The New York City Department of Environmental Protection held three meetings this week on a proposed 10-year extension of their watershed land-buying program. At a meeting on Monday in Delaware County, one of the city's main targets for buying land over the next decade, alarmed residents and town officials had strong words for the DEP. (See our story and video on Monday's hearing here.)
Today, the Times Herald-Record has a story on last night's meeting in Neversink, Sullivan County, where the plan is apparently no less controversial:
Joy-Ann Monforte, the town clerk in Denning, expressed similar worries. If New York City reaches its peak acquisition goals, only 4.2 percent of Denning's developable land will remain.
"That's totally unacceptable," said Monforte, noting that Denning's development potential is already limited because of its mountainous terrain. "Our town will cease to grow."
As part of the piece, THR reporter Adam Bosch also has a nice "by the numbers" feature, with statistics about the watershed and the land NYC owns in it.
A thought: Maybe we should build one of those 90s-style web counters tracking how much land NYC now owns? Unrelatedly, here's one I found tracking the BP oil spill, from WKRG News in Alabama:
