Wireless Watershed 📶 NYC's Initiative to Connect the Catskills

Transcription by Jerome Kazlauskas

[00:00:00] Rit Aggarwala: That forest fire that DEP police contributed to addressing in the Catskills was at a site that had no cell phone coverage, and so I'm sitting here in New York waiting for updates, and our chief of police is telling me, "Well, once the officer drives down the mountain to get into coverage, he's going to give me an update, and then as soon as he does, Commissioner, I'll call you with it."

[00:00:26] Brett Barry: Rit Aggarwala is Commissioner of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, which on November 25, 2024, issued a press release. NYC DEP announces intent to expand wireless communications across upstate water supply region and improve coverage for all watershed communities, and as you probably know, New York City is a major landowner with more than 200,000 acres and 100 miles of roads throughout the watershed region, including the Catskills. The DEP is collaborating with New York State's ConnectALL initiative and is currently engaging with leaders in communications and infrastructure to see what can be done to build out broadband and wireless communications and to eliminate cell phone dead zones. Not just for DEP staff, but for everyone who lives and works in the watershed. On today's show, I speak with DEP Commissioner Aggarwala and Deputy Commissioner Paul Rush about their RFI, the first step in the process. Also, some historical perspective from watershed documentarian Lize Mogel, and I check in with my own town clerk, Shandaken's Joyce Grant, who's been adamantly pursuing expanded communications in some of the Catskills most remote hamlets and valleys. Will New York City be the unlikely partner that's needed to finally make a call in the Catskills? I'm Brett Barry, and this is "Kaatscast: The Catskills Podcast."

[00:02:05] Campbell Brown: "Kaatscast" is supported by the Mountain Eagle, covering Delaware, Greene, and Schoharie counties, including brands for the local region such as the Windham Weekly, Schoharie News, Cobleskill Herald, and Catskills Chronicle. For more information, call (518) 763-6854 or email mountaineaglenews@gmail.com.

[00:02:26] Joyce Grant: Hi, Brett! How are you?

[00:02:30] Brett Barry: Great, how are you, Joyce?

[00:02:32] Joyce Grant: Good, good, good.

[00:02:33] Brett Barry: To set the stage, I made a call on my landline, of course, to our town clerk.

[00:02:38] Joyce Grant: Joyce Grant, Town Clerk, Tax Collector, Information Officer, Town of Shandaken. The thing that really hit home was when, you know, Irene hit, of course. I was running that year to become town clerk. There was no information, you know. I couldn't get any information. No power at all, so we have nothing, of course, and we went to town. My husband and I saw the rotary booth there, and we found out what was going on. By then the electric had been out three days, and we volunteered to help and all that and got information that way. Red Cross brought food, of course. Being a long-time resident, we knew the only way to get cell service around here during an outage would be to go to Hunter, the town of Hunter, or down to Boiceville, so we would go there, and I would update because I still have an online business. It was very important also, so I know every angle [personal], you know, a businessperson and all that and what I had to go through, so that was Irene, so when I got in as town clerk, one of the first things after the first month, you know, tax time and all that, I asked the town board to make me town information officer. I sent out a bulk email to postal patrons, a short form. Do you have heat backup? Do you know what to do in an emergency? Do you have neighbors or family nearby? What would you do? Blah, blah, blah, and all these questions, so you watch channel 23, which is our public service TV station. Do you go online? Do you know that the nearest cell tower is here? And then we also had a page of what to do in an emergency when we said to connect to Woodstock Radio if you have a radio because, you know, the old school, you have a radio in your house.

[00:04:22] Brett Barry: Yeah.

[00:04:23] Joyce Grant: A lot of people don't nowadays. Do you know where your firehouse is? We gave the list of firehouses we did all, you know, we got all this stuff going, and we did get back quite a good response, and for the people that I asked, "Are you at risk or do you feel at risk, do you have heat [backup heat]?" We called those people, and then we also asked people if they were willing to volunteer, and we got a lot of those people, so we connected volunteers with the people at risk, and it's neighbors helping neighbors is basically the gist of that, so you know, fast forward in 2020, you know, we did the resolution, and the letters, and everything to Verizon. We did a survey for people to sign with many, many comments asking Verizon for cell service. The previous supervisor and I literally called the person in charge of Verizon in the Northeast up in Albany...

