Happy V-Day sweetheart!

If your special sweety is a hipster residing in the Williamsburg/Greenpoint area, this holiday is especially hard. What can you get them, a pre-order of the Girls: Season 1 box set? Luckily, the Department of Environmental Protection has your back. Raw sewage, anyone?

According to the AP's Big Story Tumblr:

The Department of Environmental Protection is again offering Valentine's Day tours of the Newtown Creek sewage treatment plant in Brooklyn's Greenpoint section.

The DEP says it's offering three tours this year due to "overwhelming demand."

The 9:30 a.m. and 1 p.m. tours were quickly filled. So another was added at 11 a.m. Thursday.

Highlights include the plant's giant egg-shaped digesters, which break down noxious waste into harmless sludge and gas.

This idea is especially good for any young lady who claims to hate Valentine's Day, uses phrases like "the Hallmark-industrial complex," and has still made you confirm four times that you're going to be around to "hang" on Thursday. This should teach her about managing expectations.

Coming off of more than three years as its top New York executive, Mr. Ward has no illusions how the bi-state agency is run.

The audit last week cited mismanagement at the Port Authority and spiraling costs at the World Trade Center site, findings that aren’t exactly revelatory. Swelling budgets have been a long-running problem at the complex site and criticisms have been lobbed before at the sprawling agency’s byzantine structure.

Chris Ward.

To the politically cynical, the findings were a way for governors Andrew Cuomo and Chris Christie to distance themselves from the inevitable overruns at the World Trade Center site as well as the unpopular toll and fare hike last year by the agency early in their tenures.

One thing is immediately clear: It won’t impact the consensus on Mr. Ward’s time at the Port Authority, which is widely hailed as one of the key reasons behind the progress at the WTC site.

“Government has to reinvent itself all the time,” Mr. Ward said. “Good for them for raising questions about the Port Authority. All I can say is, imagine what the audit would be, what the conclusions would be if the world looked at the site on the 10th year anniversary and it wasn’t complete and President Obama was working his way through an incomplete site and the families were there and it’s been 10 years and the memorial was not done.”

Such is the contradictory and sometimes absurd nature of public service, where memory of the overwhelming mandates Mr. Ward and his colleagues at the authority faced when he stepped in as executive director in 2008 can give way to scrutiny over the evasive actions they were forced to take. Building in the expeditious manner that was required to get the memorial done in time for its big moment in the national eye was more expensive. But in the pressured years leading up to anniversary, who among both the government and public would have been willing to accept failure to meet the deadline in exchange for cost savings?

“The alternative was incredibly worse,” Mr. Ward said. “From 2008 to 2011 we completed the memorial, we solved the Larry Silverstein issues, we signed Condé and did a deal to have the Dursts invest $100 million into the building. And the site now has all of this progressive momentum. In 2008 people thought the project would never get built. Now it’s a done deal.

“I think you have to be a little perverse to enjoy major league public service,” Mr. Ward added with a smile.

And yet one can sense that Mr. Ward also misses the thrill of being one of the top transit and infrastructure officials in the country. During his time at the authority, Mr. Ward, wearing his trademark designer eyeglasses, excelled as a public speaker and face for the agency, always at ease in the limelight and a forceful presence during the authority’s tough talks at the WTC site that reassured the public its stake in the rebuilding effort would not be subjugated to Mr. Silverstein’s.

While perhaps out of the public eye, Mr. Ward’s new role places him closer to a pipeline of transit and infrastructure that is potentially bigger than the Port Authority’s. Last month, Mr. Ward took an executive level position in the U.S. operations of the large international construction company Dragados, and he has grand ambitions for the firm.

“It’s a big change,” said Mr. Ward. “Being executive director of the Port Authority is making 50 different public policy decisions every day; here the focus is bottom-line business development.”

In recent years, a pattern of ballooning construction costs has plagued more than just the Port Authority. The situation has transpired in so many instances, it has come to seem like an endemic outcome for public transit and infrastructure projects. It’s a story that Mr. Ward can tell more compellingly by virtue not only of his tenure at the Port Authority but, before that, his time at the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, where, as that agency’s commissioner, he presided over the planning and construction of a water filtration plant in Westchester County’s Croton, which also busted through preliminary cost estimates.

According to Mr. Ward, a new era could be dawning in the U.S. where government seeks to off load large civic construction projects onto private partners who take on not only oversight of the work but responsibility for its costs, guaranteeing that government is not on the hook for overruns. These public-private partnerships (PPP) have become popular in Europe but slower to catch on here. Mr. Ward has ambitious plans for Dragados. The company, he says, will be in contention for billions of dollars of construction work and has a war chest of billions more to invest alongside government partners who embrace the PPP concept.

