Effective watershed management with municipal cooperation

Clean water is a basic human right and fundamental to a healthy ecosystem. Because of this, state and local governments are tasked with developing and enforcing policies that minimize the polluting of public water supplies and other harms to water resources. Water quality is directly influenced by land use within a watershed, which is defined as the area of land in which all surface waters drain to the same outflowing waterbody. Land-use changes in the watershed and the specific land-use types, such as farming or housing developments, typically have at least some negative impact on water quality. This realization led New York State to implement legislation permitting municipal governments to create Watershed Protection Improvement Districts (WPIDs). These local governance mechanisms allow municipalities to generate revenue through taxation and impact fee assessment to support water quality remediation strategies within their local watersheds. This strategy has the potential to be highly effective for communities concerned with water quality. However, individual municipalities will not have the most meaningful impact on their water resources if they act alone. Upstream land-use in one municipality has a direct impact on the water quality in the downstream municipality, making it a necessity that these municipalities work together in developing WPID plans. As seen in the map below, all HUC-10 watershed within Albany County are shared by at least one neighboring county and multiple towns within the County, and all HUC-12 watersheds are shared by least two townships, some in neighboring counties. Neighboring towns that fall within the same watershed would have the most meaningful impact on the water quality if they worked together to plan and implement watershed management actions. This cooperation will lead to an entire watershed approach to land-use management and securing clean water for their community and local ecosystems.

Below is a map that I generated of Albany County with municipal boundaries overlaid with HUC10 and HUC12 watershed boundaries. You can interact with the map to explore the different watershed in Albany County.

The map below presents an example of how municipal cooperation could be done in the Normans Kill HUC10 watershed. The Bonny Brook and Indian House Creek HUC12 watershed and headwater streams of the Normans Kill begin in Schenectady County and flow into Albany County through Guilderland. The Bozen Kill, Black Creek, and Hunger Kill HUC12 watersheds and headwater streams begin in Knox and Guilderland and also flow into the Normans Kill in Guilderland. The Normans Kill then intersects with the Vly Creek HUC12 watershed in New Scotland and flows through Bethlehem and into the Hudson River. This example contains four townships within Albany County alone, along with two towns in Schenectady County. A WPID for the Nornams Kill HUC10 watershed with full municipal cooperation would include all of the towns that fall within the watershed.