a “Catskill Park,” drawing the “blue line” boundary across the map. This created Catskill Park and roped in parts of Delaware County. The park allowed them to dump unwanted land outside the blue line, creating a gerrymandered land-use jurisdiction.

The Reservoir System and the End of the Dairy Economy

By 1907, as New York City looked to the Catskills for cheap, gravity-fed water, the lofty “forever wild” language was swiftly modified to allow for 3% of the protected Forest Preserve to be flooded and used for the construction of public water storage and dams. The amendment to the state constitution stands to this day, explicitly allowing state lands to “be used for the storage of water for public purposes and the construction of dams therefor.”

The utilitarian conservation framework that made this possible had been assembled by some of the most powerful men in the country. Gifford Pinchot, the first Chief of the U.S. Forest Service, recalled in his autobiography the movement was “still without a name” until he found one in India, where British imperialists administered vast tracts of conquered land as “Conservancies.” In 1907, Pinchot pitched the name to President Theodore Roosevelt, who approved it instantly.

The term embodies the rational extraction of remote resources for the benefit of the empire, over the objections of people who actually live there.

Pinchot was named after the Hudson River School painter Sanford Gifford, who painted Hunter Mountain, Twilight, his quiet elegy for the hemlock forests stripped bare by the tanning industry. Pinchot’s father, a millionaire New York real estate speculator and lumber financier, was a close friend and patron of the artist. The painter had warned against the Catskills’ first wave of utilitarian extraction, but his namesake took the visual legacy of that stripped landscape and used it to justify a bureaucratic framework that would lock the region into a permanent state of managed underdevelopment, administered, as always, from somewhere else.

By 1911, the Catskill Forest Preserve was administered by the Pinchot-inspired New York State Conservation Commission, which combined water and land management. By 1926, it became the Conservation Department, and in 1970, on the first Earth Day, Governor Nelson Rockefeller transformed the department into the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) that we know today.

Meanwhile, New York City was quietly building the infrastructure that would define the region for the next century. The Ashokan Reservoir, completed in 1915, flooded the hamlets of the Esopus Valley. The Pepacton and Cannonsville reservoirs, completed in the 1950s, drowned Delaware County’s most productive farmland that John Jervis’s Erie Railroad had made into the dairy capital of the nation a century earlier. Instead of thriving by selling valuable dairy products to New York City, the Catskills became a site of managed decline.

Hardenburgh’s Last Stand

The tiny Ulster County town of Hardenburgh was named for the same Johannis Hardenburgh patent family, and it is completely encircled by the Catskill Forest Preserve. In the 1970s, their 236 residents were getting crushed by a $20M tax levy, while neighbors like the Zen Studies Society Inc., the Dung Kar Gumpa Society for the Preservation of Tibetan Dancing, the Catskill Center, and of course, the State of New York, were all receiving large tax breaks.

They resorted to an ingenious legal rebellion: 200 of the residents obtained “certificates of ministry” by mail from the California-based Universal Life Church.

“Lester Bourke, who owns 192 acres of land, only 19 of which can be farmed for corn, saw his property taxes rise from $1,822 in 1974 to $5,642 last year. He figures three-quarters of his income is eaten up by the local property tax.”

Lee Mitang, Associated Press, January 17, 1978

Backed by their local town assessor, Robert Kerwick, these newly minted ministers claimed full religious tax exemptions on their properties, refusing to pay taxes on land that they could do little with. It was a gesture of defiance against a situation that had been created entirely without them.

But, true to the historical pattern of the Catskills, they were quickly overruled by authorities acting from afar. The State Legislature in Albany enacted strict new guidelines taking effect in 1979 that limited such exemptions only to property used exclusively for church purposes. The town sued the state, arguing the new statute violated their First Amendment rights, but the New York State Court of Appeals ruled against the residents, forcing the properties back onto the tax rolls.

While New York City’s population grew by fifty percent over the last century, Delaware County has slightly lost population. In Phoenicia, an Ulster County hamlet in Shandaken surrounded by Forest Preserve land, the population fell thirty-seven percent between 2012 and 2023. These population losses mean that fixed costs are being shared among a shrinking pool of people, leading to the cost of taxes, utilities and other essentials rising for everyone. The elementary school closed and a critical sewer system was never built because outside agencies withdrew funding after years of bureaucratic gridlock.

Albany’s Next Idea: Solar Panels on “Reforested” Land

A century of arrested development and temporary boom and bust cycles have left the Catskills in a vulnerable position. The system governing the region is on the verge of changing again, but not in the way that many Catskill residents would hope.

The region was once targeted as a place for cheap farm labor. Then it became tanning bark. Then it became a dual-purpose “conservation” zone with water resources. And today, as New York State falls further behind on its 2019 climate goals, city and state officials are looking at the Catskills to save them yet again.

The irony is that the Catskill Forest Preserve originally began as reforestation land. As the 1885 forestry report found, there weren’t many forests to preserve; the hillsides were covered in stripped trees and stumps that the state then acquired simply allowed to grow back. The distinction between what is “reforestation” and “forever wild” preserve land, at least in the Catskills, is a completely arbitrary legal definition that can be altered to provide tax relief, build reservoirs, and now, to build solar panels and transmission lines.

Once again, the Catskills are being treated as a blank space on someone else’s map. As Senator May asserted, the forests are “out of the way,” and the few people that live here can be a financial backstop and sacrifice the landscape for infrastructure decisions made far away.

What a Different Model Looks Like

The Catskills have never lacked resources; it lacks agency. For centuries, the residents of the region have been stuck playing the hand that they are dealt, and picking up the pieces after decisions were made far away. The question for the region in 2026 is: what would happen if local residents, not Albany or New York City bureaucrats, got to decide what the future of the Catskills should be. 

That conversation is happening on March 21 at 2 PM at the Phoenicia Playhouse. A screening of Unfiltered: New York’s Watershed Battle will be followed by a rich community conversation where anyone is welcome to speak. Buy your ticket today.

On a Thursday night in late February, the Okun Theater at SUNY Delhi filled with over 80 students, farmers, engineers, retirees, and local officials who came to watch the second-ever screening of Unfiltered: New York’s Watershed Battle.

The film traces the history of New York City’s Catskill watershed system, from the clash of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr over the Manhattan Water Company, to the original taking of land for the reservoirs, through a controversial early 20th-century “depopulation plan,” and into the present day, where new pressures on the region are mounting from renewable energy. But rather than simply re-litigating old grievances, each event is an opportunity offered by the filmmakers to rural communities.

It’s not about solar versus nuclear, or upstate versus downstate, but something much more important: what kind of future does Delaware County get to have?

A Changing Landscape for the Watershed

The February 19, 2026 event came in the midst of multiple developments confirming that the role of the New York City and state government in the Catskills is evolving around the issue of renewable energy, with or without the host communities.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani appointed Lisa Garcia to head the Department of Environmental Justice, who promises a robust “environmental justice” framework that prioritizes people who live in the Bronx and Queens. A bill to allow the New York Department of Conservation to develop solar energy on “reforestation” land passed the State Senate. The Coalition of Watershed Towns expressed concern that their own economic development study is being ignored in favor of a McKinsey study commissioned by NYC. And the Town of Middletown is exploring a solar moratorium to protect against potential “mission creep” in the new pro-renewables watershed pact.

As with New York Energy Alliance’s first Catskills Energy Future event, the conversation after the film was just as important as the film itself.

“You Talked About Things I Struggle With Every Day”

John Gasstrom, CEO of the Delaware County Electric Cooperative, offered some of the evening’s most interesting testimony. He leads an organization responsible for delivering “safe, clean, reliable, and affordable energy” to 5,500 people across Delaware, Schoharie, and parts of Otsego and Chenango counties.

Gasstrom said the film illuminated two issues that are affecting the operation of his utility. The first was the issue of stagnant population growth. While there is no literal “depopulation plan” for the watershed as proposed by New York City’s J.P. Morgan-aligned Merchants Association in the 1910s, city policies have locked up land and economic development opportunities so that population growth is nearly impossible. That pressure is increasingly showing up on electric bills.

“When you don’t have available land for expansion and growth, I can’t continue to spread fixed costs over a greater number of people to keep electric bills low,” he said. “Your statistic of 0.1% growth in Delaware County matches what I’ve seen across my electric grid. I see growth in usage, but not in the number of consumers. So everybody coming on is picking up more costs.”

The second issue was the difference between firm energy and wind and solar. DCEC was created in the 1940s by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Rural Electrical Administration policy, on the basis of helping farmers in the then New York City “milkshed” increase productivity with electricity to prevent food shortages. But what has allowed local people to depend on DCEC is their purchase power agreement with the New York Power Authority for 24/7 electricity from the St. Lawrence-FDR hydroelectric plant in Massena, NY dating back to the 1950s.

“Hydro is a great renewable source… far more reliable, dependable, and schedulable than solar or wind,” Gasstrom said. “When I need power, it’s 6 AM on a January morning, or 8 PM on a February evening, and I don’t have solar generating then. Unless I’m going to invest tens of millions in battery storage (and I’m looking at that) it’s very difficult.”

“And tying it all back together, it’s not just energy affordability, it’s property affordability, creating an economic environment where businesses can locate here, which brings people to live here, which creates a growth engine that becomes an affordable model to operate and live in.”

Read New York Energy Alliance co-founders Fox Green and Brian Wilson’s 2022 testimony urging New York State government to let NYPA build more than just renewables.

Q&A Highlights

Taking Responsibility

“What I took away the most was just the words ‘locals taking responsibility for their towns.’ I don’t know what the agenda is here, but I know that we have to come together and cooperate and figure out our situation — not rely on New York City or whatever. Maybe it’s a combination of solutions… And if we invest in anything, we should own it. We should own our town’s infrastructure and take responsibility for it.”

