זיגי דורכפאל: זאלי לאט קומט אן צו ק"י

New water source for KJ

By Chris McKenna
Times Herald-Record
cmckenna@th-record.com

Cornwall – It was once a major water system in Cornwall, supplying hundreds of thousands of gallons a day to the Star Expansion Co. factory off Route 32 and other properties in the sprawling Star empire.
But the four wells off Taylor Road that supplied the water went dormant in 2002, after both Star Expansion and its short-lived successor, Star Anchors and Fasteners, declared bankruptcy and the factory closed.
Today, though, those wells could face a surprising new life in different hands. Through an improbable turn of events, the four wells in a country field beside the Moodna Creek now belong to the religious school system in Kiryas Joel, a community 10 miles and two towns away.
A Kiryas Joel-based corporation that bought the 3.3-acre well property 18 months ago for $14,000 signed it over April 10 to the United Talmudical Academy of Kiryas Joel Inc., property records show.
While it's too early to say what will become of the wells, their transfer appears to have handed Kiryas Joel a significant addition to its water reserves as it continues planning to tap New York City's Catskill Aqueduct to satisfy its mounting demand.
The village of 17,000 is one of New York's fastest-growing communities and shows no signs of letting up. It relies on 11 municipal wells for drinking water but must truck in more whenever demand surpasses 1.3 million gallons a day.
How would the Cornwall water get to distant Kiryas Joel? One approach village officials are considering is connecting the wells to their proposed aqueduct pipeline, which would pass relatively nearby, Kiryas Joel Administrator Gedalye Szegedin said last week. The aqueduct tap would be north of the Cornwall wells in New Windsor.
The wells tap Cornwall's only significant groundwater pocket and are a stone's throw from two others belonging to the Village of Cornwall-on-Hudson.
Cornwall Supervisor Richard Randazzo said last week that the town looked into acquiring the Star Expansion wells in the late 1990s but declined because it would have had to pay millions to clean Star's polluted factory grounds two miles away.
A bankruptcy trustee appointed to liquidate remaining assets of Star Anchors and Fasteners sold the wells to Spring Water Realty LLC on Sept. 29, 2003 – the same day another corporation with the same Kiryas Joel address bought the factory and 37 acres for $1,000.
The address belongs to Samuel Kaufman, one of three people who signed papers giving the wells to the school system this month. Neither he nor anybody else in Kiryas Joel could be reached for comment yesterday because it's Passover.
Why the factory and wells sold for only $15,000 combined is unclear. But the cost was probably low because the buyer had to take responsibility for cleaning the Star Expansion site and pay off a large mortgage, an attorney involved with the transaction said yesterday.
Wendy Rosenbach, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Environmental Conservation, said yesterday that the factory buyers met with DEC officials last year to talk about cleaning 5 acres that still have soil and groundwater pollution.
The wells are two miles from the factory site and are not affected by the pollution.
Kiryas Joel officials have begun talking with officials from the school system, known as the UTA, to take over the Star Expansion wells for municipal use, Szegedin said last week. He said they could serve as either a primary or secondary source.
The wells could help Kiryas Joel meet its obligation to maintain a backup water supply equal to whatever it would draw from the Catskill Aqueduct. New York City imposes that requirement so communities that tap its water tunnels have drinking water when aqueducts are shut down for repairs.
Kiryas Joel's pipeline project has aroused strong opposition from neighboring communities, who see it as fuel for overdevelopment and an expansion of the village's borders. Orange County filed a lawsuit in November challenging Kiryas Joel's environmental review of the pipeline project.
As that case grinds through court, the village has been acquiring new water sources. The state recently approved one new well in Monroe and is reviewing plans for a second one.
And now, the Cornwall wells.
Szegedin said adding these won't deter the village from pursuing an aqueduct connection. The main reason it decided to seek an outside water source, he said, was to end its competition with neighboring communities for groundwater.

How much water?

The United Talmudical Academy of Kiryas Joel Inc. now owns four wells off Taylor Road in Cornwall, next to the Moodna Creek.
The Star Expansion Co. drilled them in 1963 and 1964, tapping a sand-and-gravel aquifer that consultants for the Village of Cornwall-on-Hudson had determined to be the town's only significant groundwater pocket.
Water was piped 2 miles south to the Star Expansion factory off Route 32, which was using roughly 200,000 gallons a day when an engineering report on Cornwall's water was written in June 1994. The wells also supplied about 25 company-owned homes and Glenoden Farms, a dairy farm that Star Expansion created in 1980.
The daily demand was 359,000 gallons on average and never exceeded 587,000 gallons, according to the report. Usually, one well alone could serve the water system.
How much Kiryas Joel could draw from the wells is unknown. Each yields 300 gallons a minute, which comes to 1.3 million gallons a day if all four are pumped for 18 hours straight.
But the state Department of Environmental Conservation allowed the previous owners to draw no more than 300,000 gallons a day when it issued its last permit in January 1998. Their future use might be limited by their proximity to two Cornwall-on-Hudson wells off Taylor Road.

Star Expansion Co.

The Star Expansion Company made metal bolts and other hardware, mostly for the construction industry, for four decades in a factory off Route 32 in the Mountainville section of Cornwall.
The company moved to Cornwall from Bayonne, N.J., in 1956, with 28-year-old H. Peter Stern and his father-in-law, Ralph Ogden, as its owners. At its peak in the 1980s, Star Expansion employed 700 people.
Struggling with overseas competition and a construction slump, the company began marketing its hardware to consumers in the early 1990s but lost out to big retailers such as The Home Depot.
In 1995, it sold its consumer-product division and laid off employees, reducing the work force to around 135. Stern, who had run the company for 40 years, filed for bankruptcy protection in March 1996.
In February 1997, investors bought the business and factory for $6.2 million and continued operating under the name Star Anchors and Fasteners. But the high cost of cleaning and removing soil and groundwater polluted by years of dumping waste on the property soon crippled the new owners. In September 1998, Star Anchors laid off about 90 workers and filed for bankruptcy.
The company limped on with fewer and fewer workers until 2001 or 2002, when manufacturing ceased. The 183,400-square-foot factory and a 124,200-square-foot building once used for packaging and storage are now warehouses.