“My job is to identify and then win some of these large public works projects that are on the planning boards or ready to go around the country,” Mr. Ward said, citing plans to replace the Tappan Zee Bridge as one among many potential jobs that will be up for bid in the coming years. “There are major highway projects down in Texas that we’re keen on, some tunnel projects out West that we’re looking at.

Hydro plants in Canada. There’s a good $35 billion of major public infrastructure that will need to get built in the next five years and we’d like to get a significant part of it.”

When Mr. Ward left the Port Authority late last year, he didn’t have his new position lined up yet. He said he went to the gym and caught up on reading. More than anything else, he said, he walked. As a high official, Mr. Ward said he was cloistered.

“Three and a half years at the Port Authority, you don’t have a lot of time to yourself,” Mr. Ward said. “I walked the Hudson River Park, which is so beautiful. I walked new neighborhoods that I hadn’t been to. I hadn’t really been over to Williamsburg and so I saw that part of the city, just walked the whole thing. I walked Madison Avenue one day, which is such an eye opener. With everything that is going on in the world there’s this one little place that remains protected from the economic recession.”

Mr. Ward went to Macalester College in Minnesota and when he graduated in the late 1970s, he said he went to work as a ranch hand in NewMexico, leaving to then do a stint on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

“We were about 150 miles offshore, out there for seven days on and then off for seven days,” Mr. Ward said. “There was every walk of life,

South Houston blacks, West Texas cowboys, Chicanos. At the time I had to be a working-class hero, I wanted to live the authentic life. I came to work for the city after graduate school at Harvard.”

One point that always stands out in his résumé is the focus of his studies. Mr. Ward has spent much of his career in public service roles involved with transit, infrastructure and construction, but in college he primarily studied theology.

“I always get questions about that,” Mr. Ward said. “All I can say is, it equipped me to ask critical questions and try to find answers to hard questions. Whether it’s an answer for a construction project or economics, it’s just a useful skill for problem solving.”

dgeiger@observer.com

Assemblywoman Linda B. Rosenthal, Eric Goldstein from the Natural Resources Defense Council, former Commissioner of the NYC Dept. of Environmental Protection Albert F. Appleton, Deborah Goldberg from Earthjustice, and actor/activist Mark Ruffalo.

Last night, actor Mark Ruffalo was on hand at an Upper West Side public forum to voice his opposition to the proposal allowing  hydrofracking in New York State.

Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal arranged the forum as a means for her UWS constituents, along with other New Yorkers, to discuss the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation's proposal to open the Marcellus Shale to natural gas drilling, which comes after the moratorium on the practice was lifted in June. The DEC has opened its Draft Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement (SGEIS), which explores the controversy surrounding hydrofracking, to public comment through Dec. 12. 

Mr. Ruffalo arrived at the forum just ten minutes before its scheduled conclusion at 9 p.m., but questions, comments and general indignation at hydrofracking continued for 90 more minutes. Mr. Ruffalo, along with panelists and organizers, braved an antsy crowd as time to publicly comment ran out and one woman asked why there was no representative from the gas industry present.

After almost an hour of citizen questions and comments—including one representative for Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer—a woman named Marsha walked purposefully to the microphone and said, softly defiant, "Since it was billed as an information forum, I’d like to know why there is no representative of the gas industry."

By then it was around 10 p.m. and most of the audience had left, but a soft mumble-grumble filled the hall at B'nai Jeshurun Synagogue on the Upper West Side where the forum was held. After the woman finished speaking—she had two more questions—Assemblywoman Rosenthal jumped right in, explaining the gas industry "does not need me to organize a forum for them."

The woman, who tried to respond to Ms. Rosenthal, was met with cries of "enough of this lady" and "next". (It should be noted that someone also said "let her talk, she's a voice!")

"Last night was about conveying the other side of the story about the potential dangers of fracking to our drinking water, our environment, our health and even our home values," Assemblywoman Rosenthal said in an email this morning. "These are direct repercussions of fracking that the industry has refused to acknowledge, let alone discuss."

Mr. Ruffalo also responded to the woman's comment, which included questions about the validity of the panel's claim that hydrofracking is environmentally un-friendly.

"They are not taking responsibility for what they should take responsibility for," Mr. Ruffalo asserted. "Until that day comes, you cannot have an honest debate with them because most of what they're saying is lies. And that's the truth."

