New York State has proposed the biggest rewrite of New York City’s stormwater program in a decade — and it comes with a $3.5 billion price tag. The Department of Environmental Conservation and the city’s Department of Environmental Protection announced the plan in May: a modification to the 2012 consent order that has governed the city’s fight against combined sewer overflows. The proposal is open for public comment through June 16. At its heart is a trade: the city gets more time and more room to build, and in exchange it commits to spending far more, everywhere.
What Changes
The current order, dating to 2012, requires the city to manage the runoff from one inch of rain across 10 percent of the impervious surfaces in combined-sewer areas by 2030, cutting overflows into the harbor by 1.67 billion gallons a year. The new proposal keeps that 1.67-billion-gallon goal but pushes the deadline to 2040 — with a possible five-year extension — and expands the program beyond the combined-sewer districts to separately sewered areas across all five boroughs. It also broadens what counts as green infrastructure and rewrites how progress is measured, replacing the old “greened acres” count with gallons of overflow actually reduced.
Why Now
The reason is climate. The storms hitting the city are heavier than the ones the 2012 order was written for, and green infrastructure — rain gardens, bioswales, permeable pavement, green roofs — is now expected to do double duty: cleaning the harbor and holding back floodwater in neighborhoods that were never part of the sewer-overflow program. The city has already built more than 12,000 installations, the largest program of its kind in the country, and the proposal adds $2 billion to the commitment. Supporters call it a realistic plan for a wetter century; the question in the comment period will be whether a decade of extra time is a necessary adjustment — or a decade of delay.