 Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Megan Lowry. I am a media officer with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Thank you for joining us this afternoon for a webinar on the report that was just released this morning, titled Review of the New York City Watershed Protection Program. You can now download a copy of the report and other supporting materials at www.nap.edu and we'll also chat that link out to you. A recording of this webinar will be available in the coming weeks on our website. For those of you not familiar with the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, we are private non-profit institutions that provide independent objective analysis and advice to the U.S. to solve complex problems and inform public policy decisions related to science, technology, and medicine. For each requested study, panel members are chosen for their expertise and experience and serve pro bono to carry out the study statement of task. The reports that result from the study represent the consensus view of the committee and must undergo external peer review before they are released, as did this report. Please note that this webinar is scheduled for one hour. We'll start off with a presentation summarizing the report by the committee chair and then we'll open it up to any questions you may have. You can simply submit a question at any time during the presentation. Click the Q&A button on the bottom of your screen and type in your question. Now I'd like to end with Dr. Paul Barton, who served as the chair of the committee. He is a professor in the Department of Environmental Conservation at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and his research centers on the links between land use, stream flow, and water quality. And with that, I'll turn it over to Dr. Barton. Thanks very much, Megan. Thank you everyone for joining us. So I have the nearly impossible task of summarizing a 400 page report. What may begin with an overview of New York City water supply system with a few key points and then move on to this slide. The system is enormous in extent. It encompasses about a million acres in the Catskills and about 200,000 acres in East Hudson watershed. It delivers 1 billion gallons a day of water to 8.5 million people in New York and about a million people living along the aqueduct. It has been successfully in compliance with the Safe Drinking Water Act and the surface water treatment rule since 1993 with a succession of five filtration avoidance determinations. They're issued by the US EPA and the New York State Department of Health. This didn't happen by accident, of course. It's a combination of the high ambient water quality in the system, the operational skill and dedication of the New York City DEP staff, the effectiveness of the watershed protection program, and the partnership approach that was fostered by the Memorandum Agreement all these many years ago between New York City DEP, the watershed communities, and state and federal agencies. This table from chapter one shows the scope of the watershed protection program to date with investments, as you can see, of $2.5 billion. We began our work in a figurative sense by tracing the outline of the elephant here by looking at the relative investments in different parts of the program. And as you can see, the wastewater treatment program upgrades, water treatment plants for municipalities and city-owned plants encompassed about 40% of the total investment. The land acquisition program comprised nearly 20% and the major program shown in green include about 90% of the watershed protection program investments to date. That's not to say that the smaller programs and the smaller expenditures are not important. They all contribute to the cumulative positive effect of the program. We began our work by consulting and thoroughly studying the work of our predecessors from 1997 to 1999 that resulted in this 2000 report. This was a prospective review and that the watershed protection program was just beginning. And the question that committee was addressing was, would it work? Our work was both retrospective looking back at the last 20 years and prospective looking ahead, especially at the next 10 to 20 years, to see how the program might be improved. Both the 2000 committee and the 2020 committee returned over and over again to the memorandum of agreement as the template or as the foundational element of the watershed protection program and the five filtration avoidance determinations. As Megan mentioned, an academy committee begins with a statement of task, which is another way of saying a charge to the committee or in lay terms, a rigorous checklist that we consult at the beginning of every meeting and at every round of writing and revision and review of our report to ensure that we've delivered on these five very complex open-ended items. As a committee, we adopted the old shaker maxim. Anything can be done better as our working philosophy, not in a critical or pejorative sense, but by dedicating ourselves to the development of an authentic consensus report to serve the common good for the long term. And by authentic, I mean that it wasn't a simple majority of the committee, but the entirety of the committee that agreed on its content and tone. The statement of task was read at the beginning of every meeting and consulted frequently. This committee had eight meetings, which is two more than the norm, a number of study tours organized by Watershed Protection Program partners and other site visits and numerous information requests to the New York City DEP, Watershed Ag Program, Casco Watershed Corporation, and others. It's a large committee, 17 members, capably supported by the National Academy staff, in particular by Dr. Laura Aylers, who was the study director for the 2000 study and the recent 2018 study of a software package called the Operations Support Tool, and I'll mention a little bit about later. Between the 17 committee members, we have at least 500 collective years of training and experience. It's a very collegial group. That's not to say that we didn't have