The Observer caught up with Mr. Ruffalo after the forum ended around 10:30 p.m. and asked about the woman's comments.

"I didn't have a problem with it," Mr. Ruffalo said. "I think there's a lot of room in our democracy for that kind of conversation. And if you go down to Occupy Wall Street, you see that type of conversation happening everywhere. It's a conversation that a healthy democracy can handle."

During the forum, Mr. Ruffalo explained that since moving to upstate New York he has educated himself on the issue of fracking and become involved for the sake of his children and, well, America.

"It’s seeing how outrageous citizens of the United States are being treated," Mr. Ruffalo added to the Observer on his way out the door. "They’re not being taken care of."

Before Ruffalo arrived, the forum was mostly an information session. Panelists, including the Natural Resources Defense Council's Eric Goldstein, former Commissioner of the city's Dept. of Environmental Protection Albert Appleton, and Earthjustice's Deborah Goldberg, informed over 300-person group on the politics and dangers of hydrofracking.

Hydrofracking, also known as simply fracking or hydraulic fracking, is a controversial method of natural gas extraction. The process involves pumping a mixture of water, sand, and an unknown cocktail of 336 chemicals (or more in some cases) into the ground to fracture shale deposits some 5,000-20,000 feet below the surface, which releases the natural gas in the shale. Mr. Goldstein said that water quality, water quantity, air quality, land and habitat, public health and other resources may be jeopardized where fracking occurs.

"Folks can actually light the methane with a match in their faucet in the kitchen where methane gas has escaped from gas drilling activities," Mr. Goldstein said at the panel.

Panelists said that hyrdofracking can contaminate groundwater, which threatens to contaminate New York City's water source in upstate New York. The Halliburton Loophole, which amended the Energy Policy Act in 2005, exempts the hydrofracking liquid from the Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, Clean Air Act and Superfund Act. While only a fraction of the fracking liquid, panelists affirmed the fluid is toxic and not "safe" as natural gas companies have said.

"The fracking fluid is actually poison," said Mr. Appleton. "If you drank it you would almost certainly die."

Other concerns addressed by the panel included fracking liquid disposal and the argument that opening up the state to hydrofracking would create jobs.

"Many of the jobs, as the SGEIS indicates, would intitially go to folks from out of state who are experienced," Mr. Goldstein explained. "You're not going to get some unemployed kid who lives up in Chemung County and put him to work in this drilling equipment."

A recording of the forum was filmed and will be submitted to the DEC as part of the public's comments. On Nov. 30, the DEC will also hold a public hearing at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center.

It was windy but not cold. Inside a long, white tent, tables were set up with some brochures on them. These turned out to be a walking guide to the Newtown Creek Nature Walk and an accompanying booklet called the Newtown Creek Nature Walk Scavenger Hunt, with lines to fill in "Name" and "Class" and "school."

The Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant was built in 1967.  A few years ago, it was made, very consciously, into a "new" kind of sewage plant. It acquired "the eggs," several large, architecturally striking steel bulbs that are lit up at night, giving off an ethereal purple glow. Their actual function is to "digest" solid waste. "You may say the modern renaissance of New York City is complete," wrote David Dunlap in The New York Times on June 3, 2008, the night the lights at Newtown went on.

There were dozens of people standing near the white tents. There were several families, one with two smartly dressed toddlers who looked out of place standing next to a sewage treatment plant in the middle of industrial Brooklyn, a fifteen minute walk from the nearest subway station, the Greenpoint G.

There was a man in this 40s in faded jeans, an N.Y.U. sweatshirt and jungle mocs. There were several lesbian couples. An older man with grey hair was wearing an orange fleece vest and a Hooter's baseball cap. There was a man in his 20s with a beard, wearing a purple zip-up sweatshirt from American Apparel. There were several girls in their 20s in galoshes. There was a guy that looked like George Carlin wearing a black pleated cotton kilt (really, it was skirt), a pink sweater, thick tall black socks, and black sneakers. He had a grey pony tail and was carrying a black laptop  bag. There were a couple of adults in LL Bean who might have come in from Nyack.

An unusual number of the visitors wore protective footwear—galoshes, hiking boots, Merrils—maybe because of the walk from the subway, or the rain that morning, or just because visiting a sewage treatment plant seemed to a number of people to require shoes fit for getting dirty in.