– Thomas, Local Resident

“I support public power if it’s about increasing the amount of energy we can all use while lowering costs, not rationing. The big distinction with FDR was that he was not saying public ownership was the solution, he said it was a tool in the toolbox. His real bottom line was creating abundant energy. He wanted to increase everyone’s energy consumption because he knew that would raise the standard of living.”

– Fox Green, New York Energy Alliance

Why is Westchester Different?

“First off, I believe you. I did some research; I know that you’re not funded by anybody — you guys did this independently.

My question: I lived in Westchester County and Putnam County. Those are the areas that were the first water supplies for New York City, some taking happened there too… and those areas are very robust. Do you think that’s a function of their proximity to the city, or other reasons, or that they were never as completely controlled by New York City?”

– Steve from Margaretville

“When the Westchester water system was developed, in the 1840s and 1850s, that was still in the tail end of the tradition of the Erie Canal and the D&H Canal. It was actually the same engineer who built the Erie Canal, the D&H Canal, and then the New York City Croton system: John Jervis, who Port Jervis is named after.

They had a very positive conception of the relationship that infrastructure can have with nature. They believed explicitly that infrastructure should support a growing population. John Jervis actually had a huge role in building up dairy farms in Delaware County. Before the 1850s there were farms here, but they were all subsistence farms — that’s what the anti-rent war was about. The farmers had a very hard time making a living. What really set the farmers free and made them thrive was Jervis building a railroad from Deposit all the way to New York City: the Erie Railroad.

What happened then was that dairy farms in Delaware County became one of the biggest dairy-producing regions in the entire nation, because there was finally a way to get the milk from Delaware County down to New York City. Nobody said, ‘we’re sending our milk to New York City, screw them!’ People said: we’re providing a critical service, we’re getting paid well, and we’re building generational farms.”

– Alex Panagiotopoulos, New York Energy Alliance

Is Germany a Model?

“The film had a lot of robust historical information. But then it seemed to carry a negative connotation toward solar, with some facts that weren’t really elaborated on.

Other countries like Germany are up to 20–40% of their energy from renewables. I think you could have done a deeper dive into the facts of solar in Delaware County — it’s not something that just came around last week. Are they a positive or negative impact? Is solar doing what it’s supposed to be doing? Is it making the grid better? Is it lowering our bills?”

– Frank from Hamden

“Those are really great questions to be asking, and I’d encourage you to look into it for yourself. What I have researched: solar panels are not very good for the grid. They can’t be controlled — you can’t tell the sun to turn on. You can say ‘we need more gas, more coal, more hydro’ — those are things you can control. Solar adds a level of instability that makes the grid harder to run. Engineers will tell you all about this.

On Germany: their leadership just admitted that shutting down all their nuclear energy was a massive mistake. Pound for pound, nuclear is the best energy. To get the same amount of energy from solar you need to cover massive amounts of wildlife habitat, whereas a nuclear plant takes a tiny spot.
Nuclear plants create excellent, generational, technically skilled jobs that people feel proud to work at. With solar panels and wind turbines, nobody needs to operate them. With a nuclear plant you need a whole team of highly educated people. It’s an incredible leap — it’s carbonless, emission-free, clean.”

– Fox Green, New York Energy Alliance

The Myth of Pure Mountain Water

“As far as I understand, most of the Northeast cities have a combined storm and sewer system, so they’re dumping sewage effluent as well as rainwater when their tanks overflow directly into the rivers. That includes in the Catskills. If they’re doing that anyway, how can New York City claim they’re getting fresh water from here? Why does it matter whether they filter it or not? At that point, you’re drinking the same wastewater from animals and from people.”

I just don’t understand what the big deal is. The whole fight between New York City and Delaware County seems to hinge on the idea of unfiltered water, but whether they filter it or not, they’re still pulling the water anyway.”

– An Engineer

“It doesn’t make sense from an engineering standpoint, does it? It’s a political question.

Why can’t the Catskills develop? Because New York City’s water has to stay pure in the mountains where all the fairies live.’ But that’s not true, as you see firsthand as an engineer.

Now the situation’s changing and they can no longer keep up this fiction. Just like Burr did with the Manhattan Water Company: people are catching on. So let’s fix problems. Hamilton’s system, the public financing of great infrastructure projects, is still the model: there’s a scientific solution that can uplift everybody, both the host community and New York City.”

– Fox Green, New York Energy Alliance

Where Will Our Power Come From?

“One of the reasons our electric bills are going up all over the country is to prepare for AI — solar fields, data centers, all of these things. We’re being told we’ll need 30–50% more power than the grids can currently give.

People are knocking on farmers’ doors constantly asking to buy land. Almost half our land in the Catskills has already been bought. Our communities need to be more a part of the decisions. When are you showing this film again? I have lots of friends who would be interested.”

– Louise from Hamden

“When a town is disempowered for so long, and people think ‘as long as we get the tax bill from New York City, we’re good,’ and that compounds over decades, then when these pressures come, there’s no local sovereignty to respond. We’re not here to sell a solution; we’re here to bring people up to speed on the history and get these conversations going.”

– Alex Panagiotopoulos, New York Energy Alliance

Small Towns Left Behind

“I want to take you outside of Delaware County for a moment. There’s another issue in New York State besides the reservoir thing: electricity. In 2000, the first industrial wind farm built in New York State was the Madison Wind Farm — 12 Vestas wind turbines, 300 feet tall. In their 25 years of operating, the area did not get a single megawatt of power from those wind turbines. Only the landowners got a little coin for having them on their land. Those turbines also sat idle for four years before being torn down at the end of their life cycle.

All that wind power was shipped to New York City — just like the watershed water is dammed up and the benefits go to New York City while small towns in the Catskills are left behind.”

– Brian from Delhi

“We want to do economic development and energy and water projects that work for the host community and also work for the beneficiary. The only way to do that is if you’re somehow transforming or adding value to the thing being sent downstate.

The dairy farms are the perfect historical example. Nobody ever said ‘they’re taking our milk’ — we said ‘please take our milk, give us money for it.’ We’re selling it, building generational wealth, and people love milk. We want to find the milk of the 21st century and sell it to the benefit of this region.”

– Alex Panagiotopoulos, New York Energy Alliance

What’s Next?

Over 125 people have come to our first two screenings in Oneonta and Delhi, and a number of people have attended both. The events have had high rates of audience participation, with discussions that have involved farmers, engineers, utility stakeholders, local politicians and officials, artists, homeowners, and students.

With a firm grounding in our region and nation’s history, the discussion can be of a high quality: the horizon of possibilities is zoomed out to decades and centuries, and not just the proposal of the day.

More screenings are being organized. The next one is on March 21 at the Phoenicia Playhouse. To stay in the loop, sign up for the email list on the footer of our website.

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Thank you to SUNY Delhi’s Environmental Studies and Sustainability Club for hosting us, and to SUNY Delhi’s Director of Human Resources, Marketing & Meal Plans Christina Viafore for helping make the event happen. Photo credits go to Irina Zollars.

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.

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 19 at 8 P.M.

Subscribe to our mailing list to be notified of future events!

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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.

A snowy Saturday did little to thin the crowd at the Foothills Performing Arts Center in Oneonta, where more than 40 residents and officials gathered to discuss energy, land, and the future of the Catskills.

Until now, most public discussion about the watershed has been nostalgic, memorializing the communities and farms lost decades ago, without a thought toward what could be different in the future. It’s an outcome of the “depopulation plan” for the watershed region that was advanced over a century ago by New York City business elites, and continues to this day in more polite terms.

On January 17, 2026, that paradigm was challenged at Catskills Energy Future, an event hosted by New York Energy Alliance, with a screening of Unfiltered: New York’s Watershed Battle followed by an extended public discussion. The event came amid heightened regional attention to New York City’s shifting role in upstate land and energy planning, and it marked the first time these issues were debated face-to-face in a public forum.

The exchange that followed reflected many of the dynamics explored in the film. Residents brought up concerns about bureaucratic gridlock, land-use restrictions, and economic stagnation. Others argued from the paradoxical position of New York City; that restrictions protect precious nature and water, but that same nature should now be covered in solar panels to meet the state’s energy goals. Beneath these exchanges is a deeper disagreement about whether the region’s current trajectory represents stewardship, or a form of managed decline.

Gatekeepers Insist on an Adversarial Relationship

As the discussion unfolded, a clear fault line emerged between those who view the Catskills as a static nature preserve and those who see it as a place for human creativity, industry, and growth. One attendee accused the New York Energy Alliance of using “selective history” to inflame anti-New York City sentiment. Yet the most pessimistic view of the region’s future came not from the filmmakers, but from the local legal establishment itself.

Jeff Baker, longtime attorney for the Coalition of Watershed Towns, offered a defense of the existing bureaucratic regime and the latest renewables agreement with New York City in a dialogue with NYEA’s Fox Green. In doing so, he articulated a worldview characteristic of the region’s gatekeepers, those who seek to shut down criticism of the land-use status quo:

Baker: It is always going to be a constant battle between the upstate areas and the downstreet areas.
Green: Did you watch the film? Because no, it doesn’t have to be that way.
Baker: Yeah, it does.
Green: Why?
Baker: It’s human nature.
Green: Actually, no, that’s not human. That’s animal nature. That’s the law of the jungle.
Baker: We are animals.
Green: We’re not actually. We can grow our population beyond what any animal can do because we can harness technology. We’re creative. There are more people on this planet now than there were 100,000 years ago, right? We always push outside of the limits to our population, right? Our supposed limits of growth. Because we can come up with creative solutions. Because we can discover new forms of energy. Did nuclear energy exist 200 years ago when they were building the reservoir or the canal? No, but it’s here now.

Baker’s assertion, that human beings are locked into a permanent, zero-sum struggle over resources, is the same logic that Alexander Hamilton rejected when he proposed securing New York City’s water supply from the Bronx River in 1799. It assumes that for the city to prosper, the countryside must stagnate; that for the city to have clean energy, rural regions must accept solar sprawl.