our differences, but even in our most contentious discussions, we're constructive and respectful and aimed at meeting the statement of task and delivering the best quality product that we could. Serving on a National Academy committee is an intense experience. It's over and above your day job, so to speak. So it requires people who are dedicated to this kind of public service. And I thank my colleagues for rendering it so capably. Before I continue into some of the details, I'd like to address some of the core concepts and key themes that pervade this presentation and, moreover, our report. The first two items should go without saying, but shouldn't be left unsaid. The third item, the Watershed Protection Program, appears to us to be entering a new phase, and for a variety of reasons, that new phase is more important than ever. Finally, we encourage New York City DEP and all the Watershed Protection Partners and Watershed Communities and the like to adopt what is called the Adaptive Management Paradigm, and that is a formal, systematic way of integrating monitoring measurements, statistical analyses, modeling, and program implementation, so we all learn by doing and improve the product and project as it goes along. A particular tool that we'll note in this presentation, our report, is something called the Mass Balance, which instead of just measuring water quality concentrations of pollution, which is typically needed for compliance monitoring or required, a Mass Balance endeavors to do just that, to find the total quantity of pollutants moving towards the reservoir. And finally, I'll note something that many of you already appreciate and know, that the New York City Watershed Protection Program is a national and international example. That photograph shows Steve Parker, former director of the Water Science and Technology Board, on a study tour in Oregon in 2007, during which our host from the Portland, the Portland, Oregon water supply showed us his copy, which is notable for all the sticky notes in the margin. So to be a little bit of background that is included in chapter two, if we had a photographic record of the Catskills region, over the last 400 years, at 50 year intervals, we would see a radically transformed landscape, especially in the 19th century, that period between 1820 and 1870. In about 1920, a few years before, the Ashokan Reservoir would appear on the horizon from Slide Mountain, formerly a long settle agricultural valley. And it's worth noting that the Watershed Protection Program has only encompassed, although it seems like much longer, a 20 or 25 year period of this long timeline, or 100 years about the lifespan of a hemlock tree. The landscape has been had been transformed during that period of time. And we have a wonderful record in Michael Kudish's work to show the effects of the bark pealers working for tanneries that cut hundreds of thousands of acres of mature, mature hemlock trees, the bluestone quarries, furniture factories, Coopridge mills, mountain houses, and various boarding houses, and the railroads like the Ulster and Delaware that connected it to the outside world and international markets. Add to them more than 200 water powered sawmills on virtually every large tributary, about 20 charcoal operations, and hundreds and hundreds of small family farms, some with family heritage dating back to a Revolutionary War land grant to a veteran who was the patriarch of their family. So chapter two traces these ecological, historical and cultural antecedents to look at the sources and the continuing legacy effects, as ecologists call them, of these historical land and resource uses, some of which date again, from the 1700s. It's no surprise, therefore, that one of the marquee stream management program projects, a full channel restoration project that we'll see more about in relation to chapter six occurs on a reach of stony clove downstream from a number of sawmills adjacent to a railroad grade, a road and several furniture factories. But even after this long period of extractive resource use, during which only 6% of the Catskills region escaped direct human influence, this ecosystem has recovered to a remarkable degree and is now supporting a high ambient water quality again. So this is all to say that a pristine water, a pristine wilderness with no people and no human activities is not a necessary precondition for production of clean water. Pristine wilderness areas do not produce DI and IS distilled water contrary to popular belief. Chapter three focused in detail on the New York City water supply system and I invite you to review it to fill in the gaps that I left at the fumbling beginning of this presentation. It includes four findings and recommendations that are somewhat of a miscellaneous list. Let me walk you through them. Covering the Hillview Reservoir, we felt should be a top infrastructure priority. This is the kensical reservoir, which is the confluence of the Catskill and Delaware Aqueduct where the final blending and mixing takes place before being disinfected with chlorine and with ultraviolet ultraviolet light. And then reaching the Hillview Reservoir, the balancing reservoir immediately before the water enters the distribution system for New York City. We also note that succession planning and professional continued professional development should be undertaken to ensure that the essential staff that operate the New York City water supply are always in place. It goes without saying but we sometimes forget that a water utility needs to operate 24 hours a day seven days a week in perpetuity. And as I'll present in just a moment, that is, is a challenging task to say the least, even with the operational flexibility that New York City system has. We encourage work and effort on scaling up watershed protection efforts when they're necessary in the face of harmful algal blooms that often produce unacceptable tastes and odors, and other changes in regulations that may make it more difficult to comply with with EPA and State Department of Health regulatory edicts. And finally, we conducted a prototype