[00:05:15] Brett Barry: Wow!

[00:05:16] Joyce Grant: ...and unfortunately this guy was still around 20 years before this when a group of people sued Verizon to stop the cell tower they were going to put up behind, I believe, the Phoenician Diner up on the mountain, and Verizon was very bitter about this. I have a lawsuit in my office somewhere, and 20 people signed it, and they just backed out, so 20 years later Verizon was still very bitter, so this guy was kind of a little nasty to us. He goes, "Well, you know, cell towers cost money." I'm like, yeah, but you're dropping your signal right by Boiceville. You know, what's the story? Yeah, well, you know, you could call other companies to see if they'll jump on the tower because it costs a lot of money, and it's like, "Oh my God," so we went nowhere. We did this whole thing, this whole thing on Facebook. If you go back to 2020, I think it was February and said, "Why does Verizon hate us?" You know, a 17-mile stretch of dead zone. We did a lot of, I did great graphics and all this. We got over about 1,200 signatures online, which is huge for this town. 300 live signatures at the libraries. The median age in Shandaken is nearly 60 years old. The closest hospital is 30 minutes away. We're flood-prone, you know, all that, so you know, it's a catastrophe waiting to happen. Our emergency vehicles have a hard time connecting sometimes, and our antenna for that is up at Belleayre, and it seems that last year two weeks went by before we got wind of it. They couldn't connect. The fire trucks couldn't talk to each other. There's no radio. We found out that they were digging up at Belleayre and cut the cable.

[00:07:00] Brett Barry: Yeah.

[00:07:00] Joyce Grant: So there's no protocol, like with a big red flag. Hey, this is Shandaken's only lifeline! Let's not cut it, guys, so that's been worked on. The county's handling that. The county's also looking into another tower to put up, hopefully in Phoenicia up by the watertower, you know, we think.

[00:07:17] Brett Barry: What are some of the challenges for getting cell service? Is it just cost, or is it also just the terrain because of all the mountains and hollows?

[00:07:25] Joyce Grant: I think it's the terrain, but the thing is, also remember, we're surrounded by state land.

[00:07:30] Brett Barry: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:30] Joyce Grant: It's an emergency situation, so that's where the county comes in, and they're trying their darndest, I know. You know, they're really good people, and they know what our situation is. First of all, let's make it clear, those little things you put on the telephone poles, those little receivers that could bounce the signal if the electric goes out, they would do us no good. Yeah, we need a cell tower with backup.

[00:07:54] Brett Barry: A proposal for one new cell tower was recently submitted to the town, and reminiscent of that first go-around, there's been some pushback on social media.

[00:08:03] Joyce Grant: There were people putting up a stink, and you know, I'm sure they're going to go through all the correct procedures and everything's going to be right because we have a really good zoning and planning board, as you know, and, you know, they have like a hundred thirty-page proposal. Everything's on our website. What they're going to do is going to be a pole that's 85 feet tall, and it may be viewable above the trees, but it's a pole that could save lives. We have to look at it like that, and this will give us our first pole or sell down and continue and connect the dots so we get it through the town, and you know, to raise such a stink and to see the comments I saw, and I could swear some of those people are on this first petition, but I don't know. I'm not going to look it up because it'll just aggravate me, but to raise a stink about this, they just have no clue. I mean, I have letters from the ambulance and the police to please—we need these, you know our ambulances can't connect to the Kingston Hospital at times to defib somebody. Yeah, it's just crazy.

[00:09:05] Brett Barry: What's the breakdown that you hear of residents in favor of versus those who are concerned that it's going to mar the landscape?

[00:09:13] Joyce Grant: I think it's like three people that are concerned, in my opinion, in that area. The rest have common sense, and that's my opinion.