Behind the white tents were double doors with a steel overhang leading into the visitors center. The outside wall was covered in square red tiles, glazed, and the path outside had inlayed blue lights. The interior was improbably elaborate. A curving concrete walkway, painting white, lead to a sitting area. The slope that ran down from the upper level, and on the outside of the walkway, were sides with rough stone over which water flowed constantly. It was very Disney.

A scale model of the treatment plant, which covered, in all, 25 acres, sat under Plexiglas in the middle of the upper level. Beyond it were bathrooms, and a water fountain that no one drank from.

The Department of Environmental Protection was taking the event extremely seriously. Beside the tours and the white tents and the nature walk brochures there were dozens of people wearing official looking navy blue windbreakers with NYC DEP printed in white on the back. The press check-in under the white tent seemed aspirational at first, with only a clipboard holding a pristine sign-in in sheet. Then within minutes a windbreakered woman holding a Blackberry in one hand appeared and, typing messages as she spoke, introduced herself as Ann and hustled me around the back of the facility, where the digester eggs, made of curving steel, dramatically soared from walls covered in glazed blue tiles.

The vertigo-inducing glass-and-steel walkway above the eggs had an astounding view of the bleak industrial grounds of the plant, and of Brooklyn and Queens and the Manhattan skyline. Looking down there was the steep slope of the eggs, and on the ground there were sets of enormous blue stadium lights that, at night, give the impression of a U.F.O., or at least something much grander than a waste water treatment plant.

Jim Pynn, the director of the facility, was in the middle of speaking to the third tour group, standing on a raised round platform on which there were several complicated-looking chest-high instruments. Pynn, wearing a pale-purple collared shirt, sounded like a high school coach on game day. He is is broad-shouldered and tan and has thick silver hair. "This is our third pressure device," he said, one hand on one the instruments. "In the event that something happened to these two? This is a weighted cover. And I'm going to burp it for a second."

"You going to be ready for that? I'm just going to burp it for a second. I'll pick it up." He did, and there was a "poof," like the sound of opening a bottle of soda that's been shaken.

"You're going to smell it in a minute," he said, and we did. It was a terrible, putrid smell, but not particularly surprising. It was a diluted version of the smell in some places outside the plant.

Toward the end of the tour someone asked about the architecture. The eggs were designed by the Polshek Partnership; their shape helps silt and solids to fall to the bottom while gases rise to the top. The lighting design, by  L'Observatoire International, just won an award from Architecture Lighting magazine.

"Function is what I'm interested in," Mr. Pynn said. "Not that I'm not interested in form. They take the function that we have to have here, dress it up, position it, light it, and it's a beautiful way."

"We've had four films. Angeline Jolie in Salt.  Naomi Watts in Fair Game. We're going to have Wall Street 2, with Michael Douglas, in this treatment plant. And we're also going to have Keeper of the Pinstripes. "

"We have a lot going on here, besides waste-water treatment," he said. "The interest in the architecture is allowing the public to have more of an interest in what we do."

"We can't hide it," he said. "We have to flaunt it."

The group was invited to look through the thick, clear plastic over the top of one of the manholes. Hands cupped over eyes to block out the glare as, one by one, members of the tour leaned over and looked down, and then came up looking somewhat sickened from the sight of a roiling black lake far below.

"We entertain the community about once a month, about issues about the plant, ever since we started the design and the reconstruction, since 1998. It was first under Council member Fisher, who started it.  Councilman Yassky continued it, and whoever is going to replace Councilman Yassky, I'm sure, will continue it too." (Steve Levin will replace David Yassky.)

"You're up here on top of the plant, and I'm asking you candidly, can you smell anything?" There were murmured noes. In fact it did smell, although not a lot, considering the circumstances. Pynn quickly went on,  "It really doesn't smelll most of the time. There's an occasional upset, but for the most part, the treatment plant under construction, with the odor measures in place, are counteracting the nuisance and the unneighborliness that we had in the past, given the Greenpoint community. The technology's advanced so we can have these types of facilities in places close to the residing public, and not be noticed. Today we welcome the opportunity for you to notice us. And I think what most of you were brought in to see, was the amazing look of the facility—the angles and shapes and the colors and the stainless steel."

"But to be able to show it off to you and have it clad in all these beautiful types of  colors and textures is what I think has drawn you. And because of that we have a captive audience now, you're going to learn about the wastewater treatment process."

Ms. Lloyd assumed the DEP commissioner job in 2005, after the departure of Chris Ward, who is now executive director of the Port Authority. Trinity, the real estate arm of Trinity Church, is a giant in the business, and is in the process of transforming the Hudson Square neighborhood west of Soho from a former printing district into an office space hub. Trinity, the major landowner in Hudson Square, is also spearheading the creation of a new, well-funded business improvement district for the neighborhood.