economic analysis with the data that limited data were available to us to determine that embarking on a large filtration plant does not seem to be the best investment of New York City or other taxpayer funds at this time in support of public health, economic and environmental objectives. Chapter four is a transitional chapter that lays out some of the necessary background information that sets up the program review chapters five through 11. It begins with an overview of watershed hydrology and continues through these four points. Let me add a few foot notes before venturing into them in a little bit more detail. We'll focus a lot on phosphorus in this presentation and in our report, because phosphorus is something that's been measured and monitored in great detail in the watershed and was a rich data resource for us to analyze. But it's also a surrogate for these other pollutants of concern. That is to say that eroded soil that causes turbidity, dissolved organic matter and microbial pathogens are in effect along for the ride with stormwater along with phosphorus, nitrogen and other water quality constituents of concern. Most of that transport, as you know, occurs during rain and snowmelt events. Some of it occurs during dry weather in solution. And a lot of it happens during the dormant season during fall rainstorms during spring snowmelt and during extreme weather events at other times of the year. In almost all cases, it derives from multiple sources. And it takes some effort to determine where the phosphorus nutrients organic matter came from. I'll briefly describe likely climate change effects and then the stress test of the water supply system using this operation support tool that I referred to a moment ago. First, hydrology and systems operations. An average year in the cat skills has about an equal division between water that's lost to evaporation to water used by plants and otherwise returns to the atmosphere and the remainder of that water that flows to streams by way of groundwater and surface water flow paths. In contrast, a dry year has about the same, sometimes more evaporative loss. And stream flow is a reflection of the paucity of rain and snowmelt during that period of time. Wet years, which many of you remember all too well. This is a shot of the Gilboa Dam during tropical storm Irene. Evaporation is about the same. But when there is an extraordinary amount of rain and snow, the conversion to stream flow, as you can see, in this case, created more stream flow than there was rain and snow in an average year. Just to stress the importance of operations and the expertise of the New York City DEP staff and the importance of the Watershed Protection Program as a whole, regardless of the source conditions, climate and stream flow conditions, water coming out of the tap has to look, taste and smell the same. It's not easy to do during average conditions and it's extraordinarily challenging during very dry and very wet conditions. The committee analyzed changes in land use using the National Land Cover Database, which is the most consistent way to look at trend analysis. And we found the following that the conversion of forest and farmland to developed areas in the West of Hudson Watershed has been almost not detectable. That's not a typo. That's 300 of 1% of the Watershed area. The east of Hudson region was greater but on par with places like Vermont and Maine. Both were much lower than the New York State average, which in turn was lower than the U.S. average and the U.S. maximum, which is startling because of its occurrence in Arizona, with all their water problems, 16.2%. The committee's mass balance analysis of phosphorus in the Canisville Reservoir, a particular watershed and reservoir that I'll return to again. And then a report focuses on as one of the most challenging sites has shown that the rate of improvement has been measurable but slow, as you can see from the two graphs on the right. With respect to climate change, the principal concerns, again, tropical storm Irene may well have been an example of one is that mobile circulation models tell us that the Catskills region is likely to be subject to more intense storms and warmer conditions. And as you can see from the flow duration series on the right, the size and severity of those storms has been increasing fairly steadily over the last many, many decades. The stress tests that I alluded to earlier was using this operation support tool, a very sophisticated computer model that's linked to the New York City system to determine what would happen if, in a mathematical sense, tropical storm Irene, followed by Lee, were repeated over the entire system, not just the west of Hudson System twice, to see if systems operations could accommodate that extraordinary stress and still deliver water in compliance with the safe drinking water act limit of five ethnometric turbidity units at the outflow of the Kensical Reservoir. We found that that was the case, and that led us to this conclusion that the system operations appear to be more than adequately able to protect water quality in the long term. Not without challenges, but a reassuring result, to be sure. The next chapter is the program review chapters follow this template. We began by describing the program in detail. We looked at its effectiveness, and then we critique the program, again, in this anything can be done better mode, to look for opportunities and recommendations that we could make for improvement in the face of things like climate change, invasive species, and regulatory change. Chapter five focuses on the agriculture programs, particularly the watershed agriculture program on the Kensical Reservoir, where a rich data set was available to us. This very detailed almost psychedelic image is the result of some terrain analysis and computer modeling of something that you already understand intuitively, and that is water flows downhill from the hill tops to the valleys, and it follows that most stream flow is generated from those dark blue areas, the so called saturated source area for stream flow. So pollutants and human