A surprising detail ends this story about another watershed-related lawsuit in the Daily Freeman.
Correspondent Jay Braman reports that the New York City Department of Environmental Protection is suing the town of Shandaken over the town's tax assessment of the wastewater treatment plants the city operates in Pine Hill and Chichester. The DEP sued Shandaken over the same wastewater system two years ago, but despite a settlement, it's at it again: The town is trying to tax a part of the plants not covered by the previous lawsuit, and the city objects.
At the end of the story, Braman reports that such lawsuits have competely cashed the $3-million-dollar legal defense fund set up for watershed towns in 1997 as part of the massive agreement between the city and the watershed region. The money was intended to pay for the towns' lawyers in disputes with New York City over issues like tax assessments -- but now, just 13 years later, it's gone.
From the Freeman:
One of the programs was a bank account set up with $3 million of city money to pay for legal defense against lawsuits brought on by the City against towns, villages and counties in the watershed region — the idea being to level out the David- and-Goliath relationship between the big city and its wealth and the small, cash-strapped municipalities in the Catskills.
But that account was drained as the city filed lawsuit after lawsuit throughout the region, and is now empty, with Shandaken using the last $140,000 of it fighting over the Pine Hill plant’s value two years ago. That means the cost of fighting the latest suit will fall on Shandaken taxpayers.
$3 million in 13 years -- that's about $230,000 every year since 1997 that has been spent on lawyers representing various towns and villages in disputes with the DEP. Clearly, the only winner here is the lawyers.
