פארגעקומען קאורט וועגן ק"י פייפליין

County questions impact of KJ water pipeline plan

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

Goshen – After a lull of almost eight months in the Kiryas Joel water pipeline controversy, lawyers for the village and Orange County government appeared in court yesterday to debate whether the village adequately considered the potential impact of its project.
In what seemed a quiet coda to a noisy dispute that filled government meeting rooms last year, attorneys delivered oral arguments for more than an hour before acting state Supreme Court Justice Stewart Rosenwasser. Few spectators attended, and Rosenwasser concluded the session without questioning the lawyers.
Kiryas Joel has been planning for several years to build a 13-mile pipeline tapping into New York City's Catskill Aqueduct in New Windsor. The $21-million project would end the village's reliance on groundwater and secure an outside source with plenty of water for the community's booming population.
But after months of mounting opposition, the county sued Kiryas Joel in November, charging that it glossed over important questions in the environmental review it completed last year, particularly how additional sewage would be treated as the village's water use grows.
Yesterday, Mitchell Katz, a Syracuse lawyer representing the county, asked Rosenwasser to order Kiryas Joel to supplement its review because it failed to take the "hard look" at those issues that the law requires.
"This case is not about whether the project has merit," he said. "All we say here is that the village did not undertake the procedural and substantive analysis required by the statute and the Court of Appeals."
"This is not a hard look," he added, holding up a single page from the review dealing with wastewater. "This is a glance."
But Daniel Ruzow, an Albany lawyer representing Kiryas Joel, called those objections a "selective attack" against Kiryas Joel, arguing that the county never questioned how additional wastewater would be treated when the neighboring villages of Monroe and Harriman and the Town of Blooming Grove connected new wells.
"There's something wrong with this picture, your honor," Ruzow said.
A lawyer working with him argued that the case should be dismissed anyway, since the county missed the deadline to challenge the review. He said that date was either Aug. 28 or around Sept. 5, depending on which legal interpretation is used.
The county contends that it sued on time.
No more court appearances or filings are expected in the case. Both sides now await a decision by Rosenwasser.

http://www.recordonline.com/archive/2005/06/30/pipeline.htm