State Senate Hearing 10-14-2011, NYCWTA's Rob Buchanan's testimony

Good morning and thank you for convening this meeting.

My name is Rob Buchanan, and I am here on behalf of the Steering Committee of the New York City Water Trail Association, an umbrella group that aims to represent the common interests of the human-powered boating community and the more than 20 community boating organizations that now populate the harbor.

I am also a board member of two of those organizations--the Village Community Boathouse, a community rowing group based on Pier 40 in lower Manhattan, and the Brooklyn Bridge Park Boathouse, which offers free public kayaking and rowing on the Brooklyn waterfront.

The Water Trail Association's mission is to promote the safe use of the Water Trail that was established by the NYC Parks Department in 2007; to foster maritime education in, and environmental stewardship of, the harbor and the estuary; and to advance awareness of the public ownership of our urban waterways. One thing that sometimes gets overlooked in discussions about the harbor is that it is a public space, and, by far, our biggest Commons.

One of the first things the Water Trail Association did after incorporating last year was to conduct a survey of our member organizations. What we found was that in 2010, those groups together took more than 40,000 people out on the water in human-powered boats. That is not a total of trips or user days, but of individuals, and it does not include independent boaters who undertook outings on their own. We believe that that qualifies us as a significant constituency and that we have earned primary stakeholder status when it comes to discussing the development of the waterfront and the health of our waterways.

We will do another survey this winter, and while I think our general expectation is to see some growth in our numbers, we're also aware that the North River Treatment plant fire and subsequent sewage releases this summer will have an impact, in two ways. That's partly because the weekend that followed the fire, when most of our programs were necessarily suspended, was the hottest weekend of the summer, and thus would have drawn our biggest crowds. But it also seems likely to us that the lingering mistrust of the water created by the spill deterred others who might have gone boating later in the season. All in all, the episode was a major setback for our cause.

i think we all agree that the DEP made a heroic effort to put the fire out and get the plant back online, and we salute them for that. At the same time, we want to dispute the characterization of their notification efforts, particularly to our constituents, as "robust," a word DEP representatives have repeatedly used in public meetings and written documents.

Another member of our steering committee, Nancy Brous, has already testified as to her own experience with New York Kayak Polo, whose members played a match at Pier 66 completely unaware that at the very same time, an outfall under their boathouse was discharging raw sewage into the Hudson. (Her testimony at the City Council hearing last month is appended to this). I can add to that our own experience at the Village Community Boathouse on Pier 40, where at about 6 pm on July 20, we sent out about 40 members of the Stuyvesant High School Rowing Club in six of our rowing gigs. They rowed north to Gansevoort Peninsula, at about 12th Street, before realizing there was something wrong with the water and turning around.

At the time, we did realize that there was a problem at the North River Plant, and some of us had even heard, via news reports, that releases were likely to begin that evening. None of us, however, were aware that those releases would take place up and down the West Side as far south as 12th Street, and even around into the Harlem River. Our boats are big and relatively dry, but even so, had we had any inkling of the extent of the releases, we certainly would not have sent any high school crews out to row that afternoon.

The NYC Water Trail Association was formed in part so that government agencies interested in communicating with the human-powered boating community would have one simple point of contact. In previous testimony before the City Council, the DEP claimed that they did reach out to us, but that's simply not the case. Our first contact was on July 21, when we phoned them to find out what was happening. At no time did they ever inform us that there were multiple points of release; that was information we learned from Riverkeeper.

We understand that there was a lot going on that week, and don't want to dwell on the particulars of what happened or didn't happen. The main thing is to improve communication going forward, and based on recent meetings with the DEP, we are confident that that will happen. But key to a solid relationship between us is an acknowledgment that the notification effort that week was not, in fact, adequate.

Looking ahead, we'd like to make the following endorsements and recommendations:

First, we fully support a sewage release 'right to know' law.

Second, we'd like to see a full report on what happened in the sewers in the aftermath of the fire, and, for that matter, in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Irene.

Third, we believe that the DEP should share, in a clear and comprehensible way, the regular information on water quality and CSO releases that they are collecting now. For example, we understand that they have place telemetering devices in about thirty of their outfalls. Is there any reason that information can't be made available to the public?

Fourth, in the event of another significant dry-weather release, we would like a written pledge from the DEP that they will make a phone call and send an email to us so that we can get the word out to our member boathouses.

Fifth, while we're gratified to hear news of a new pilot program for CSO metering, and appreciate the overall commitment to improving public notification, we want to encourage the DEP to develop these things via a true community-planning process in which stakeholder groups like ours can be involved. It may be cumbersome and labor intensive, but if the real goal here is to clean the harbor, this is the only way forward.

Thank you.

Rob Buchanan

Steering Committee, New York City Water Trail Association