activities in those areas are of particular importance when it comes to prevention and reduction. If you're a thousand feet away, two thousand feet away on a dry well-drained hilltop, the likelihood of a measurable effect would be much much less. This plot shows our committee's analysis of phosphorus data in soils, provided to us thousands of samples by the watershed agriculture program. It's a rather complex plot, but let me walk you through it. The two ranges that are noted by the dashed lines are high, and that is concentrations of phosphorus that are at the upper limit of what plants, particularly agricultural crops, can use, and then above that line, very high concentrations, which is in effect an over-fertilized site that is right for offsite impacts of flow. The boxes show the range of variation of most of the samples, and the solid black line shows the median value, the most common observation. And unfortunately, what you can see, and what we saw in these data, is that the highest phosphorus concentrations occur on the wettest sites, immediately adjacent to the streams, even small tributaries, which puts them particularly at risk of contributing to downstream flows and loading of canons of a reservoir. So it follows that a watershed management approach that starts on the wettest sites with the highest concentration and works its way to progressively drier sites holds the best promise for long-term results. But treating what's there is important, but not enough in the sense these phosphorus loads are high enough that the committee also highlighted these two other recommendations. Commonly in Europe, in countries like the Netherlands, in Belgium, manure and other biomass is turned into energy or other useful byproducts. It's something called a bioreactor, where the methane is harvested and used to produce electricity. That's one possible method of reducing the input of phosphorus to the watershed as a whole. Another is to build on the success of the Precision Feed Management Program and expand that to as many farms and animal units as possible. We also suggest that the Watershed Ag Program should transition from metrics of output, counting the number of BMPs installed to more outcome oriented objectives, determining the nutrient loading prevented by either field measurements, statistical analyses, modeling work, or some combination thereof. And finally, we suggest that the Watershed Ag Council and the New York City DEP should jointly develop a climate action plan for agriculture and in so doing revise best management practices to make sure that they're up to the task, the more stressful task of dealing with climate change in the future. This will largely entail changing design guidelines for some of the field practices. Chapter six focuses on the Stream Management Program. We found that it stands out among stream restoration efforts nationwide. Other examples include work by the Forest Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, but primarily in the Pacific Northwest to restore salmon habitat. But this is a much more ambitious program because in addition to the the ancillary benefit of improved habitat, it aims to greatly reduce turbidity. We found it to be a helpful prototype that other Watershed Protection Programs might emulate. That's not an implicit criticism of any other program. It's just to say that this program was the most complete example of the adaptive management paradigm and that mass balance approach because it uses a whole watershed or whole system approach with active partnerships. It builds scientific investigation into every project. It begins work with a stream a comprehensive stream corridor mapping and prioritization method and then uses the most appropriate tool ranging from very elaborate full channel restoration to simpler and more straightforward restoration of riparian forest buffers and all the while water quality is monitoring is monitored to check the efficacy of the work. We do note however that more statistical analysis and ongoing analysis of that monitoring data would be helpful. Let me show you an example from that site I mentioned earlier in the vicinity of Trichester, New York. The site on the photograph on the right is the completed example of the stream channel restoration. The tree seedlings are small and will soon be more evident. The complex graph on the right shows the changes in suspended sediment over time. I want to draw your attention to the logarithmic scale on the vertical axis. That is to say if you look at the pre-construction loads of suspended sediment and then the effects of the first part of the stream channel restoration, the first site, and then the cumulative effects of site one and two, you could note that at any given stream flow that if I gave you some numbers for example what might have started out as 40 milligrams per liter in the black dots is now something like excuse me 400 milligrams per liter in the black dots is now 40 in the red dots and only four in the yellow dots. Now there's a great deal of variability as is the norm for watersheds but the effect at least the near-term effect of this program is plainly evident. We turned our attention in chapter seven to the land acquisition and recreation programs. The land acquisition program has the distinction of being one of the most essential programs in with respect to the signing of the initial MOA, the renouncement of eminent domain and the process of willing seller, willing buyer transactions, that clause, and also the issuance of the filtration avoidance determinations but almost inevitably it was the most controversial with watershed communities. It's been a very large program as I mentioned in the introduction. It's expended almost $500 million purchased or gained easements purchased the development rights on 1800 parcels and encompass about 15 percent or a little more than 15 percent of the total watershed area, 154,000 acres. But we find at this stage in the project and the program that the watershed acquisition program should focus more on lands in the riparian areas and in flood plains of tributaries both