Unfiltered shatters this very premise, drawing upon examples of positive development where the needs of cities and host communities were served harmoniously. For example, Delaware County was on a subsistence farming level until the building of the New York and Erie Railroad by engineer John B. Jervis in the 1850s. It was this railroad that allowed the county to become the top dairy-producing region in the nation. Dairy farmers could get their product from Deposit to New York City in an overnight trip without spoilage.

Jervis was also behind great works like the Erie Canal and the Delaware and Hudson Canal, which both caused entire cities and towns to spring up around them, rather than choking host communities with restrictions and regulations. The building of the Cannonsville and Pepacton Reservoirs, followed by decades of implied and overt land use restrictions, later destroyed Delaware County’s dairy industry.

“Who Funds You?”

At several points during the discussion, attention was shifted away from a discussion of land use and energy policy and toward the motivations and backgrounds of the organizers themselves. One attendee repeatedly pressed the panel on funding sources and affiliations, returning to the question even after it had been answered.

NYEA’s Fox Green met the question with transparency. “Nobody,” he replied. “We run a creative agency, and because we run our own business, we’re able to take the time to do this. We’re not a funded organization; we’re just three people who were frustrated with the paradigm.”

Rather than engaging with the historical record or the policy arguments presented, the questions treated the act of inquiry itself as evidence of hidden influence. The troubling implication was that critical analysis must have originated from “outside” interests, rather than from residents and local advocates.

Q&A Highlights

Energy That Runs When You Need It

“You can’t tell the sun to shine or the wind to blow when demand spikes. The grid needs sources you can turn on, especially in winter.”

– Alex Panagiotopoulos, New York Energy Alliance

The Physics of the Grid

“I worked at the Blenheim-Gilboa Pumped Storage Plant. The only way it works is with nuclear power. Once Indian Point closed down, it cost more to generate power.

And talking about hydroelectric, the director of REA, which is the electric co-op, wanted to put a generator onto the Pepacton Reservoir at the dam. What happened to that? You’ve got the water, you’ve got the power. So that’s a political question that needs to be looked into. Where are our tax dollars going to support that?”

– A retired energy worker

Rules for Thee, But Not for Me

“It took us four years and at least 50 phone calls to get a lease for agricultural purposes to tap maple trees on land next door to us. The New York City Watershed’s inability to get stuff done is phenomenal. But now they’re talking about building renewable resources on their land? DEP shows up and tells a friend to stop excavating because of runoff, while city utility crews are running three-foot deep trenches of mud all the way down the mountain. As soon as it’s them, it’s fine.”

– A local business owner and farmer

Scarcity Is a Choice

“Nothing ever gets built. There’s no economic development, and consequently we live in stunningly poor areas.”

– A retired electrical engineer

Is It Going to Stop?

“I’m concerned about Delaware County and New York City and its infringement upon a lot of our lifestyles, our lives, our economy. I lived it. I’ve been through it. I watched both dams be built. I watched the acquisition of property. Your film is great and I thank you for it.

…

Now as your history lesson shows, New York City has oppressed Delaware County for so many years. My concern is, is it going to stop or is that going to be status quo from now on? Are we going to continue to live under the oppression of New York City?”

– A pastor

Local Control Matters

“The one thing with the Office of Renewable Energy Siting (ORES) is the lack of control that local municipalities have. Even when we offer suggestions, they can override it.”

– A county planner from the Adirondacks

Why People Came Anyway

“I’m glad we’re all here, sitting in a room together, discussing. That sure beats throwing bombs out on a phone.”

– A local resident

What’s Next?

The event in Oneonta made something visible: anywhere people are actually allowed to speak openly about energy, water, and land, the conversation can quickly move beyond “solar good versus solar bad.” It becomes a discussion about the future of the Catskills as a place where people live, work, build, and raise families.

More screenings are being scheduled across the state in 2026. Wherever these conversations take place, the goal remains the same: to insist that development in New York can both uplift and equalize humankind. We hope to see you there.

Make sure that you don’t miss the next screening by signing up for our email list on the footer of our website.

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Thank you to Irina Zollars for the wonderful photos.

For more than a century, New York City has outsourced a massive infrastructure need to the Catskills: not only storing its water supply, but naturally filtering it by freezing development across an entire region. Since 1916, hundreds of thousands of acres were purchased outright or locked into conservation easements to make that system work.

Even as New York City continues to buy land, that arrangement has begun to break down. New York City is openly preparing for the loss of its Filtration Avoidance Determination, a transition that will require a permanent, energy-intensive filtration system operating around the clock. This coincides with the city’s push toward net-zero and renewable energy policies.

In a new deal between New York City and Delaware County, the land that was once deemed too precious to develop has now been opened up to a specific kind of development: renewable energy projects.

With an incoming mayor who has openly called for a massive expansion of publicly built solar and wind energy upstate, the question facing the Catskills is no longer theoretical: how much of the region will be transformed as New York City shifts from protecting water to pursuing renewable energy goals?

What the Filtration Avoidance Agreement Has Meant

It was once assumed that water filtration was an inevitable part of the Catskills Aqueduct to New York City.

“Before the water reaches the city it is practically sterilized and the gas is entirely neutralized and dissipated. In addition to this, there is a provision for a filtration plant two miles below the Kensico Reservoir. Every precaution is thus taken to insure the purity and palatability of the water.”

Scientific American, October 27, 1917

But the filtration plant was seen as a finishing touch of the project, which made it easy to delay.

“There remains several pieces of work to be completed, such as the building of a filtration plant, which will take six years more, etc.”

Charles N. Chadwick, Commissioner of the Board of Water Supply, The Chat, April 7, 1917

Most major cities in the world filter their water supply to offset the effects of runoff and water-borne illnesses. Filtration plants are an example of technology that allows host communities to benefit and develop alongside mega-infrastructure projects like the New York City water system. But despite the intentions of the city to build a plant, they were laid asunder by the ultra-elite Merchants Association of New York’s Committee on Pollution.

The association, which existed between the late 1800s and 1930s, was made up of some of the most elite businessmen and financiers not just in New York City, but the world, including J.P. Morgan, Henry Morgenthau Sr., and Paul Warburg.

The Association’s Committee on Pollution was run by a man named Edward Hatch Jr., the heir to the Lord & Taylor business empire. He was nationally prominent as an opponent against what seemed, on the surface, to be an epidemic of careless pollution of rivers and lakes.

However, he and the Merchants Association did not believe in engineering solutions to divert or manage pollution, or to treat water once it was polluted. People who ran filtering plants were “incompetents,” as the “nature of the work is such that a man who can get any other position will not accept the job of operating one of these plants… the plants are, therefore, under the management of men who haven’t the intelligence to run them.”

“What we hope to do… is to prevent any increase of the population within the watershed, and, taking every precaution, meanwhile, wait until the present population dwindles to nothing,” said Hatch in 1915. “Our ultimate hope is to see the watershed absolutely free from human dwellings, for so long as people live there the water will be more or less polluted.”

Thus, Hatch’s fight for “pure water” was built with a cruel Malthusian calculus. “There is only one thing to do,” he said, “keep to, its lowest possible limit, the population within the watershed. That is the aim of my committee and we will oppose any effort to add one home or institution to the watershed territory.”

A 1914 proposal to build a 6,000 person Mohansic State Hospital, an insane asylum, and the 800-person New York Training School for Boys, a juvenile detention center, on the edge of New York’s Croton Lake watershed in Westchester, were in Hatch and Morgan’s crosshairs. Working with Tammany Hall politicians like State Senator Robert Wagner, they pushed an attack against the facilities that would set the stage for the next century of watershed relations.

The issues of sewage and runoff could not be solved with filtration or engineering, the Association claimed. The only solution was to ban the building of institutions in the watershed.

“The Merchants Association of New York, and officials of that city, appeared in favor of the bills which would prevent completion of the institutions at Mohansic Lake… opposed by representatives of Westchester, Ulster, Putnam and Greene counties, which are most directly affected.

Senator Slater of Westchester predicted that the Wagner bills, if passed, would depopulate his county and were intended for that purpose, that the removal of the institutions would be followed by an attempt to remove county institutions and eventually the dwellings on the watershed.

…

Rumors in Ulster County, said [County Attorney] Mr. Eckert, were to the effect that the City of New York… was trying to purchase lands above the Ashokan Reservoir, and the present bills were introduced at the request of some department of the city to make life so unpleasant in Ulster County that owners… would be glad to get out of that section at any price.”

The Daily Freeman, February 25, 1916

State Senator George A. Slater, of Westchester, went up against some of the most powerful people in New York City on the behalf of the Catskills region. “The principles involved will apply to every watershed in the State,” he said. “New York City should filter its water supply… that is the perfect answer to the question: not driving everyone from the watershed, but treating the water.”

However, Slater was up against an emerging governing philosophy: the myth of “pure” mountain water. As one opponent put it, “we gave $300M for pure water and want it, and not what you are satisfied with.”

By 1918, New York Governor Whitman signed a bill to turn the site of the hospital and school into a protected state park known as Mohansic Lake Reservation.

The precedent was therefore set: protecting New York City’s water supply was a zero-sum game. The city’s financial and commercial interests, paired with Tammany Hall, could easily overpower any upstate opponent to control land use, population and economic activity. Engineering solutions became politically dangerous; if water could be reliably treated, the moral and regulatory justification for freezing development for a century would collapse.

This premise hardened into doctrine, quietly baked into land acquisitions, easements, and intergovernmental agreements that transformed the Catskills into an extension of the city’s infrastructure, rather than a region with its own development future. While New York City’s population grew by 50% over the last century, Delaware County, the host of much of its water infrastructure, has slightly lost population.

“New York City… they feel, I guess, that in the watershed they have to restrict development, which is a very touchy situation.”

Olive Town Supervisor Berndt Leifeld, 1990

Filtration Avoidance as Governing Doctrine

This trend continued, largely uninterrupted, until the mid 1980s. In 1986, Congress amended the Safe Drinking Water Act, requiring filtration for most cities’ surface water systems in response to persistent outbreaks of waterborne disease. Filtration was meant to become the norm. Avoiding it was allowed only as a conditional exception, delegated to federal regulators.

