They say that everything is bigger in Texas, but the program that the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and New York City Department of Environmental Protection announced an agreement on an enforcement Order to improve the overall water quality in New York Harbor waters amounts to the City’s investment of approximately $187 million over the next three years and an estimated $2.4 billion of public and private funding over the next 18 years! Through this program of Green and Grey Infrastructure, NYC expects to see savings of $1.4 Billion from Grey Infrastructure Substitution Projects and an additional $2 Billion in Deferred Costs. The City’s modified Consent Order will allow the CIty to implement a green infrastructure adaptive management approach to address it combined sewer overflow problem as well as other water quality improvements throughout the City.
Councilman James F. Gennaro, who wrote a letter to the DEC in support of the change in its agreement with the city that enabled the Green Infrastructure Plan to go forward, said, “This agreement locks in place an ambitious, adaptive, intelligently designed stormwater management plan through the next 20 years. It will establish enforceable milestones and a budget to implement it. The plan will offer better stormwater management at lower costs to the public. DEP projections indicate that the Green Infrastructure Plan will reduce combined sewage outflow volumes by nearly two billion gallons more per year than the previously required all-gray infrastructure plan — and all that for $2.4 billion less in public spending.”
Read the full story from the City’s announcement here:
http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/html/press_releases/12-17pr.shtml?goback=%2Egde_2075936_member_105070638
Can Virginia’s small, mid-sized, and larger localities promote different approaches to respond to and plan tomeet more stringent stormwater regulations as NYC has as a result of their Consent Order?