large and small that are likely to have a more straightforward and direct effect on water quality maintenance and enhancement. We also recommend that New York City work with watershed communities to identify parcels that New York City has purchased that have low water quality protection value but may offer development or relocation potential that would be of a great help to watershed communities and end up serving both watershed protection and community vitality goals at once in the spirit and letter of the MOA. The good neighbor payments that were made at a at the beginning of the MOA this would be a good neighbor collaboration. The example that was repeated to us over and over again in Margaretville is the grocery store an essential service that occurs right in the flood plain. The arrow happens to be the direction of flow that's confined by two state highways so as you can see that building more or less forms a dam just where you want it want at least during a high-flow event like tropical storm Irene. Finding a four to five acre site to relocate that would solve two problems at once and the precedent for this good neighbor collaboration is ready there and most evident in this marquee example of success from the watershed recreation program that recently opened the Shokan Rail Trail. Those of you who are familiar with the area would I think note that this would be unimaginable this would have been unimaginable 30 to 40 years ago it would have been implausible if it was proposed 20 years ago even after the signing of the MOA it's a reality today and it's a remarkable asset for both New York City and watershed communities not least because it's proximate to the new Catskill visitor center named in honor of Congressman Maurice Hinchie. Chapter eight focus on the wastewater programs throughout the watershed and the graph on the right shows the early success of the wastewater treatment plants the five the last five what wastewater treatment plants to come online brought about an enormous reduction in the annual load of phosphorus in those watersheds but once those large point sources have been dealt with the smaller non-point sources the diffuse source pollution septic systems agriculture land use urbanized land show up in the insect graph on the right and that led us to both revisit the 2000 report and amplify and update the suggestion recommendation that the septic system especially on sensitive sites should use best available control technology and that is aerobic treatment units and absorption fields that are up to the task of dealing with domestic wastewater in small confined valleys in difficult soils or some combination there of stormwater management didn't rise to the level of the summary section of our report because the amount of developed land in the Catskills is relatively small but it's it's an important program program of the Watership Protection Program especially in the east of Hudson region and also a source of some consternation and concern in the west of Hudson the the tools and techniques that the methods listed on the on the horizontal axis the x-axis show how far stormwater management has come in the last 10 or 20 even 30 years and the efficacy of some methods like bio retention basins or or otherwise means of controlling stormwater runoff in this case 40 milligrams per liter of total suspended solids entered that retention basin and only 10 left a promising result but on the other hand phosphorus that pollutant of particular concern had the anomalous effect of in some cases the outflow of the basin is greater than the inflow how can that be the retention basin stored phosphorus during the growing season it enhanced the growth of plant plants within the bio retention area and then when they decomposed during high flows in the dormant season fall rain spring snow melt that phosphorus was mobilized and carried downstream so that led us to to deal with a suite of questions and concerns in chapter nine that focus on the onsite or in situ effectiveness of stormwater BMPs how they may be influenced by climate change and their their expense these are very expensive practices in relation to their source share their partial contribution to pollutant loadings through in the watershed as a whole chapter 10 dealt with ecosystem protection and management activities largely on the forestry programs on state city and private lands with a particular focus on private lands because as you can see they comprise the the largest areas and the largest proportions of forest land in the scoherry cannonsville and the packton reservoir at present the watershed forestry program influences by their own estimate about 40 percent of this land base we suggest that it should be expanded to encompass as much of that land base as possible we also urge partnership work to develop reliable markets for low value wood it's easy to harvest high value saw timber and export it out of the watershed but it's much more difficult to diversify the forest unless you can use a range of silvicultural techniques that maximize the number of species increase the age class distribution and the heights and as an insurance policy against wind damage one way to do that would be to look at wood chip gasification here's an example of a recently constructed plant on middlebury college which produced which replaced their oil burning plant along with bennington college and the very expensive very extensive vermont fuels for schools program as prototypes that we suggest might be applicable in the cap skills lots changed lots changed for the better in the last 20 years since the first academy study when pathogens were the forefront of everyone's area of concern the two things that are responsible for a dramatic at least production of those pathogen loads during the early part of the last two decades was the ultraviolet disinfection plant coming online and the cumulative effects specifically of the watershed ag program and the wastewater treatment plants and the septic program of reducing pathogen loading but and here's that usual but there's an increasing trend in the last few years that