That exception was formalized three years later, when the Environmental Protection Agency issued the Surface Water Treatment Rule. The rule created what became known as the Filtration Avoidance Determination (FAD): a revocable administrative finding that filtration could be deferred only if a water system could prove extraordinary source-water protection, enforce strict land-use controls, and continuously demonstrate compliance.

This meant that the city’s approach to protecting its unfiltered water now had to meet a certain level of scientific, rather than purely political, rigor. It led to a $5B showdown between the emergent Coalition of Watershed Towns (CWT) and the financially unstable New York City. The CWT, tired of being pushed around for decades, had a bargaining chip: if they obstructed the city’s efforts to get a FAD, they could force the city to build a filtration plant and finally unlock development in the Catskills from its slumber.

A third party to the negotiations, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., soon entered the fray. Environmental groups like the National Resources Defense Fund and Riverkeeper greatly valued the biodiversity and untouched nature of the city-owned watershed lands. Kennedy Jr. advanced a vision for the region as a form of “enforced ruralization.”

“Spending so much on filtration at a time when every level of government is crying poverty would no doubt undermine watershed protection… Filtration would also foster a sense that watershed protection was unnecessary.”

Riverkeeper, The Legend of City Water (1991)

In other words, the success of filtration would threaten the legitimacy of the land-use regime built around avoiding it. Once water was treated, the justification for freezing development across an entire region would weaken. The delicate political consensus holding the watershed regime together would fracture. Ultimately, the CWT, New York City, and the environmental groups reached a Memorandum of Agreement in 1997.

By 2024, New York City directly owned or controlled more than 214,000 acres of land and easements in the Catskill–Delaware watershed, over 20% of the entire basin. New York State owned an additional 210,000 acres, bringing total publicly owned or permanently protected land to approximately 434,000 acres, or over 41% of the watershed. Within that footprint lay nearly 74% of all wetlands, 63% of mapped floodplains, and more than 36% of riparian buffer corridors.

Filtration Was Deferred, Not Avoided

In 2005, environmental philosopher Mark Sagoff dismantled what he called the “Catskills Parable,” the idea that preserved wilderness was superior to human filtration. Rainwater, Sagoff noted, is already nearly distilled; pathogens are introduced by human and animal activity, not removed by forests.

The acreage targets embedded in the watershed program, he concluded, were not derived from hydrology or microbiology, but from politics.

Indeed, independent reviewers have found that, even after decades of watershed protection, turbidity and nutrients remain the dominant water‑quality threats to the Catskill–Delaware supply, with turbidity judged a “top priority” and phosphorus the “second priority” pollutant for New York City’s drinking water. In Cannonsville Reservoir in particular, detailed analysis by the National Academies shows the trophic state index improving after wastewater upgrades and then “creeping back into the eutrophic range” in the most recent years of record, indicating a renewed trend toward more nutrient‑rich, algae‑prone conditions despite existing controls.

In recent years, New York City planning documents, capital plans, and DEP testimony have stopped describing filtration as a remote contingency and begun treating it as an eventual inevitability. The language has shifted from if to when.

One of the most important impacts on DEP’s decarbonization efforts is the possibility of having to build a Catskill-Delaware filtration plant in the coming decades. Should DEP’s Filtration Avoidance Determination (FAD) be undermined by a combination of climate change, wildlife driven fecal coliform contamination, microbial and disinfection byproducts regulations, and standards for emerging contaminants, it would require the swift construction of a water filtration plant. This would create a significant increase in DEP’s energy consumption. Further, such an event would likely injure public confidence in New York City drinking water. This is why we are proactively planning in earnest for the eventuality of Catskill-Delaware filtration, even as we continue to work to extend the life of the FAD.

NYC DEP Long-Range Vision, 2025

Once filtration becomes inevitable, the question shifts. It is no longer how much land must be protected to avoid filtration, but what purpose that land will serve once filtration arrives. That question collides directly with a second commitment New York City has made: that its agencies will pursue “energy-neutral” or net-zero operations, relying heavily on renewable generation from solar and wind.

From Water Stewards to Renewable Developers

The Department of Environmental Protection, historically defined by its role as a steward of the Catskills watershed, is now increasingly positioning itself as a renewable energy developer, tasked not only with delivering clean water but with helping meet the city’s climate and decarbonization mandates.

No figure embodies that transition more clearly than Rohit “Rit” Aggarwala. In addition to serving as DEP Commissioner, Aggarwala has simultaneously acted as New York City’s climate czar, a leading advocate of aggressive building decarbonization policies like Local Law 97, and a proponent of using artificial intelligence and streamlined permitting to replace local decisionmaking for renewable energy projects. The dual role matters: it collapses the boundary between water management and energy policy inside a single office.

Aggarala helps explain a development that, to many watershed communities, appeared to come out of nowhere. In the most recent negotiations between NYC DEP and the Coalition of Watershed Towns, long-standing environmental groups were excluded from the process. The reason was not subtle: those groups were expected to object to a buildout of solar energy infrastructure on wetlands and watershed lands owned by New York City.

By the time those negotiations occurred, DEP’s priorities had already been laid out in writing. In its June 2025 Long-Range Vision, DEP identifies “producing renewable energy by using DEP assets to support solar production, battery storage, and heat recovery” as a strategic objective. The report frames DEP not merely as a regulator or land steward, but as the holder of “huge untapped resources for renewable energy production,” noting that the agency owns approximately 182,000 acres of land, some of which “could host solar installations.”

Finally, we need to leverage all our opportunities to generate renewable power – utilizing water pressure to generate electricity, capturing waste heat from treatment processes, and using our watershed lands for watershed safe solar and hydropower development.

This shift is not occurring in isolation. DEP openly acknowledges that one of the largest threats to its decarbonization strategy is the eventual loss of the Catskill-Delaware Filtration Avoidance Determination. Should filtration become unavoidable due to wildlife-driven fecal contamination, tightening microbial standards, or emerging contaminant regulations, the city would be forced to construct a filtration plant of unprecedented scale, which could require somewhere around 150 MW of 24/7 electricity.

At that scale, intermittent renewable generation cannot support the system without both a massive overbuild of storage and new long-distance transmission infrastructure, expensive infrastructure that does not currently exist anywhere in New York State. The implication is unavoidable: once filtration becomes inevitable, the watershed lands that once justified avoiding it are no longer passive buffers. They become energy assets.

Seen in that light, the exclusion of environmental groups from recent watershed negotiations was a signal. New York City moving away from organizing its Catskills landholdings around the avoidance of filtration. It is shifting to organizing them around the energy demands of a solar and battery-powered filtration system.

The Deal That Quietly Changed the Rules

This shift in policy is reflected in the latest negotiated agreement between New York City and the Delaware County Board of Supervisors, hailed in the local press as the beginning of a “New Watershed Era.” Among other changes, the deal formally replaces the Land Acquisition Program in Delaware County with a system of land swaps, even as land acquisition continues in other watershed counties such as Ulster.

More significantly, the agreement introduces a new framework for renewable energy development on city-owned land, marking a clear departure from the historical premise that watershed land exists primarily to avoid development.

“Delaware County and the City (including DEP) agree to explore partnership opportunities on renewable energy projects on City-owned property within Delaware County…”

The passage continues by listing shared objectives like electrification, affordability, farmland protection, storm resilience, and water quality, before emphasizing cooperation, efficiency, and expedited timelines.

Crucially, many of the constraints discussed during public meetings never make it into the final text.

During negotiations, Coalition of Watershed Towns meeting minutes reflect repeated assurances that renewable projects would be “community-scale,” that tree clearing would be limited, and that towns would retain meaningful review authority through local planning boards. Specific figures, such as two-to five-acre tree-clearing caps and heightened scrutiny, were discussed, but none of those limits are codified in the agreement itself.

Instead, enforcement and implementation are deferred to future regulatory processes, principally through DEC permitting frameworks, which in turn intersect with state siting authorities that can supersede local control under certain conditions. In effect, the agreement resolves today’s political conflict by postponing tomorrow’s land-use decisions.

Land that once justified as a passive buffer against filtration will not be sold back to the host communities, but rather, is now considered a massive energy asset for the city.

What the Negotiations Assumed, and What They Didn’t

At the time the deal was announced, two critical assumptions were left out of how it was presented to the public.

The first was an implicit belief that renewable energy development on city-owned land would remain small, local, and constrained by existing transmission limits. As Coalition of Watershed Towns President Ric Coombe explained, any solar development envisioned by the DEP was intended to be community-scale, used locally, and limited by the inability of current transmission infrastructure to carry power long distances.

In a previous conversation with DEP Commissioner Rohit Aggarwala, Coombe reported it is DEPs intent to permit community solar operations to benefit local residents. “Maybe there is a twist,” Coomb noted, but current transmission lines can’t transport solar energy well and it is best used locally. It is a mutual benefit because the initiative would also support the State’s zero emissions goals, he added.

The Schoharie News, December 19, 2024

At the time of that remark, the proposed 5 GW, 175-mile Clean Path NY renewable transmission line proposed from Delhi, NY (in Delaware County) to Queens was on life support. If renewables were going to be built in Delaware County, there was no confirmed way to actually get the electricity to New York City.

But Clean Path NY continues on, without a name. The state has continued advancing long-horizon transmission planning through the Energy Policy Planning Advisory Council (EPPAC), a body tasked with identifying future grid needs to meet climate mandates. While EPPAC materials avoid project-specific announcements, they make one thing unmistakably clear: New York State is actively planning for major new transmission capacity to move large volumes of power from upstate generation zones to downstate load centers.

And while watershed towns were debating assurances about “community-scale” solar and local review, New York City was already working upstream, inside Albany’s permitting process, to smooth the path for renewable development in regulated wetlands.

