When Christopher Ward takes office as the new commissioner of the
city Department of Environmental Protection on April 8, one of his first acts
will be to suspend the city’s efforts to tap the Hudson River to relieve the
city’s
so to speak, byMayorMichael Bloomberg two months ago-one of several last-resort
solutions to the city’s
that Mr. Bloomberg formally declared a Stage 1 drought emergency on March
26-abruptly turning Mr. Ward’s normally low-profile post into a high-visibility
position with huge implications for the city’s immediate future.
Mr. Ward decided to scrap the proposal to tap into the
Hudson-which contributed some 100 million gallons a day through a pumping
station near Poughkeepsie until 1985-after listening to environmentalists
predict a range of calamities, not least of them an invasion by a new Hudson
River species known as zebra mussels. If introduced into the city
it turns out, this lusty species of shellfish could multiply at an astonishing
rate and block sinks and toilets from Woodlawn to Brighton Beach.
“We have suspended our efforts to pump the Hudson, because it
won’t bring in enough
solve,” Mr. Ward told The Observer ,
in his first extensive interview since being appointed to the post. “The
pumping of the Hudson has no immediate or midterm value to the
the city.” Mr. Ward didn’t rule out use of the Hudson in a dire emergency in
the future-if, say, reservoirs were on the verge of drying up. But that almost
certainly won’t happen.
Mr. Ward’s decision is one of several early signals that the
Bloomberg administration intends to establish a good relationship with the
city’s environmental community, which is regrouping after an eight-year war
with former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Indeed, it’s a safe bet that the specter of
zebra mussels in the city’s sewers wouldn’t have been all that alarming to Mr.
Ward’s predecessor, Joel Miele, a confrontational Queens Republican who packed
a pistol in an ankle holster. Environmentalists battled Mr. Miele throughout
the Giuliani years, suing his department numerous times and charging that he
failed to protect the city’s upstate watershed. Relations deteriorated so badly
that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the chief prosecuting attorney for Riverkeeper Inc.,
took to comparing Mr. Miele to Boss Tweed.
Under Mr. Ward-a burly, gregarious, wonkish man who lights up
when discussing the virtues of light rail and other big capital projects-things
are likely to be different. Several months ago, when the Mayor was considering
Mr. Ward for the D.E.P. post, two of Mr. Bloomberg’s top aides, Marc Shaw and
William Cunningham, quietly reached out to Mr. Kennedy to solicit the
environmental community’s opinion of Mr. Ward. After canvassing his fellow
environmentalists, Mr. Kennedy got back to them with an answer: Mr. Ward was
well-liked because, as chief planner for the Port Authority of New York and New
Jersey for the past five years, he
had been sensitive to environmental concerns during the agency’s development of
its master plan, pushing for protections of the Hudson estuary. He also had
experience selling large capital projects to angry community groups: He made
the rounds in southeast Queens several years ago, persuading residents that the
light-rail project linking Jamaica to Kennedy Airport would be good for their
communities. Armed with those good reviews, Mr. Ward got the job.
Mr. Ward’s appointment led many environmentalists to speculate
that Mr. Bloomberg will be more environmentally friendly than his predecessor
was. Of course, Mr. Bloomberg has not pleased them on all fronts: He proposed
scrapping the city’s recycling program in a cost-cutting move and suggested
that the city may have to build new incineration plants to get rid of its
garbage. Environmentalists associate such moves with the bad old days of grimy,
smoggy New York City in the 1970’s. But Mr. Bloomberg has also cheered
environmentalists by taking the subway to work and proposing several measures
aimed at discouraging motorists from taking their cars into Manhattan’s central
business districts.
Now that the city has declared a drought emergency, Mr. Ward
will become one of Mr. Bloomberg’s
highest-profile commissioners, and his performance will go a long way towards
setting the administration’s tone on the environment.
“Because of the drought, Chris Ward will be among the most
visible commissioners at City Hall,” said
Eric Goldstein, senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
“Hopefully that visibility will translate into the authority he’ll need to ensurethattheBloomberg
administration is green on all the other issues facing
our city.”
The earliest indications are that Mr. Ward’s tenure will be
marked not just by a willingness to listen to the environmental community, but
also by his emphasis on capital spending to upgrade the city’s aging
infrastructure.
“This city was built on large-scale infrastructure projects that
were put up generations ago,” Mr. Ward said, adding that he expected to launch
a $1.8 billion capital plan next year for a range of projects, including a
major upgrade of the sewer system. “D.E.P. is a huge, huge utility. It’s a
fabulous system that was created decades ago. It needs to be taken care of,
expanded and improved upon. There comes a time when you need to spend money to
make it better.”
Huge Challenges
In a city dealing with a budget crisis, a drought and lingering
fears of terrorist attacks, Mr. Ward faces a number of other huge challenges.
First among them is balancing the economic needs of upstate residents who live
in and near the city’s watershed with the mission of ensuring New Yorkers that
their
Mr. Ward said that fishermen would be allowed to troll upstate
reservoirs again. They had been banned amid heightened anxiety after Sept. 11.
But Mr. Ward said that he agreed with environmentalists, who have publicly
argued that the
at its intake points-the places where
reservoirs, which are too large to be poisoned by material carried in a small
fishing boat.
“In a large reservoir, whatever you’re putting in the
diffuse,” Mr. Ward said. Echoing the public comments of environmentalists, he
added: “Intake points are clearly the points of most concern. The worry is that
someone would introduce into an intake system some type of poison, where it
would go directly into the system and wouldn’t have a chance to dissipate
within a larger body.”
To combat such fears, Mr. Ward said, his agency would have a
representative on Mayor Bloomberg’s new bioterrorism task force, which includes
representatives of the Police and Fire departments. “After Sept. 11, issues of
bioterrorism are going to be very high on the agenda,” he said. “One of the
things that we’re really going to have to evaluate is the security of the
watershed system. We need to find a balanced approach for protecting it while
meeting the needs of people upstate.”
The second set of challenges is associated with the drought. On
March 26-one of this year’s few rainy days–Mr. Bloomberg announced that city
residents would be prohibited from washing vehicles, sidewalks, driveways and
streets, among other things. But it’s not easy to persuade New Yorkers to
conserve
toilet-flushing during a drought of the early 1980’s, Mr. Koch famously
remarked: “If it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down!”
Mr. Ward sought to make a similar point, although he didn’t
exactly match Mr. Koch’s deft use of imagery. “We need to take seasonal
regulations and add another series of restrictions,” he said.
Making matters more complex, Mr. Ward candidly noted in the
interview that there was a strong possibility that the drought emergency could
be upgraded to a Stage 2 emergency in the coming weeks. This would mean
stricter regulations and enforcement on
enforcement agents out to ticket violators.
Mr. Bloomberg is trying to remain optimistic about the city’s
Mayor joked that it was a good omen that it had rained four times since Mr.
Ward’s appointment-but officials remain wary.
“In all likelihood, I would think we’re talking about a potential
Stage 2 within a month,” Mr. Ward said. “If it rains a lot, as it can and it
has, we can avoid it; but if levels stay consistently low, we’ll need to go to
a Stage 2.”
All of which raises yet another problem for Mr. Ward, one that
goes to the heart of his new job’s challenge. On the one hand, he needs to
alert New Yorkers to the vulnerability of the
largest capital asset. The trick is to do that without exacerbating fears about
the fragility of post–Sept. 11 New York.
“We need to let New Yorkers understand that
lifeblood of the city, is also a finite and vulnerable resource,” Mr. Ward
said. “But we need to do it in a way that won’t undermine people’s long-term
confidence in New York.”