[00:09:24] Brett Barry: And you said, "You know, obviously there was a time when nobody had cell service, but now, as you mentioned before, you know we can't get radio." There are other services that aren't so available anymore. Landlines aren't as available, so it's, in a way, become more important that cell service is available because that's the way of the world, right?

[00:09:43] Joyce Grant: Right, they won't install new landlines. I still have my landline from 50 years ago when we first got married, you know. We don't lose the landlines. I had grandchildren growing up next door, so I made sure to always pay. It's well worth it, and as an information officer, I'm the one that does the alerts and posts. It's nice. I have a landline so people can call me, like the supervisor or the police or the ambulance, and they call me and say, "George, can you do an alert?" "Pine Hill Water, can you do an alert?" They better boil their water, you know, whatever it is. The only other option is satellite phones, and they're not cheap, and a lot of the seniors can't afford a satellite phone. I don't think I'd even get a satellite, you know.

[00:10:20] Brett Barry: I didn't know that they weren't installing new landlines. That's amazing.

[00:10:23] Joyce Grant: No, not for a few years now. They won't maintain them. You know, I go out and clean that little box up. I make sure there are no birds building nests in my little box on the back of the house. It's like, "Oh my God, you know, so they really don't."

[00:10:34] Brett Barry: Yeah, so what's your expectation for the near future? Do you think that there's a chance that we're going to get some more reliable cell service in this area?

[00:10:42] Joyce Grant: I hope so. I'm hoping the one in Mount Tremper will go through that will extend service up past the Emerson, so then if they put another one in Phoenicia, it'll pick up that signal and extend it a little further, and that's our goal. It has to be along 28 first, and then later on it can go through the hollows, you know, up Route 214, up Route 42, all those guys, you know, Oliverea, Big Indian, come on. I mean, that's so far, and they don't get anything. You know, I'm sure there are places also that don't even have cable yet. There are places in Woodland Valley and some of these hollows that they don't even have a cable.

[00:11:18] Brett Barry: Is that just, you think that's just scale, like it's not worth it for companies to run cable for five houses on a road?

[00:11:25] Joyce Grant: Absolutely, yes, it's all about the money, and I work with March Gallagher and Liz Potter and Robert Drake and some other people on the digital committee, and we look for grant money, and there's BEAD money that's available in the state of New York right now, and Ulster County is entitled to all this money, so they want to get the first place to get service. Their essential buildings...

[00:11:49] Brett Barry: Mm-hmm.

[00:11:49] Joyce Grant: ...like all the firehouses, should have a mini cell tower, or you know, and if they have it, we can use it too, of course, right? So all the firehouses should have it. You know, maybe a town hall, but the police, whatever, but basically, yeah, those ambulance buildings and those firehouses. We also did mapping for the area, I think a year and a half ago, showing where we had cell service, which Shandaken has barely any of, so that map, my map was really easy to do, but then we had to do where there was cable service, and there are a lot of areas that aren't serviced in Shandaken, just for basic cable.

[00:12:24] Brett Barry: That's amazing.

[00:12:24] Joyce Grant: So yeah, it is.

[00:12:27] Brett Barry: And if you don't have cable, you don't have internet.

[00:12:29] Joyce Grant: Right, right.

[00:12:30] Brett Barry: So you're really shut off.

[00:12:32] Joyce Grant: Yeah, and like when I first got in, I used to get complaints. People call me like, "I just bought a house in Woodland Valley." I didn't know there was no cable or cell service, or this was before COVID. Can you imagine after COVID? And I called. I talked to one of our board members, who happened to be a real estate agent. I go, "What is it with you people?" You can't tell people they don't have it. I pitched a storm, and I called some of the realtors and said, "You've better tell your people that you sell houses to that we don't have to sell." I don't want these calls. It's not cool...

[00:13:02] Brett Barry: Wow!

[00:13:03] Joyce Grant: ...and they kind of stopped. The other thing, when the STRs came along...

[00:13:08] Brett Barry: STR stands for short-term rentals like Airbnbs.