we suggest needs to be studied in greater detail to determine whether it's an actual phenomenon in the watershed or an artifact or a result of using more sensitive tests we also urge in chapter 11 that microbial source tracking tracking a genetic technique that identifies the source of something like coliform bacteria to differentiate between human sources agricultural sources and wildlife sources in order to best prioritize and identify watershed protection methods the uv plan is a remarkable asset but any any barrier in the multiple multiple barrier approach can ultimately be breached so prudence is the watchword here chapters 12 and 13 dealt with monitoring assessment statistical analysis and modeling methods that would be in some form or fashion taken together ways of improving all of the program areas in a somewhat of a departure from the usual scientific discipline of never saying never and never saying always we put forth the recommendation that trend analysis should always be part of water quality monitoring and information generation and it should be subject to formal statistical trends and furthermore a mass balance approach to compare different watersheds and their proportional contribution should be taken this rather complex figure on the right is actually an excellent illustration of it that's why it's included in the chapter in my presentation it was authored by one of our committee members Bob Hirsch and his colleagues about a decade ago let me highlight a few things and tell you what to what the take home messages the first is what's called normalizing the data kilograms per day per square kilometer means that the mass of pollutant on a unit time on a unit area is calculated for each of these nine watersheds they may be of different areas and characteristics but now it's an apples to apples comparison of the nine sites done over a long period of time more than three decades so using a traffic light analogy we might draw the following conclusions from this figure green good to go that the variability of phosphorus loading is low in those four watersheds not least the Susquehanna one of the largest watersheds leading to the Chesapeake and the trend line is holding steady yellow as in the caution light the variability is greater and the trend is less consistent that leads us to ask what's the reason for that and what can be done about it red as in stop the Rappahannock river shows signs of increasing variability and an upward trend in flow normalized yield of phosphorus that should be the first place we apply our attention just like site their wetness class 10 with high phosphorus concentration on their cultural land and finally the Patuxet watershed not on the traffic light shaded in blue shows us that something favorable is going on in that watershed is that a result of the watershed protection activities or some natural characteristics some combination thereof that warrants further investigation as well so whatever success is being enjoyed there could be repeated on the other sites the yellow and the red sites chapter 13 deals with the pervasive questions of community vitality economic viability and social well-being and summarizes the just two studies that have occurred since 1999 of those elements of the memorandum of agreement and suggests that the watershed protection program and all the participants in it would benefit from the same systematic and scientifically based approach to census data economic data and social and social and community data as water quality data this is a complex slide inevitably that shows the results of our work in chapter 14 the concluding chapter of our report that focused on the question from our statement of task about balance let me break it and in the component parts and then put it back together the first graph here shows the in effect the law of diminishing returns and that at the beginning of any project once the problem is clearly identified and the data are analyzed that the program is is deployed and we can expect major improvements in water quality for example the project proceeds it's a maturing project there are still measurable improvements but over time incremental investments the next thousand dollars the next thousand dollars and so forth are producing smaller minor incremental benefits until finally that model is producing little or no return on additional benefits and in some cases if conditions change there are unintended consequences or both there are actually negative benefits or adverse effects of a watershed protection sub-program clearly number three, four, and five present opportunity costs in that if you're investing in program A and it's yielding no benefits or negative benefits and that funding could have been invested in program B that is still in the large or medium return phase that would be the preferred approach so we did a best professional judgment review because the data aren't available to do this quantitatively it could be but they're they're not available yet to derive the sense of the relative performance and opportunities associated with several programs I've highlighted waterfell management to show that we find small opportunities for improvement from increased investment both now and in the future because it's working well it addressed a critical important problem back in the mid-1990s it brought that that problem under control and has remained within compliance with the surface treatment rule even in the face of tropical storm Irene the red bar January 12th noted there by contrast we believe that operationalizing our recommendations like the bioreactors the waste energy plants the precision upgrading the precision feed program improving BMP performance would take the watershed ag program from its mature current phase with small incremental benefits from new investments to a new phase of large incremental benefits both for water quality and community vitality where would the funding come from by rebalancing among the programs and it isn't exclusively the watershed ag program but by adopting recommendations that we put forward to reduce the size of the