In March 2025, the New York City Law Department submitted formal comments on the state’s proposed Community-Scale Solar Energy Installations General Permit, a new DEC framework designed to streamline solar development in wetlands and wetland-adjacent areas. The letter notes that, within the New York City watershed, the City owns “over 160,000 acres of land, in fee simple and through conservation easements,” and acts “both as a regulator and a regulated entity.” The City’s comments focus on implementation details like road widths, vegetation clearing, grading, and mitigation ratios, effectively treating solar development in wetlands as a given.

The Mamdani Factor

Second, the negotiations took place at the tail-end of Rohit Aggarwala’s tenure with the NYC DEP. Since the creation of the DEP in 1978, every mayoral administration, from Eric Adams, to Bill De Blasio, all the way back to Ed Koch, has featured at least one turnover in DEP commissioner. By June of 2025, Aggarwala must have known that he wasn’t long for this job; but curiously, he aggressively negotiated to open up the right for the city to develop renewables on its land.

Aggarwala’s administration framed renewable siting in careful, incremental terms: community-scale, locally used, transmission-limited. Those assurances shaped how watershed leaders and residents interpreted the agreement. But agreements written during leadership transitions are always vulnerable to reinterpretation, especially when they codify permissions without binding limits.

As of late 2025, it remains unknown who Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani will appoint as the next DEP Commissioner or Chief Climate Officer. What is known is Mamdani’s legislative record, his public statements, and the composition of his Transportation, Climate, and Infrastructure transition team, all of which point toward an aggressive, centralized push for publicly built renewable energy.

Mamdani is a prominent advocate of the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA), which directs the New York Power Authority to build 15 gigawatts of public renewable generation by 2030. In its most recent strategic plan, NYPA states that it is:

“Exploring opportunities to utilize publicly owned land for renewable energy generation projects,” including “partnerships, greenfield development, distributed energy resources, community solar, creative off-balance-sheet ownership structures, and NYPA-enabled projects at customer or public sites.”

The report’s language is deliberately broad, and emphasizes access to land that is “inaccessible to the private sector.” As mayor of New York City, Mamdani will now oversee an administration that controls hundreds of thousands of acres of land upstate, with newly codified rights to build renewables on it.

Mamdani’s coalition that got him elected is eager to aggressively build solar energy in Upstate New York, no matter what “rural landowners” think.

The Responsibility We’ve Always Carried

The Catskills have never rejected responsibility. We have hosted canals, aqueducts, reservoirs, transmission corridors, farms, forests, and the physical burdens of New York City’s growth for more than a century. We understand what real infrastructure looks like because we live with it. Real infrastructure is durable, capital-intensive, engineered for reliability, and judged by whether it actually performs its intended function over decades, not by whether it satisfies symbolic targets or political fashions. That tradition is Hamiltonian in the strictest sense: power exists to expand the productive capacity of labor, to sustain industry, and to support a growing population. It is not ornamental. It is not speculative. And it does not treat land as disposable.

What we reject is a new round of underdevelopment disguised as climate virtue; projects that consume wetlands and public land, fracture communities, and still fail to deliver the baseload energy required for filtration, industry, or economic revival. The Catskills should not once again be reduced to a blank space on someone else’s planning map, asked to absorb land-intensive projects that solve no hard engineering problem. If New York City needs power, and it does, the question is whether it will pursue infrastructure that actually works, or repeat the mistake of substituting optics for substance. That is the question at stake now. And it is why we are convening this conversation on January 17 in Oneonta: not to oppose energy, but to insist on development worthy of the responsibility this region has carried for generations.

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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 features the world premiere 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.

Get your tickets today!

When it comes to the story of energy in America, what counts as “legitimate” opposition and what gets waved aside?

It’s been our position that narratives and ideas are just as important as megawatts and electrons.

And for decades, the “idea” of environmentalism in New York has carried enormous cultural and political weight. But what happens when the people raising concerns aren’t professional activists, foundation-backed NGOs, or conservationists, but homeowners, local fire officials, and working-class communities?

The latest example that brings this question into focus comes from the Hudson Valley, long established as the birthplace of the environmental movement.

This week, the Albany Times Union ran a long feature on New York’s push for large-scale battery energy storage, centered on a proposed 250 MW Terra-Gen facility in the Hudson Valley. The project is opposed by homeowners, fire officials, and dense neighborhoods worried about fire risk, evacuation zones, and property values. One can imagine that the opposition is coordinated over kitchen tables, Elks Lodge meetings, neighbor-to-neighbor conversations and bake sales.

In 2021, the same outlet covered what seems like a very similar energy controversy: a 800 MW pumped-storage hydroelectric project at the Ashokan Reservoir. That plan, capable of storing far more energy for much longer durations without fire risk, was framed by environmental groups and green politicians as an existential threat to the landscape and local communities.

Both projects are energy storage, designed to smooth out the external risks and limitations of renewable energy. Both carry local impacts and involve massive amounts of infrastructure.

But one was framed as an ecological crime, while the other has been framed as inevitable, with local concerns posed as obstacles to overcome rather than a death sentence for the project. And the real difference is who opposed each project, and whether that opposition was legitimized by the media.

How Energy Narrative Is Shaped

The latest Times Union article frames the battery project as necessary and safe, a response to an unquestionable state mandate. The quotes selected, and those left out, tell the story.

“Energy storage is central to New York’s climate goals – goals the state is far behind on.

New York aims to have 3,000 megawatts of storage by 2025 and 6,000 by 2030.

Battery storage systems would also bring flexibility to the grid, help with bottlenecks and keep power flowing during weather-related outages.”

Despite widespread community concern, the piece featured only one direct quote from a local opponent. In contrast, eight voices ranging from academics, developers, state officials, and climate policy advocates were included to deflect criticism.

“Nationwide, however, the percentage of facilities experiencing fires has dropped sharply since 2020, according to the EPA…

There’s a lot of new research, new discoveries, that have been integrated into these systems, so over time, they will become safer and safer.

It’s increasingly common for the fossil fuel industry to use isolated, unrelated incidents to evoke people’s worst fears about energy storage projects.”

Readers were also told that these battery plants “last long,” “store large amounts of energy,” and “could reduce reliance on peakers and lower bills” without any rebuttal or context.

Surface-level inquiry reveals that the state of Texas has built the second most battery capacity in the nation, yet is burning more natural gas (via peaker plants) than it did in 2020 (according to Electricity Maps). The state of California now has the most battery capacity, but also the most expensive electricity.

The Technical Reality Left Out

Just this week, the National Center for Energy Analytics published an analysis by Lars Schernikau, PhD, titled The Battery Storage Delusion: Utility-Scale Batteries Are No Silver Bullet. It says that while utility-scale batteries can enhance grid stability, they “are not a scalable and sustainable solution” to overcome the intermittency of wind and solar.

“The narrative that batteries can solve the intermittency problem at scale is not only technically flawed but also misleading, as it diverts attention from the development of power systems that actually generate-rather than consume or partially store-electricity and that are more robust, realistic, and cost-effective.”
…
Utility-scale batteries cannot function as long-duration energy storage solutions or scale to the levels needed to back up large-scale energy systems that are reliant on intermittent wind and solar.”

— The Battery Storage Delusion, National Center for Energy Analytics (2025)

For some reason, analysis like this was not included to balance out the article.

Rewind to 2021

Four years ago, the same newspaper covered the proposed Ashokan Reservoir pumped-storage hydroelectric project, a proven technology capable of storing vast amounts of energy for days at a time, over many decades of operation.

The difference this time? Major environmental non-profits were against it, including the Catskill Center, the Sierra Club Atlantic Chapter, Riverkeeper, Catskill Mountainkeeper, the Woodstock Land Conservancy, Mountain Top Arboretum, The Adirondack Mountain Club, the Ashokan Center and more.

Yet the pumped storage project was framed as a classic David vs. Goliath struggle: of locals and authoritative NGOs against an out-of-state and out-of-touch developer threatening water, forests, and historic communities. Not one technical rebuttal to the claims of the opposition was offered; they functioned as settled truth.

“Thanks to the unfragmented forests we are able to be an area that’s more resilient to climate change and also host a number of rare and endangered species.

Any of the proposed sites… would require buyouts of homes… and, most importantly, the fragmentation of a protected forest.

A new energy project forcing people from their homes is hard to swallow for a community that has a collective history with such action.

Concerns over displacing residents, potential contamination of NYC drinking water”

Contrast that to the coverage of the battery plant which is supported by environmental NGOs. The residents concerns have been treated as “fossil fuel misinformation” and fear that will be managed and overruled.

For their part, local environmental groups have publicly strategized on how to overcome local opposition to battery storage, green politicians have discouraged residents from seeking an environmental review of the project, and a state assemblywoman spent days arguing with residents on Facebook about the safety of the project. The media has followed their lead.

CHPE: When the Data Don’t Match the Story

Consider one more recent Times Union story: its 2023 coverage of the Champlain Hudson Power Express (CHPE) hydropower cable, a project NYISO itself has called critical to New York City’s grid reliability.

After towns along the Hudson pushed for extra drinking-water studies, the results came back clear: the jet-plow trenching needed to lay the cable would not violate state water quality standards or threaten local intakes. Turbidity, metals, PCBs, and organics all stayed within limits, and sediments settled quickly.

In other words, the science said the water was safe.

And yet the piece framed that outcome as “bittersweet” for local officials organized by environmental groups. A mayor along the Hudson was quoted saying they had been “hoping for a smoking gun” that would justify stopping the project. Instead of asking the obvious question: why a council formed to protect drinking water was disappointed to learn that drinking water would not be harmed, the article treated their thwarted opposition as emotionally understandable and admirable.

When we challenged that framing publicly, the editor insisted that the story showed they were relieved. But the word still framing the whole piece was “bittersweet.” The real loss, the reader is invited to feel, is not environmental risk. It is the loss of a reason to block a project the climate establishment doesn’t particularly like.

