Deputy Mayor for Operations Ed Skyler speaks at a public hearing at Stuyvesant High School

The Bloomberg administration indicated that it may back an all-out ban on natural gas drilling within the city’s massive upstate watershed, which supplies 9 million New York residents with drinking water.

Ed Skyler, Deputy Mayor for Operations, said at a public hearing earlier this week that drilling could force the city to build expensive water treatment plants to filter out poisonous chemicals it leaves behind.

The mayor will wait for the outcome of a consultants’ study that is due in December before making a final decision, Skyler added. But unless the study shows that drilling can be done safely, the state should “ban altogether” any drilling in the watershed, he said.

Skyler delivered the remarks before a boisterous audience in the auditorium at Stuyvesant High School in downtown Manhattan, where 160 people lined up to voice their concerns about the controversial drilling proposal, which has pitted New Yorkers’ economic realities against health and environmental concerns over the city’s water supply.

The state’s Department of Environmental Conservation has published a decision arguing that to allow drilling could lead to billions of dollars of economic benefits and tax receipts for the state–as long as it is done safely. The energy industry, in turn, has argued that not only can the drilling be done safely, but it can also spur “green” job creation, since natural gas is a cleaner-burning fuel than coal.

Last month, Chesapeake Energy Corporation, a gas company that owns rights to 5,000 acres within the watershed, said in a press release that it would not pursue drilling on those acres. It said that it may still pursue drilling elsewhere.

However, people at the hearing said they did not trust the company to keep its promise and insisted that a ban on drilling in the watershed was the only way to make sure Chesapeake would keep its promise.

Opponents argue that the drilling would inevitably result in poisonous chemicals seeping into the city’s water supply, requiring New York to invest billions in water filtration plants to treat the 1.5 billion gallons of water that currently supply the city with drinking water that does not need to be filtered.

Drilling would rely on a technique called “hydraulic fracturing,” in which water laced with various chemicals is used to break through rocks and allow natural gas to come up from the ground more easily.

The Department of Environmental Conservation has decided to require all drillers using hydraulic fracturing to register with the state and reveal the chemicals used in the process. But opponents say that wouldn’t do much to safeguard the safety of the drinking water.

“Sure, there’s a couple of things in here that you wouldn’t mind drinking,” Eric Goldstein, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told people gathered outside the hearing as he pointed to a giant print-out of the list of ingredients commonly used in hydraulic fracturing.

“But ethyl benzene – that’s a known carcinogen,” he added, as students leaving school raced past him on the way home.

Goldstein said job creation is a laudable goal but it shouldn’t trump public concerns over safety–a sentiment echoed by other public officials gathered at the hearing.

“There are many ways to create green jobs and economic development that do not involve sacrificing water supplies across the state,” New York City Council Member James Gennaro (D-Fresh Meadows) said in an interview.

Gennaro, who chairs the council’s environmental protection committee, has been a strident opponent of the drilling proposal.

He has introduced a council resolution urging Congress to ban an exemption in federal law that allows energy companies to drill near water supplies.

“Two important things happened tonight,” Gennaro said. “The deputy mayor came to the meeting and the word ‘ban’ passed his lips.”

Entrance sign to the controversial Marine Transfer Station

Although Mayor Bloomberg overwhelmingly carried the East 90’s in the last election, he is not a popular man among the residents here when it comes to the issue of garbage. The neighborhood is up in arms over his plan to re-open a huge garbage transfer site on East 91st Street and the FDR Drive.

The station on the East River would take Manhattan’s trash and put it on barges for removal to out-of-state landfills. Five years after Bloomberg announced this proposal, residents are still perplexed that he has not responded to community opposition.

“It’s like he isn’t listening,” said Francisco Gomerez, a doorman at 530 East 91st Street, “People talk and talk, and he doesn’t care.”

“I think they’ve gone down a path and they feel they can’t change course, ” Gifford Miller, former City Council speaker and Bloomberg’s opponent in the 2005 Mayoral election, said in an email.

The city’s old Marine Transfer Station closed in 1999 after nearly 60 years of operation. Trash is currently trucked out of Manhattan, and the city intends to cut down on truck pollution and mileage by sending the garbage by barge instead. Residents fear that if the station is re-opened, hundreds of garbage trucks will pass through the neighborhood each week to dump trash at this collection site.

The entrance to the station is on a quiet, residential section of York Avenue, lined with mom and pop stores and sidewalk cafes. An access ramp runs between a playground and two soccer fields belonging to Asphalt Green, a not-for-profit sports complex that offers programs to approximately 600,000 members of the community.

Wilfredo Carrero, the superintendent of the nearby Gracie Gardens apartment complex, remembers the years when the transfer station was open: “ York Avenue was a lot busier. Garbage trucks were double parked all the way down to 89th Street. It was smelly, especially in summer time, and there were a lot more rats along the street.”

When Bloomberg announced his new waste proposal in the fall of 2004, he explained that Manhattan had to be responsible for its own garbage. Manhattan creates half of the city’s garbage but doesn’t have a transfer station for waste. The bulk of the city’s waste is trucked to transfer stations in the South Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens.

According to Tony Ard, the director of the Gracie Point Community Council, the principal community organization fighting the re-opening, Bloomberg pushed this plan for political reasons. “He’s pandering for votes in minority communities in the outer boroughs. It’s a political game, pure and simple. He needed to support this because it was perceived as a matter of environmental justice.” Bloomberg has stood firmly behind his plan, as have many local environmental groups, including The Natural Resources Defense Council and the New York League of Conservation Voters.