land acquisition program and tighten its focus on riparian and streamside areas floodplain buyout and others could take a program that's having very small incremental benefits to water quality now and what we might we believe our negative benefits to community vitality and convert it in a reconfigured way to medium benefits in each realm using the funds to improve the implementation and redesign of the watershed ag program but again I want to emphasize funding could flow to other programs as well like the watershed forestry program aseptic program increasing the scope of work upstream management and light so it follows that by undertaking this analysis and as objective and careful way as possible leading to the conclusion that reducing expenditures and land acquisition would allow us to better fund improvements in watershed ag septic systems and watershed forestry the cascals stream buffer initiatives and others that would be a worthwhile thing to to take in consideration in the near term finally we conclude with two statements that actually reflect the tradition of science to never say never and never say always they might seem like rather faint praise or a tepid conclusion but they're not the BEP and watershed protection program partners should be very proud of the pathbreaking approach and the monumental job well done to date but we all know that it's a job that will never be finished because conditions will change and more work will always need to be done we found that overall the MOA the memorandum agreement and the watershed protection program that it led to have succeeded in maintaining this very challenging exemption to the surface water treatment rule and have well positioned the system to maintain that trajectory into the future in conclusion on behalf of our committee we hope that our findings conclusions and detailed recommendations will be carefully considered and will contribute to the long-term success of the watershed protection program thank you very much all right thank you so much Dr. Barton for that wonderful presentation so now we'll move on to the Q&A part of our session so the bar's open for questions as a reminder to submit your question just click the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen and typing your question there so I'll start us off with our first question did the committee and I think you mentioned this a bit already in your presentation Dr. Barton but did the committee consider the costs and benefits of just abandoning the watershed protection program all together and filtering the Cascale Delaware supply what did your considerations look like there as a committee well in several ways and I'll ask Jay Lund to answer this in a moment but abandoning the watershed protection program in some form is not an option that all water supplies are required to undertake source protection producing it in scope would be possible but our preliminary analysis shows that that would be much more costly and much less effective than maintaining or improving what's already been happening but I'd ask Jay to comment on that as well yes we looked at this fairly carefully in a preliminary way but I think in a pretty insightful way and what we found the protection program is really very much of a win-win program overall it's much less expensive than providing similar water quality from filtration it provides a lot of environmental benefits a lot of recreation benefits a lot of community development benefits up on the watershed and it keeps the rates lower for the people of New York City which include a lot of folks that have trouble paying rates wonderful thank you very much for that additional detail so our next question is did the committee consider structural risks to the New York City water supply from climate change such as dam breaches which I know is a concern during tropical storms I mean Lee we didn't specifically that wasn't within our statement of task or our scope of work thank you could you explain kind of in more depth about how the watershed protection program as a whole has impacted communities living in the Cascals area over the past couple of decades how has it changed their life and how they operate in that area I'll begin with a few general comments and then refer to Rich Steadman but the several ways and important ways are when the MOA was signed it brought into full force an enhanced set of watershed rules and recommendations the effect of which is anecdotal because the work hasn't been done yet to determine the true cost economic or social it has led to some opportunities and some challenges not least through the land acquisition program may I ask Rich to add to that please sure thanks Paul so I mean one of the things that I would underscore that Paul just said is the the main answer is we really don't know you know in terms of the amount of attention that has been placed on understanding community well-being whether it's economic well-being whether it's social well-being compared to that that's been put on put on water quality which we know a great deal about there's an awful lot of uncertainty and that is one of our recommendations in the report is that we try to reallocate some resources to better understand community vitality for a few reasons I mean one just so we can answer questions that that like that were asked and and and another you know I think Paul mentioned the good you know a good neighbor kind of kind of approach kind of a kind of a policy I think it would allow demonstration of linkages that are already there and potentially allow modifications to programs that that weren't serving those needs as well as they might I'll also footnote that by saying that it should be considered the direct investment in infrastructure that's made the cannot skills not least those wastewater treatment plants for many small communities is an enormous community benefit wonderful thank you one comment came in through the chat that said that the comparative examples of other watersheds was very interesting and is there what's the best process do you recommend for other cities and states to learn from the