In the Ashokan story, in the CHPE story, and now in the Terra-Gen battery story, the pattern is the same: when opposition comes from the right institutions, their motives are never interrogated, and their fears are granted moral authority, even when science undercut them.

The Same Story, Rewritten With New Props

The apples-to-apples comparison between the coverage of these two energy projects is an extension of a larger truth: the story of New York’s energy policy has long been tightly stage-managed by massive environmental non-profits.

Just in the last five years, they’ve gotten multiple climate and renewables mandates passed, shut down one of the world’s greatest nuclear plants and blocked the conversion of dual fuel peaker plants into cleaner natural gas. They’ve gotten everything they’ve wanted… and yet electricity prices have skyrocketed while fossil fuel use has increased.

These stories show the urgency of how New Yorkers must take control of their own energy narratives. We can no longer afford to trust the judgment of powerful environmental groups, the politicians that hide behind them, and the media that legitimizes their opinions as unqualified facts.

Until our entire state, including the media, decisionmakers and the general public, recenters affordability, technical feasibility, and energy density, and stops policing who is allowed to dissent, our energy policy will continue to drift further from reality and deeper into crisis. New Yorkers deserve better.

New York’s electric grid is nearing the end of its runway. NYISO, the independent operator responsible for keeping the lights on, is issuing its most urgent reliability warnings in decades. Meanwhile, the incoming mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, is elevating advisors whose policy positions directly increase the risk of blackouts and higher energy costs.

The great irony of the recent New York City mayoral election is that while Mamdani thrashed his opponent Andrew Cuomo, he is going to do everything in his power to continue implementing the former governor’s signature 2019 climate law. Mamdani’s transition team is dominated by the same groups that closed Indian Point, oppose all gas infrastructure, and want to retire every NYC peaker plant by 2030 even though no replacement exists.

The stakes could not be higher: if this coalition gets its way, New York will continue down a path NYISO says leads to rolling blackouts as early as 2026.

New York’s Energy Landscape

The 2019 passage of the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act got headlines for being “nation-leading” and ambitious, but it delivered a raw deal to New Yorkers: we have to pay to build out a renewable energy grid that is both less reliable and more expensive and creates land use, public safety and home rule conflicts up the ying-yang.

It mandated a massive expansion of heat electrification, while also mandating the shutdown of natural gas plants that can create electricity on cold nights. It mandates that new housing has to shoulder the costs of all-electric heat instead of tapping into existing natural gas infrastructure. It also mandated a solar energy buildout across a state that has famously cold and dark winters.

In addition to consumer bills skyrocketing, multiple grave warnings have been issued that the state will not be able to continue on the path that it’s on. Governor Kathy Hochul faces a court-ordered February deadline to either replace the CLCPA with a new energy policy, or implement upcoming mandates that will be harsher and more draconian measures than anything to this point. She must act carefully, as the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) has warned of “reliability violations” in New York City beginning as soon as next year.

More than half of all fossil fuel peaker plants in NYC are now scheduled for retirement before a viable alternative is built.

Hochul Slowly Shifting to Reality

After delaying the inevitable until last year, Hochul pivoted to a healthier “all of the above” energy mix that includes a new 1 GW nuclear reactor and the desperately needed Northeast Supply Enhancement gas pipeline into New York City. She has weathered challenges from environmentalists who fought against the CHPE hydopower pipeline into New York City, and she helped make the Build Public Renewables Act more tolerable by slowing down its rush to close clean peaker plants in New York City.

The 2026 primary between Governor Kathy Hochul and her former Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado is a tightrope walk, as she must lower costs and create stable energy to drive economic development. Delgado, for his part, is campaigning on doubling down on Cuomo’s CLCPA plan and has promised the world to Bill McKibben, the most extreme climate groups, and most importantly, to mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.

Although he kept quiet about climate on the campaign trail, Mamdani’s political career was built on pursuing extreme climate goals, above and beyond even the CLCPA. He is part of a network of environmental NGOs that simultaneously have closed Indian Point nuclear plant, ignored the rise in emissions and reliability costs, want to use state capacity to take over upstate land for solar mega-farms, and also believe that all fossil fuel infrastructure is a “stranded asset” even though more people are relying on them than ever.

With New York City accounting for the largest share of demand, emissions, and political pressure in the state, the energy agenda set by mayor-elect Mamdani will play a major role in New York’s direction.

The Choice Between Affordability or Climate Change

While Mamdani said that “we should consider” nuclear energy upstate to help meet New York’s energy needs, he has been clear about the Northeast Supply Enhancement pipeline: he doesn’t believe in investing in any fossil fuel infrastructure.

This is a clear diversion from Governor Hochul, who has greenlit the plan to relieve a crippling and expensive energy bottleneck into New York. It would pay for itself in two years and would reduce the use of dirty “dual fuel” generators by relieving transmission constraints.

Mamdani’s latest shot against Hochul’s all-of-the-above approach came in his picks for a Transportation, Climate, & Infrastructure transition team. Despite Mamdani’s noted campaign emphasis on affordability over doomsday climate prognostications, his choices signal otherwise.

This team has little representation from utility labor or grid management experience.

Of 33 team members, 20 have some kind of track record with energy issues, almost exclusively as non-profit activists. Of those 20, 16 are drawn from the same coalition that, in loose terms, has closed Indian Point, ignored the resulting increase in fossil fuel use, opposed every major gas project since, wants to carpet upstate farmland with solar, while retiring every peaker plant in the five boroughs by 2030.

Upstate, dozens of towns have blocked battery storage and solar megafarms, setting up a collision between Mamdani’s advisors and rural New Yorkers who will have to host land-intensive renewable infrastructure.

Meet the New York City Advisors Who Will Shape Your Electric Bill

These 16 advisors listed alphabetically below have clear and consequential records on energy policy. Their past advocacy shows exactly what Mamdani energy policy will look like in practice, and how that agenda conflicts with NYISO’s increasingly urgent warnings about grid reliability.

The unifying theme among these advisors is belief in a frictionless, all-renewable path, even as NYISO and other grid experts keep pointing out that transmission, storage, and permitting realities simply do not match this rhetoric or timeline.

1. Eddie Bautista – NYC Environmental Justice Alliance

NYC-EJA is a founding member of the PEAK Coalition, the group campaigning to shut down all NYC peaker plants by 2030. Those are the same dispatchable resources NYISO says are needed to maintain reliability as early as 2026. Bautista quit the NYS Climate Justice Working Group because Governor Hochul was delaying the implementation of a potentially disastrous “cap and invest” scheme.

“Can clean renewable energy plus battery storage also replace all the City’s older, polluting private peaker plants? Can NYC become the first city in the nation to have all its peaker plants replaced? We believe we can – especially if we follow the visionary direction established by the New York State Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act.”

Eddie Bautista in 2022

NYC-EJA also has attacked Hochul’s nuclear proposal as “more expensive” and that it will “take way more time to build… than solar.”

2. Tabitha Decker – Spring Street Climate Fund

Spring Street is the fiscal sponsor of the Public Power Coalition, which wants to overpower the wishes of “rural landowners” about solar panels and block public nuclear energy from being built.

Spring Street also provides financial firepower for the NY Heat Act and Local Law 97 proposals, and contributes directly to anti-nuclear groups like Alliance for a Green Economy, NYPIRG, the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance, the Environmental Defense Fund, Catskill Mountainkeeper, Food and Water Watch, and the list goes on.

3. Noah Ginsburg – New York Solar Energy Industries Association

NYSEIA is the solar industry’s primary lobbying group in New York. Ginsburg’s advocacy focuses on accelerating statewide build-out of solar farms and rooftop systems, including on agricultural land, as a core replacement for fossil fuel and nuclear capacity. This assumption directly conflicts with NYISO’s conclusions that intermittent resources upstate cannot replace dispatchable power in NYC.

He and NYSEIA regularly advocate for overriding home rule and local opposition to utility-scale and distributed solar, and have opposed new public investment in nuclear as an alternative to solar and storage.

4. Rhiana Gunn-Wright – Green New Deal architect

Gunn-Wright, as part of the Roosevelt Institute, is one of the main intellectual architects of wielding Keynesian economics to justify a 100% renewable Green New Deal and a leading national voice for rapid fossil fuel phaseout, electrification, and environmental justice as policy first principles.

She has written that nuclear energy is a “false solution.”

5. Chris Halfnight – Urban Green Council

Urban Green Council treated the closure of Indian Point as a foregone conclusion, focusing exclusively on how building retrofit, electrification, and demand management that could lessen the blow to NYC’s electricity needs.​

6. Monika Hansen

Hansen currently works for a government staffing agency and previously held a leadership role at BlocPower, the climate-tech startup tasked with managing Ithaca’s headline-grabbing effort to electrify 6,000 buildings by 2030.

The reality failed to match the ambition: BlocPower completed only 10 electrifications; local officials and residents reported project cost overruns, opaque financing terms, and an unannounced abrupt withdrawal. As sustainability director Rebecca Evans put it, “We helped BlocPower make headlines, and really created a national market for BlocPower based on this program. It put us in a position to make a lot of promises that we weren’t able to fulfill”.​

7. Lauren Phillips – National Resources Defense Council

Phillips is part of NRDC, a national advocacy group deeply influential in New York’s energy policy, including as an architect and cheerleader for the CLCPA and Indian Point’s closure.​

NRDC played a central role in the campaign to shut down Indian Point nuclear plant and, in 2011, publicly claimed “energy efficiency and renewable energy resources could replace Indian Point’s output,” directly contradicting NYISO. NRDC is also a frequent signatory to coalition letters opposing gas expansion projects and even sued the Columbia County Town of Copake, NY for opposing a massive 60 mW solar project.

8. Nancy Romer – PSC-CUNY

The Professional Staff Congress at CUNY is one of the unions that is trumpeted by the Public Power coalition as a source of support from organized labor, supporting a massive upstate solar energy buildout to justify the end to NYPA’s NYC peaker plants.

9. Daphany Rose Sanchez – Kinetic Communities Consulting

Sanchez’s company advocates for demand-side reductions as the primary path to decarbonization.