[00:13:12] Joyce Grant: ...we made sure that the STR owners signed up for our emergency alert system because when their guests come here, they don't know. You know, the electric went off. Oh my God, I can't use my phone, and it's like the end of the world, so we made sure they were on our emergency alert system so they would send their property manager to the house. You know, people, and if it's a flood, God forbid another Irene happens, and you have people staying here from wherever, and they have no clue, so that was another thing, so we try to keep people aware, but it's just so easy to fall through the cracks, you know, that people don't get information, and it's just a pole. Remember, it's just a pole. Come on.

[00:13:50] Brett Barry: In a moment, we'll hear from the New York City DEP about their plans for expanding communications in the Catskills, but first, what do you think—would a dependable wireless signal outweigh the blight of cell towers on our wild Catskill Mountains? I'm sure we all have tales to tell about the inconvenience of cellular scarcity, like for me getting a security code sent to my phone, then madly driving to a coverage area and back to my computer, only to discover I'd exceeded the 10-minute window to enter that code, or driving to Boiceville every time there's a power outage to check in with NYSEG for a restoration estimate. Maybe you have a story to share about a time when a dead zone threatened your own safety. Whatever your angle, we'd love to hear your thoughts. Go to kaatscast.com and click the blue button on the right side of your screen. It says, "Send us a voicemail." Record right from your browser and click "Send." Your thoughts on the matter might make it into our next episode. In November, the New York City Department of Environmental Protection announced its intent to expand broadband and wireless communications throughout the 2,000 square mile upstate watershed and water supply and help eliminate cell phone dead zones for residents and businesses in the region. In a moment, my interview with the DEP, but to lay some groundwork on the New York City Catskills connection, here's Lize Mogel, host of the series "Views from the Watershed."

[00:15:22] Lize Mogel: So I did a project about New York City's wastewater infrastructure first, and then I decided I wanted to do some research on the New York City water system. I'm from New York City, you know. I drink Catskills water every day, but I don't really think about it as Catskills water. It's just the water that comes out of my tap, so I decided to do some research about where my water came from, where my drinking water came from, and the infrastructure that makes that possible, and so I started coming up to the Catskills and talking to people and learning about the very long history and very complicated relationship between New York City and the Catskills, and I really think that everybody in New York City should at least know something about the communities that provide their drinking water because those communities are part of the infrastructure, a very important part of the infrastructure.

[00:16:15] Brett Barry: This goes back to something referred to as the takings, which sounds like it comes out of a horror movie. Can you explain what the takings refers to?

[00:16:25] Lize Mogel: So when the city started to grow, it first tapped the Croton River and other water bodies in Westchester to create the Croton System, and as soon as that was, basically as soon as that was completed, they needed to look for another water source because the city was growing so quickly, so they started to look all sorts of places: the Adirondacks, Nassau County, Long Island, the Hudson River, and they settled on the Esopus River and the Catskills for various reasons, and so in 1905 they worked with the state of New York to pass something that's called the McClellan Act that gave the state the power to use eminent domain to build the water system, and just two years later, in 1907, they broke ground on the system, and so they were absolutely prepared to, you know, two years is even nowadays is like a very short time to build such a major infrastructural project, but they were ready, you know, so they passed the act that allowed eminent domain, and then they broke ground in 1907.

[00:17:26] Brett Barry: And eminent domain means they can come in and say, "Well, this farm is in a prime location for either collecting water or moving water from one place to another, so it's going to be ours, and we'll give you fair market value."

[00:17:40] Lize Mogel: So yeah, eminent domain is basically taking private land for what is considered a public good, and there's been a lot of debate about that over the years as to what's a public good, like is it a water system? Is it a shopping mall? You know, there's been a lot of lawsuits over the years and this and that, but that's basically what it is, and so what the city was allowed to do is they had to compensate people for the loss of their private property, also for the loss of their businesses and, and business income, so what they would do is they would pay half of the assessed value upfront, and if you know anything about property, you know that quite often the assessed value is very different from the market value. It's usually lower, although in the early 1900s in rural Catskills, I actually don't know, you know, what the assessed value would have been, but probably not that much, and then sometime later they would pay the rest, and so the first part of the system that was built was the Catskill Aqueduct and the Ashokan Reservoir, and they displaced several communities for that project alone, and if you drive around the Ashokan, you can see these brown signs that are city signs that memorialize the towns that were displaced for the takings.

