For years now, the Greene County town of Lexington has had an uncomfortable offer on the table from the New York City Department of Environmental Protection: Build a wastewater treatment plant with city money, or don't and face the consequences..
The town will receive $9.1 million in grant money administered by the Catskill Watershed Corporation to build some kind of sewage treatment system, but the plan has been hung up for years on a big problem -- there's no place to put it, thanks to two recalcitrant property owners who don't want to sell their land.
The Daily Mail has been following the story, which began to heat up last month when the dreaded phrase "eminent domain" came up as a way of solving the problem:
Stuck between a rock and a hard place, the touchy subject of eminent domain was touched upon in December, 2010, when CWC and Lamont initially revealed the results of the Study Phase.
Council members let a sleeping dog lie on that occasion, hoping engineers could give them alternatives when they returned, last Tuesday night. There was no change, however, and this time the elephant in the room could not be ignored.
“Nobody on this board wants to consider going through eminent domain. It’s a bad road to go down,” town supervisor Greg Cross said, suggesting there had to be another, simpler way to move forward.
“To my way of thinking, it would be a viable option to put a manhole over every septic tank and let the town pump them out every day if we have to,” Cross said. “It’s a lot better than taking somebody’s land.”
Last week, the CWC ratcheted up the pressure on Lexington by setting a deadline for making a decision about some sort of sewage plan, according to the Daily Mail:
CWC executive director Alan Rosa, in a letter to the town council, said a decision on whether or not to enter the pre-construction phase of the job must be forthcoming by May 6, 2011, or else.
“If the town has not passed a resolution by that date, CWC will accept that your town is not interested and move on to the next community on the list,” Rosa stated in his February 22 missive.