10. Peggy Shephard – WE ACT for Environmental Justice

Shepard’s WE ACT is a core member of New York’s environmentalist coalition that dismisses NYISO’s reliability warnings, opposes delayed fossil retirements, and frames any hesitancy on renewables as a failure of political will, not technical feasibility.

11. Lise Strickler – Three Cairns Group.

Stickler is a trustee of the Environmental Defense Fund, one of the original 1970s-era non profits that formed to “sue the bastards” and close Indian Point with lawfare.

12. Tyler Taba – Waterfront Alliance

The Waterfront Alliance believes that investments in renewable energy will allow peaker plants to be shut down in NYC.

13. Tiffany Ann Taylor – Regional Plan Association (RPA)

Tiffany Ann Taylor’s (and RPA’s) October 2025 testimony about NY’s Draft Energy Plan supports plowing forward with the CLCPA and made arguments for more aggressive state action while downplaying nuclear energy and natural gas. Once again, physical grid restraints were positioned as a lack of will.

14. Midori Valdivia

Midori Valdivia helped author an influential “Climate for Change” plan, now cited as the standard-bearer for city climate ambition. The blueprint Valdivia helped craft is the same strategy NYISO warns cannot maintain reliability in NYC without new firm generation. Her role on the transition team adds further weight to a worldview that assumes generation can be eliminated faster than it can be replaced, despite the grid operator’s explicit warnings about 2026–and-beyond shortfalls.

15. Laurie Wheelock – Public Utility Law Project (PULP)

PULP has testified repeatedly in favor of expediting upstate solar, renewables, and grid upgrades, calling for stronger community benefits and equity carve-outs, but rarely acknowledging grid reliability risks, peaker plant needs, or affordability trade-offs flagged by NYISO and state regulators.

16. Justin Wood – New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI)

Wood and NYLPI have consistently pushed for rapid retirement of NYPA’s and private peaker plants in the city by 2030, asserting that renewables and batteries alone can replace their function, a stance directly at odds with independent grid operator and technical analyses.

Four other people were selected for the committee who have backgrounds that are a little different on energy. Benjamin Kabak of 2nd Avenue Sagas has criticized the Indian Point closure. John Samuelson of Transport Workers Union of America has lauded Hochul’s nuclear expansion plan. Ben Furnas of TransAlt has supported nuclear energy. Esther Rosario of Climate Jobs NY has pushed for expanded labor protections in a number of otherwise short-sighted proposals.

What’s Next?

For years, these activists have said that closing Indian Point and enacting the CLCPA would not lead to higher energy costs. When the public started to feel the pain of higher bills, they shifted accountability to investor-owned utilities, a lack of political will, AI data centers, Russia and Trump; and not to the very policies that others warned would cause problems.

Now, many of the same groups are promising the grid can survive even deeper cuts to firm power. This time, everyone knows exactly who is in charge.

The activists who designed this policy are now running the table at City Hall. If their plan fails, there will be no one left to blame. The buck stops with them.

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New York is in an energy crisis. Despite tens of billions of dollars of investments, electric and heating bills are going higher and higher for families and businesses. Fights over land use, control and different types of energy have no end in sight.

Does the Hudson Valley have the moral fitness to find solutions that are good for our state, country and humanity as a whole? To solve the problem, we first must understand how we got here.

Join us for a screening of Kingston resident Fox Green’s latest documentary, Energy/Empire: America’s Green Counter-Revolution, which tells a uniquely Hudson Valley story that starts with the American Revolution, detours to the dark founding of the eugenics movement, and recounts the true contours of the lawfare that blocked the Storm King pumped hydro project and helped RFK Jr. shut down the Indian Point nuclear plant.

Afterwards, continue the conversation with a panel discussion and Q&A with:

Fox Green, co-founder of New York Energy Alliance and Kingston Creative
Steve Carroll, President and Business Manager of IBEW Local 320
Jillian Fried, an emerging leader in the No Battery Plant on Hurley Ave movement.

Screening: The film will start promptly at 2 PM.

Panel Discussion: The discussion will run from 4 to 4:45 PM.

Don’t miss this opportunity to engage with history, philosophy, organized labor and local leaders in charting our energy future. We look forward to seeing you there!

RSVP on Facebook

A program created by Andrew Cuomo in 2016 to keep vital nuclear power plants running is now up for renewal. As New York faces rising energy costs, declining grid reliability, and a flawed climate law that was written for headlines instead of households, it’s time to stop discriminating against nuclear energy.

The New York State Department of Public Service (DPS) is requesting feedback on its proposed extension of New York’s nuclear Zero Emission Credits program (ZEC). The program originally was created as a way to keep the Lake Ontario nuclear plants open, while allowing Indian Point to close prematurely, through ratepayer subsidies. The DPS wishes to continue the program, justified through the plants’ contributions to NYS’s economic, climate, and electrical goals. The existence of this program brings up a question: Why can’t we just roll nuclear into the wider renewable framework so it can benefit from already existing programs?

To put it more bluntly: why not just call nuclear renewable?

The current definition of renewables in NY was set by the state’s climate law in 2019:

“renewable energy systems” means systems that generate electricity or thermal energy through use of the following technologies: solar thermal, photovoltaics, on land and offshore wind, hydroelectric, geothermal electric, geothermal ground source heat, tidal energy, wave energy, ocean thermal, and fuel cells which do not utilize a fossil fuel resource in the process of generating electricity.

This definition is the one used by the major environmental policies in NYS: the aforementioned climate law (CLCPA), the clean energy standard that created RECs (Renewable Energy Credits) and ZECs, the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA), and the Office of Renewable Energy Siting (ORES). The major benefit would be that new nuclear power plants could then benefit from already-existing subsidies. The ZECs program as such is worded so that only existing Upstate nuclear plants can benefit. However, if nuclear power was classified renewable, the power generated could be used for mandatory and voluntary Tier 1 RECs (reserved for new renewables) and Tier 4 RECs (reserved for renewables that are used in NYC). It would also allow batteries that are charged through nuclear power to count as renewable. This, combined with the baseload nature and already zoned industrial sites of nuclear, would make the two a perfect match.

The arguably biggest upside would come from expanding the capabilities of the BPRA. Though NYPA has been directed to build 1 GW of new nuclear power, it cannot use its expanded BPRA authority to get the job done:

Nuclear power plants do not meet the current definition of a renewable energy system in New York State and are therefore outside of the scope of strategic plans issued under PAL § 1005 (27-a)(e).

The simple addition of nuclear to the renewables definition would let NYPA use already-granted authority to hit the ground running on new nuclear projects beyond even the 1 GW already ordered.

Classifying nuclear energy as renewable could also force needed reforms for the Office of Renewable Energy Siting and Electric Transmission (ORES), which has raised many concerns for upstate and western New Yorkers. The process of siting any kind of energy infrastructure must address legitimate community pros and cons so that they are built for the true benefit of all. Removing the solar and wind silo from ORES could enable important dialogues about “energy democracy” where a community that rejects intermittent renewables can be more empowered to say yes to nuclear or hydrogen, hydropower, geothermal and more through the same office, or vice versa, with full awareness of the tradeoffs of union jobs, land use concerns, tax and ratepayer benefits.

The ZEC program was crafted to allow then-Governor Cuomo to keep the Lake Ontario plants open while closing Indian Point, the most expedient political move for him at the time. In the same way, a redefinition of nuclear as renewable would be the most expedient political move for the majority of New Yorkers, allowing for the quick reversal of NY’s energy policy from irrational to rational.

This proposal would take the tools built to destroy NY’s energy infrastructure and instead use them to build a reliable, cheap, and industrious grid for all New Yorkers.

Note: The author’s views are only representative of NYEA and not any employer past or present.

Later this year, environmentalists around the world will celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Storm King decision. The official tale is well-rehearsed: courageous locals rose up to stop a corporate behemoth from defacing Storm King Mountain with a monstrous hydroelectric plant.

But what if that story is more of a myth than a memory?

What if the project would have been nearly invisible, tucked beneath the mountain while leaving it intact?

What if the host community of people, who actually lived in Cornwall, overwhelmingly supported it?

What if organized labor backed it, prominent politicians endorsed it, and the plan promised not destruction, but revival: clean power, jobs, and desperately needed investment in a declining region?

What if Storm King wasn’t stopped because it was evil, but because it was too good? 

And how many preventable deaths and hospitalization occurred in New York City because it wasn’t built?

Storm King marked a turning point in American history, where a powerful alliance of elite families, foundations, and ideological operatives learned how to kill a future they couldn’t control. It was the moment when the postwar dream of progress and development gave way to something darker.

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The Case for the Storm King Plant

In the 1960s, New York City was at a breaking point. Electricity use had more than doubled since the end of World War Two, and office towers filled with lights, elevators and early computers were being built at a dizzying pace. 

Brownouts and blackouts were becoming increasingly common in Manhattan and the Bronx, especially during the hottest days of the year when demand would spike. Consolidated Edison, the local utility company, relied on an aging patchwork of oil and coal-fired plants that were located within city limits. These plants were largely the source of massive amounts of air pollution in the city.

In particular, Con Ed’s Astoria Energy Complex, consisting of the “Big Allis” Ravenswood peaker plant, the Astoria Generating Station, and the Charles Poletti Power Plant, was the nucleus of what is now known as “Asthma Alley,” where there are disproportionate health impacts from air pollution to this day.

These two factors meant that Con Ed was desperate for reliable and clean sources of energy that were close enough to the city’s grid to help shoulder the load. The addition of Indian Point 1 in 1962 helped, but electricity demand kept increasing at a rate of 7% a year.

That’s when the Storm King hydropower plant, 60 miles north of New York City on the Hudson River, was proposed. A 2,000 megawatt pumped-storage facility, it would have been among the largest in the world and added more than 25% to Con Ed’s capacity.