The real estate firm is run by Carl Weisbrod, who worked for the city in the Dinkins administration.

Also in today's city staffing changes: The mayor officially crowned Robert LiMandri as commissioner of the Department of Buildings, after he served for more than five months in an "acting" capacity in that role. The mayor pushed through a legislative change to allow his promotion to happen, despite objections from architecture and engineering groups. The legislation removed a requirement that the commissioner be an architect or engineer.

Statements from the mayor and Ms. Lloyd below.

New York gets its water from two upstate reservoir systems that it owns and operates. To keep the sources of water clean, the city works upstate to purchase land and ensure best-management practices by local farmers and other residents. According to the New York City Department of Environmental Protection’s 2006 water supply report, “the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has developed a $19.5 billion Capital Investment Strategy for the next decade, the majority of which will be used to upgrade and add to existing infrastructure and guarantee that we can fulfill our mandate of delivering quality drinking water to New York for years to come.”

New York’s water system provides more than 1.1 billion gallons of water daily to around eight million New York City residents and one million residents in Westchester, Putman, Ulster and Orange counties.

The two tunnels that carry our water to us represent one of the most impressive public works projects in the world. Water Tunnel No. 1 was completed 1917, Water Tunnel No. 2 was completed 1936 and Water Tunnel No. 3 began 1970, and with luck will be completed in 2020. According to the water industry’s Web site:

One reason we are building a new water tunnel is the hope that over the next century we can repair the other two tunnels. Some experts estimate that about a third of the water that we draw from our upstate system leaks before it gets to our faucets. In fact, since the late 1980’s, the Delaware Aqueduct, a piece of vital infrastructure that carries half of the city’s water, has been leaking between 10 and 36 million tons of water each day. The city is not waiting for the third water tunnel to be completed to plug this leak—a new project was just started to fix this problem.

While we may lose a lot of our supply, the quality of our water is quite good. As Elizabeth Royte wrote last year in her wonderful New York Times piece, “On the Water Front”:

Story continues below map.

The city’s filtration exemption from the E.P.A. saves it from the cost of building a $6 billion to 8 billion water filtration plant for the water that comes from the Catstkill and Delaware watersheds located west of the Hudson River. It would cost about $1 billion a year to pay the debt service and operating costs of that plant. A majority of our water comes from west of the Hudson. The rest of our water comes from the Croton Watershed up in Westchester and Putnam counties. Currently the city is spending over $1 billion to build a water filtration plant under the Moshulu Golf Course in the Bronx to protect our water supplies that come from east of the Hudson.

The city is working hard to protect the waters it doesn’t need to filter. According to the commissioner of New York's Department of Environmental Protection, Emily Lloyd:

The city has spent over $1 billion during the past decade in the communities near the water supply to keep development from ruining the water. This is of course cheaper then the billion dollars per year that a filtration plant would cost.

Most of New York City’s water supply is protected and filtered by the natural processes of upstate ecosystems. To environmental economists, nature’s work that protects our water is an “environmental service.” Because the price of a filtration plant is known, we can estimate the monetary value of the services provided to filter our water. This comes to $1 billion per year minus the $100 million or so we spend each year to protect the upstate ecosystems. This is $900 million a year of found money that we will lose if we don’t protect these fragile ecosystems. It’s a graphic illustration of the point that what is good for the environment will often be good for our bank account. Sustainable development is more than a slogan—it is a principle of good government and sound fiscal management. New York’s water is a good news story that will only stay good if we pay attention and protect it from harm.

I am grateful for the research assistance of Sara Schonhardt, Master of International Affairs student, Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs.

“Either city officials lied in their estimates or they’re incompetent, or it’s a combination of both,” said Assemblyman Jeff Dinowitz in a public statement.

Critics said the numbers they cite were calculated from figures presented by the city Department of Environmental Protection at a May 17 meeting with community stakeholders. They say they added an additional $450 million to the project's expected total cost because the DEP did not factor in things like equipment testing, project design and construction management.

Dinowitz and other lawmakers from the Bronx also want the Conflict of Interest Board to investigate because the former head of the DEP, which is in charge of overseeing the project, left his position “the day after the plant was approved by the City Council and just one year later became head of the General Contractor’s Association, a main advocate for building the plant in a city park.”

A spokesperson for the DEP said they will comment on the matter shortly.