[00:18:53] Brett Barry: So towns were displaced, reservoirs went in, pipes were laid, and New York City has clean drinking water. Cut to the 1990s. What happened then?

[00:19:06] Lize Mogel: Okay, so, for me, there are two really important parts of the water infrastructure story, and one is the Displacement, which is very important, and that's a story that a lot of people actually know.

And the other important part of the story for me is what happened in the 1990s, which is the work that led up to the Memorandum of Agreement, or the MOA. And this part of the story has a lot of acronyms. So be warned. In the 60s and 70s, the federal government passed really important environmental legislation.

So the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and with the Clean Water Act, there were all these, like in subsequent decades, all these other laws that followed that. So there's something called the Surface Water Treatment Regulation or something like that.

[00:19:57] Brett Barry: Very close. It's the surface water treatment rule.

But I had the benefit of looking this up after the interview.

[00:20:03] Lize Mogel: So as part of that legislation, municipalities of all sizes had to make sure their drinking water was safe, and one of the ways that you do that is something called filtration, and that basically is like filtering out all the, like, mud and stuff that microorganisms and pollution will chemically bond to sometimes, and it makes it very hard to treat drinking water if it's not filtered, and so it's much safer if you can filter it first and then treat it with, you know, UV light or, you know, chlorine or whatever, so the EPA required cities all over the states to filter their water, but if you could control the water to a certain extent at the source, you could avoid having to filter the water, and so you needed something called a filtration avoidance determination waiver, or the FAD. At the time, this was the 80s. New York City was a little bit broke in the 80s, and to build a filtration plant would have cost, you know, a billion dollars, and it would have cost more billions of dollars to run it and maintain it, so they felt that they could pass more regulations to keep the water cleaner at the source, and so that's what they set out to do, but I would call this like an unfunded mandate, so the city came in, and they're like, "Well, now we want to pass all these new regulations to keep pollutants out of the drinking water, out of the reservoirs, out of the rivers that feed the reservoirs," and if you're in the Catskills, you know that there's just water everywhere and it's all going downhill and a lot of it is ending up, for example, in the Esopus Creek or the Delaware or the other sources of New York City's drinking water, and so the city wanted to put these very strict regulations on the Catskills, and the Catskills wasn't really having any of that, and so what was different between the early 1900s and even the 1960s when the Cannonsville Reservoir was finished and the 1980s was that there was just more communication between watershed towns. You know, the roads were better. You know, there were telephone lines, and the watershed towns, all of them formed a coalition, and they lawyered up, and they pushed back, and so to make a long story very short, Governor Pataki kind of orchestrated. He basically, like, I would say, locked everybody in a room for two years and made them hash it out, and at the end of those two years, they created an agreement together, which is almost unheard of, and it was very difficult, but they created this agreement together, and that became something called "The Memorandum of Agreement," which basically lays out the relationship between the city and the Catskills that exist to this day, and so the MOA is basically trying to meet the conditions of the FAD, provide benefits to the Catskills, so it's not just like, it's not just extractive, so the early relationship to the Catskills was very extractive, and this is more trying to find mutual benefit, so one of those things is money in the form of grants, so economic development grants, beautification grants, education grants, that sort of thing for the city. It allows them to make sure that water quality is maintained, so one of those things is keeping pollution out of the water, for example. One of the things that the FAD requires is actually land acquisition, so the land acquisition program for the city is really because the FAD requires that the city [can] control land around the water sources so that nothing untoward can get into the water supply, and so that became very controversial because, at first, the city was just kind of buying land wherever they could buy it, and instead of taking it through eminent domain, which they don't really do anymore, although the McClellan Act is still on the books, the land acquisition program was voluntary, so the city could not go and coerce somebody to sell their land. You know, if somebody wanted to sell their land, they could do it, and the city would buy it, and they were just kind of buying things all over the place, and then the next iteration of the FAD, you know, in each, iteration as that got renegotiated, the land acquisition program got more focused. So it couldn't just be a parcel out in the middle of the mountains with no attachment to an actual water body that the city was controlling, so it's slowly becoming more focused.