“The Cornwall plant would do much to cut down the amount of air pollution in New York City… it would enable us to reduce the amount of coal and oil burned in New York and to shut down several hundred thousand kilowatts of our older steam electric generating units.”

M.L Waring, senior vice-president of Con Ed

A Plan With Many Supporters

The Storm King project was very popular in its host community of Cornwall and the nearby city of Newburgh. Village and Town citizens, officials and labor leaders were vastly in favor of the project for the benefits it would provide: economically, environmentally and in funding infrastructure improvements for their community.

The biggest booster of the plant was the Village of Cornwall’s mayor, Michael Donahue.

Con Edison will pay annual taxes of $500,000, and with these increased revenues we shall be able to construct a new village hall, library, village garage, parks, a recreational center, nature trails, and municipal ski slopes.

Village of Cornwall Mayor Michael Donahue, 1964

Cornwall’s tax assessor, Wesley Rowland, estimated that the $400 million facility would contribute approximately $100 million to the town’s existing $132 million tax base. It was an enormous boost for a community of only 10,000 residents.

In nearby Newburgh, the struggling city had just gone through a vicious multi-year welfare crisis. A $165M industrial development project just five miles away was needed to “bolster its depressed economy, to provide employment, and to add stimulus to the rebirth of Newburgh.”

Organized labor also stood firmly behind the Storm King project, viewing it as a rare chance to bring long-term, well-paid employment to a region suffering from chronic underdevelopment. Construction unions, engineers, and utility workers all testified in support of the hydroelectric plant, emphasizing jobs, economic stimulus, and the project’s environmental compatibility.

Henry P. McArdle, business representative of Local 825 of the Operating Engineers Union, said the plant would offer years of steady employment.

“This would [be] long-term employment for these men,” he said. “There are few jobs for men in the area.”

Con Edison also offered to clean up the waterfront in Cornwall, which was littered with industrial waste. The Cornwall Local reported that 1,700 people signed a petition in support, with only 100 opposed.

The Opposition: From Aesthetics to Fish

Initial designs for the facility had transmission lines running across the Hudson River and a small but noticeable intake area on the waterfront. In an early flyer about the plant, Consolidated Edison zoomed in on the design rendering to show detail, which gave the false impression that the project was going to swallow the mountain whole. 

“An artist’s rendering… showed the side of the Mountain cut away, leaving a gash… It was this illustration, in particular, that roused lovers of the Highlands to action.”

Albert Butzel, 2014

New renderings were quickly created, but it was too late. The original is the one that was plastered everywhere.

A group of “old money” Hudson River families saw the project as a threat to their legacy of conservation efforts in the region. Several of them were clustered across the river and to the south in Garrison, NY.

“From a very early point, diehard opponents of Con Ed’s plans would refuse to see the project in isolation; instead, they would come to view it as a harbinger of the industrialization of the Hudson River valley. Perhaps more importantly, many environmentalists, feeling overwhelmed at the changes they had witnessed during their lives, developed a militant, winner-take-all attitude when it came to land-use struggles. 

Carl Carmer [took]… a definitive stand: ‘It is my conviction that those who would destroy the beauty of our landscape should be fought off, not appeased. Appeasement is a postponement and if we are to preserve the landscape of the America we have come to love, postponement is the equivalent of complete surrender.’”

Robert Lifset, Power On the Hudson, 2014

Alexander Saunders was one of the leaders of the opposition to the plant. From his estate in Garrison, he said “we don’t feel this is the right area for industry. Of course, there are a lot of people on the welfare rolls in Newburgh, but as a businessman, I can tell you it doesn’t represent a very high calibre for a work force… the ideal land use for this area should be for recreation for people from New York City.”

Saunders was the chairman of the Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference and the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater organization started with a party at his house.

For these new preservationists, the Storm King battle was not about securing improvements or concessions; it was about fighting an indefinite war against industrial society in all its forms. Once it was clear that the plant would be virtually invisible on the Hudson River and an aesthetic argument would be impossible, the activists seized upon the idea of fish and fishermen being affected by the plant.

This strategic pivot was led by Bob Boyle, the future mentor to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in his sensational 1965 Sports Illustrated article, “A Stink of Dead Stripers.” Writing with a hysterical verve, Boyle abandoned the dry legal terrain of viewshed arguments and plunged instead into a lurid story of ecological doom, spinning a pile of decomposing fish near the Indian Point nuclear plant into a casus belli for total war over Storm King.

“Perhaps, ironically, the Hudson River, the living river, may yet be saved by dead fish long thought buried in an obscure dump.”

Robert Boyle

After publishing the article, Boyle met with two Scenic Hudson leaders, and congratulated them for their ongoing legal case against the plant. 

“He wanted them to know that the Hudson River in the vicinity of the Storm King plant was one of two principal spawning grounds for America’s Atlantic Coast striped bass population… “The striped bass spawn here,” Boyle said, “and it’s a very important area for larvae and plankton, and the pump storage plant will suck up the eggs and young.” [Scenic Hudson co-founder] Duggan recognized that this was the issue that could win the case. She rose with a gleeful smile and proclaimed, “They’re going to kill the fish! They’re going to kill the fish!” She was so excited, recalls Boyle, “It was like Churchill hearing Pearl Harbor had been bombed.”

John Cronin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., The Riverkeepers, 1999

This strategic pivot was also noted by Con Ed:

“[The opponents are] still not satisfied; they now purport to espouse seriously a whole series of objections based on what will surely be shown here to be insupportable, far-fetched and exaggerated theories of disaster to flora, fauna, dikes and water supplies. One opposing witness has even taken the desperately extreme position that the plant should not now be built underground and invisible, the witness will know it’s there.”

James O’Malley, Con Ed Chief Counsel, 1966

This extremism was even noted by New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who testified to Congress that he “cannot believe that our marine biologists are unable to offer assistance in meeting this problem on the Hudson. I cannot believe that a solution to the problems with the Storm King project…. cannot be found.” 

He also noted that Con Ed had offered to build a screen shielding the intake pumps at Storm King, and believed a solution could be found to the fish life questions.

Alfred Perlmutter, a professor of biology at New York University said that “one active sport fisherman would have as much effect on striped bass egg larvae” as the project would.

It was the romanticism of fish and fishermen on the Hudson River that stretched out an open-and-shut case over aesthetics into something that could go on indefinitely. Environmental non-profits spawned like fish in the Hudson; the old guard of the Hudson River Conservation Society led to Scenic Hudson, which led to the Rockefeller-supported Clearwater, the Ford Foundation-supported National Resources Defense Council, the Rockefeller/Harriman-led Hudson River Valley Commission, and the Hudson River Fisherman’s Association, which soon morphed into the Robert F. Kennedy Jr.-led Riverkeeper group.

The Death of Storm King 

Storm King was a David & Goliath fight, but it’s quite possible that Con Ed was David and the old money hydra it faced was Goliath. By the 1970s, changes to the U.S. monetary system and interest rates meant that what was once a $150M plant was slowly turning into a $1B project, where the economics could never pencil out despite an ongoing energy crisis and multiple blackouts in New York City.

The financing was made even more difficult because the national response to the energy crises of 1970s was, as Jimmy Carter put it, to put on a sweater and turn the heat down. Con Ed could not rely on steady growth in electric demand to pay for the plant. Additionally, the plant became leverage for Con Ed in negotiations with environmentalists over building cooling towers at Indian Point nuclear plant.

The Village of Cornwall’s Mayor Donahue never stopped advocating for the plant. “They’ve had conservationists all the way from Australia talking about Storm King,” he said in 1973. “They never want to know what the local people think.”

In 1976, he continued: “We – the project supporters – contend that the Cornwall plant is in the public interest. We firmly believe that it would contribute substantially to the economy of this community, that it would enhance the preservation of scenic beauty and that it would enhance the preservation of scenic beauty and that it would not affect conservation of the river’s fishery.”

According to a Con Ed official, the construction of the plant would have supported a $35M annual payroll and employed 1,500 Orange County employees from eight county labor unions. 

A union workman, reacting to one of the endless delays in the project, was blunt:

“We are all bitter as hell. This whole controversy has been ginned up by outsiders. Why should I lose my job because some guy may not be able to catch his limit of striped bass off his pleasure boat?”

But after years of lawfare, the plant was killed in closed door negotiations in 1980 between Con Ed and 10 other organizations, mediated by Russell Train, former head of the EPA and Malthusian head of the World Wildlife Fund.

A Final “What If”

Today, the proposed alternative to the “Asthma Alley” power plants in New York City is to locate dangerous lithium-ion battery plants right inside major population centers, with a mandate to build six gigwatts of battery storage statewide by 2030. The peaker plants are still running.

The cognitive dissonance over energy and the environment that resulted from the Storm King case is almost too much to take in. The added air pollution, asthma hospitalizations, increased energy costs, and now, the desperate crunch for clean energy storage in New York State makes seeing the sordid affair as an “environmental” landmark utterly absurd.

As for the good Mayor Donahue, he served as Cornwall’s beloved mayor for 28 uninterrupted years ending in the late 1970s. The lost promise of the Storm King plant was the great “what if” of his tenure, forever beyond his grasp. After the settlement, Con Ed donated land to the Village of Cornwall which was later dedicated as Donahue Memorial Park, in his memory. Approaching the park, you might only notice one plaque:

If you move to the left, buried behind foliage, you’ll find a second plaque dedicated to the memory of Mayor Donahue. You can see the faded tribute to him below, with Storm King Mountain in the background to the right:

In 2009, the more prominent plaque was added with much controversy. The addition was protested by Donahue’s surviving daughters, as it commemorated the elite environmentalists that Donahue fought against for 15 years.

The plaque faces outward toward Storm King Mountain, gleaming and well-maintained. Behind it, Donahue’s original plaque is nearly hidden—faded, weather-stained, and shrouded by overgrown foliage, like the memory of the future he once fought for. It maybe be obscured—purposefully hidden from the light of day—but Donahue’s plaque still stands, like the truth, waiting to be rediscovered.