success of the water protection programs that you outlined in your report Bob would you like to take a turn at that not quite sure I understood the question was would you state it again Megan yeah of course what would be the best process for other cities and states to learn from the successes of the program that you outlined in your report well I guess looking at this at our report there would be a lot of detail about things that have been done and the results of the effort and then the questions about what could be done to better analyze and understand what's going on and I think we would emphasize importance for anyone of constantly taking a mass balance approach and looking at the pollutants of concern be they pathogens be they nutrients be they sediment and evaluating progress and that's evaluating over time as well as evaluating across multiple watersheds in order to better focus the attentions of the program I'd add that across the spectrum of land uses and land covers and activities that might produce something like phosphorus if one water watershed protection measure costs $5,000 per kilogram and another costs $5 per kilogram do more of the latter and less of the former or maybe not don't even do any of the former because it's just too costly for such a very limited return great thank you both could you talk more about the most innovative aspects of the watershed protection program and whether or not you feel that the NYC-DEP is being maybe a leader in the water supply area well as I mentioned in that core concept slide and I think I said once I tried to collect myself from the technical difficulties were that we we really return over and over again to the memorandum of agreement as the template for cooperation and clear terms of reference between watershed communities New York City DEP and state and federal agencies it's not easy but it provides a workspace within which these programs could be designed and implemented further the active partnership approach the watershed agricultural program casco watershed corporation smaller programs like watershed forestry and casco stream buffer initiatives all they have prototypes in other areas of the country in the world as well but for them all to occur in one place under under one the aegis of the watershed protection program is really quite extraordinary if I could just add a little bit to it there was a previous study by the academy of the watershed protection program specifically something called the operation support tool which is a very innovative approach to help in day to day hour to hour day to day month to month decision making in this watershed based on watershed conditions and weather forecast the system has a great deal of flexibility and the operators needed a system to help them simulate the consequences of their decision of taking water from one place on one particular from another place at another time and that tool has been very helpful in making them enabling to make optimal decisions about where to take their water from it in particular great um another question from the chat it says as you recommend shifting funding away from land acquisition would you say that land acquisition up to this point has been successful in protecting important areas or has maybe it been misdirected I would say it it's been based on something called the natural features criteria which was agreed upon by the signatories of the memorandum of agreement it had focused of necessity on larger parcels early on because of the imperative of earning and continuing the filtration of waste determination and in so doing because of land use patterns and historical patterns some of the land is less important or less valuable than others I might ask my colleague Steve as you sort of geology to head for that Steve I think that's a good start on that answer it's been 20 some years since that program was begun a lot of great progress early on but as you continue to buy high value lands you're you move down in priority and so what we've suggested is that the program take a bit of a reset examine closely how they measure success moving away just from acres solicited to actual water quality value in that they think about where the dollars are allocated move dollars closer to the streams the flood plain areas the stream side buffers worry less about large parcels further away the city has moved to a place of having a reasonable fraction of the watershed owned and then finally as Paul mentioned earlier thinking about if there are opportunities based on where we are now for high how lower value lands to be essentially traded for other values are there opportunities to gain community vitality benefits by swapping lands and offering opportunities for communities to build on the uplands further away from the streams perhaps which New York bought as part of large parcels early on and in the meeting as doing that deal with problems right at this stream edge great thank you it looks like we have time for one more question I'm wondering if anyone has anything that they'd like to say about what they want New Yorkers the last recipients of this water and program to know about your report and what you found well I think water consumers eight and a half million people in New York and the one million people along the aqueduct should be greatly reassured by the sophistication of the program the dedication of all the people who participate in it and the results that have been sustained over this 20 25 year period of remaining in compliance with the surface water safe drinking water act come what may dry conditions tropical swarms and everything in between none of that happened by accident it's all a result of the dedication of everybody who has a part in the program wonderful well thank you very much for those remarks and for answering our questions it looks like that's all we have time for today one final reminder once you exit this webinar you will be redirected to our report page where you'll be able to download and read the report for free I would like to thank our speakers and thank you all again for participating in this webinar