Hearing set on bill to protect public drinking water

Thursday, August 20, 2015 - 21:04

Enterprise file photo — Melissa Hale-Spencer

Herbert Reilly has drafted a bill he says will protect public water supplies from blasting.

ALBANY COUNTY — A public hearing is scheduled for Tuesday, Aug. 25, on a proposed county law to protect public drinking water.

“We hope to get a little bit of public support,” said Herbert Reilly Jr. this week. A Democratic county legislator representing New Scotland, Reilly wrote the bill with another New Scotland Democrat, L. Michael Mackey.

“We’ve got support in the Hilltowns,” Reilly said, surmising that legislators in other parts of the county may be less attuned to the need for the law. “Some legislators don’t understand what it’s like to be in a water-poor community,” he said.

Mackey wrote a blasting bill this spring to protect private water sources, as Kinder Morgan and its subsidiary, Tennessee Gas Pipeline, prepare in the next two years to expand pipelines across New Scotland and parts of Albany County.

The current bill would create additional protection for town reservoirs in Albany County. Mackey said earlier that the new bill came about largely at the urging of New Scotland town board member William Hennessy who believed it was important to add protections for the Clarksville well field and the Vly Creek Reservoir; the reservoir, located in New Scotland, provides water for Bethlehem.

The bill would require a blaster to ask the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation and affected towns whether there are known or suspected areas of subsurface contamination within the blast area.

Reilly this week focused on a brownfield in Clarksville caused by a spill years ago. “I saw the pain in some of these people’s faces when they couldn’t drink the water or bathe the baby,” he said.

He went on about the proposed bill, “This puts the responsibility on the company doing the excavating to check with each municipality for known brownfields...They get a lot of money, these people. And they can just bulldoze over anyone who gives them opposition.”

The hearing on Local Law J will be held at the Albany County Courthouse in Albany at 7:15 p.m. on Aug. 24.

“We hope to vote on it on our first meeting in September,” Reilly concluded of the county legislators.

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