The Gracie Point Community Council has spearheaded the neighborhood’s opposition, filing environmental lawsuits and enlisting local politicians.

The group, which claims 5,000 subscribers and a $2 million war chest, organized a thousand-person protest rally at Asphalt Green in 2005 and bused hundreds of outraged residents to City Hall for the waste-plan hearings.

Tony Ard said that they had proposed cheaper alternative solutions like trucking the garbage to the Harlem River Rails and then exporting it by train. They also suggested remodeling what is now a pound for towed cars in the West 30’s into an alternative marine transfer station for Manhattan’s garbage.

Despite their efforts, the City Council overwhelmingly approved Bloomberg’s waste plan in July of 2006.

At this point, Gracie Point has three lawsuits in the State Supreme Courts. Two suits are challenging the Department of Environmental Conservation permits necessary for the construction of the Marine Transfer Station. The third claims that the station would intrude on the public parkland of Asphalt Green and the East River Esplanade – a violation of a New York State public trust doctrine. As neighborhood volunteer Sarah Gallagher says, “We hope to keep this in court long enough so it never happens.”

Failing that, they have the hope of legislation. In 2008, Assembly member Micah Z. Kellner proposed a law, originally drafted by Gracie Point, that would prohibit the construction of any solid-waste transfer site within 800 feet of public housing. The Stanley Isaacs Houses and the John Haynes Homes Tower are 300 feet away from the transfer station. His bill, reintroduced with a different name in 2009, is resting with the rules committee and has not yet been voted on.

Residents also hope that the city will never have the $100 million dollars needed for the transfer station construction.

As it stands, the project funding is now delayed until 2011. If there is a new administration, the next mayor has the power to initiate an amendment to the waste plan that would exclude the 91st Street station.

Although Gifford Miller admires the community’s crusade, he is not overly optimistic about their chances: “I think the community has done everything it could. Sometimes it’s true, you can’t fight City Hall.”

The former Marine Transfer Station

The two candidates for mayor of New York City may have had a good reason to avoid talking about the environment. Both find themselves on the same side of a major environmental initiative: they support PlaNYC 2030, an ambitious blueprint for cutting the city’s carbon output 30 percent by 2030. But a critical component of the plan—figuring out a way to cut down on energy consumption by existing buildings—remains in limbo more than two and a half years after the city introduced the plan.

Without cracking down on the “gas guzzlers,” or buildings that use up the most energy due to their size and structure, meeting PlaNYC’s goals may prove difficult. Nancy Biberman, president of the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation, a Bronx-based nonprofit organization that helps retrofit buildings for energy efficiency, estimates that 80 percent of the city’s carbon output comes from existing buildings.

“It is at this point morally inexcusable and hopefully at some point legally impermissible for a [building] owner to sit on a gas guzzler and say, ‘I’m not paying for it. Let it be,’ ” Biberman said. Under current law, owners can simply pass along energy costs to tenants. This provides them with a “complete disincentive” to make their buildings more energy efficient, Biberman added.

A bill introduced in April by City Council Member James Gennaro, Democrat from Queens, could change that. Gennaro, chairman of the environmental protection committee, wants to require commercial buildings with more than 50,000 square feet of space to undergo periodic energy audits. If existing energy systems, such as boilers and central heating, are found to be deficient, owners would have to replace them with newer, more efficient models.

“This is one of the ways we plan to meet the ambitious emissions reductions in PlaNYC,” Jason Post, a spokesperson from the Mayor’s Press Office, said in an email.

But the bill faces steep opposition from the Real Estate Board of New York, the voice of the city’s building owners. “This bill would result in major expenditures by landlords while the tenant gets whatever savings are achieved,” Marolyn Davenport, the board’s senior vice president, said in an email exchange.

Biberman said the Real Estate Board’s position is “disingenuous” because, while the tenants may be the ones consuming the energy, they cannot go into the basement and install a more energy efficient boiler just for their office space. Only the building owners can make those kinds of improvements. Biberman hopes the Gennaro bill will finally give them a reason to do so.

The battle over the bill may resume soon. William Murray, environmental policy assistant to Council Member Gennaro, said he expects the bill to be deliberated within the next month or so. “At that time, we’ll have a better sense of where it’s going,” Murray said.

Gathered outside the Museo del Barrio before the debate on October 13^th, some members of organized labor cited Bloomberg’s support for the Gennaro bill as one reason why they would be voting for him on November 3^rd.

“We think it’s a great idea. Retrofitting creates more jobs, it creates good union construction jobs, it’s a win-win situation for everybody,” said Pat Purcell, a member of United Food and Commercial Workers Union, local 1500, based in Queens Village.

Anne Fenton, a spokesperson for the Thompson campaign, said in an email the candidate also supports retrofitting older buildings to make them more energy efficient. Doing so, she said, could eliminate the need to build new power plants and help create jobs. Fenton declined to say whether Thompson supports the Gennaro bill.

Andrew Doba, a spokesperson for the Bloomberg campaign, said in an email the Mayor considers reduction of New York’s carbon footprint to be an “urgent priority” and, if re-elected, will “work expeditiously to update and implement PlaNYC over the next four years.”

Bloomberg is running as a Republican and Independent candidate, while Thompson is running as a Democrat. But New Yorkers opposed to PlaNYC also have a third choice.

“Energy efficiency is all well and fine. I don’t think that should be the government’s business,” said, Joseph Dobrian, the Libertarian Party’s candidate for mayor. Dobrian supports neither PlaNYC nor Gennaro’s bill.

“Absolutely not, no way. That’s government gone berserk,” he said.