[00:24:24] Brett Barry: So the city is a big landowner in the Catskills as a result of all of this filtration avoidance maneuvering, and the fact that they own so much land could be a big help in placing this new wireless broadband infrastructure, towers, wires...

[00:24:41] Lize Mogel: Right.

[00:24:41] Brett Barry: All that stuff that you need big tracts of land to be able to pull off wireless requires wires.

[00:24:47] Lize Mogel: And also because the rivers follow the roads and usually utility infrastructure goes along roads. I think that it's also a plus.

[00:24:56] Brett Barry: Thank you very much, Lize. I appreciate it.

[00:24:57] Lize Mogel: Yeah, thanks.

[00:24:57] Brett Barry: ...and give us the link for your podcast, which has everything to do with this long and complicated relationship.

[00:25:03] Lize Mogel: It does, and actually there's an episode called "A Seat at the Table," which is all about the MOA, and so you can listen to the podcast. It's called "Views from the Watershed," and it's on all of the podcast apps, and it's online at walkingthewatershed.com/podcasttour.

[00:25:21] Brett Barry: Check our show notes for a link to that series. New York City's complex relationship with the Catskills continues to evolve, and so that's where I started in my interview with DEP Commissioner Rit Aggarwala and Deputy Commissioner Paul Rush. Since 1997, New York City has purchased 220 square miles of Catskills land. Late last year, the city announced it would end its land purchases in the Catskills. Can we start there? Why did the city buy up so much Catskills land and why are you stopping now?

[00:25:53] Rit Aggarwala: Sure, well, so the city has been buying land in the Catskills as part of its watershed protection action since the 1990s, and this was something that was required by New York City's agreements with the State Department of Environmental Conservation and the Environmental Protection Agency that allows us to use the wonderful natural systems of the Catskills to keep our water clean and healthy rather than investing in a mechanical filtration plant, which is what most surface water systems use, and it's a global example that people cite all over the world of paying for natural services so that instead of doing something artificial, we're really actively preserving land. Some of that is done through payments. We pay a lot of taxes in the watershed, up to $150,000,000 worth. We provide funding for a lot of economic development activities and for things like septic systems, but some of it was purchasing land so that it remained natural, and that's what we've been doing now for more than 20 years. The announcement that was made recently, and just to be clear, it isn't a total cessation of land acquisition. What it is is refocusing our efforts to buy only land in some very narrowly defined areas that are really crucial to the water quality. For the last 25 years, it was about buying land pretty much anywhere in the watershed, and now what we've said is we bought enough land. We protected enough land in the general watershed. Now we're really focused on the tactical locations right near our reservoirs, right near sensitive streams, things like that, and so we'll be focusing our acquisition efforts there.

[00:27:47] Brett Barry: Restrictions on New York City land have traditionally been pretty tight. Can you give a sense of how some of those have loosened over the past few years?

[00:27:55] Rit Aggarwala: Well, why don't you talk about the recreation program?

[00:27:58] Paul Rush: Yep, so when the city first built our reservoirs in the Catskills, we were required under [the] state law to provide access for fishing, boating for fishing, and ice harvesting. Obviously we're not harvesting ice off the reservoirs anymore, so we always allowed fishing and boating for fishing on the reservoirs with a permit. When we began expanding our landholdings for source water protection, we put in place, you know, access requirements to get on the land and do recreation, but we loosened those restrictions, the permit requirements on those lands away from the reservoirs, to provide more opportunities for recreation and people to take advantage of the purchases, so we dropped requirements for separate permits to do hunting and hiking on our lands back in the 2007-2008-2009 time period, and that's allowed more people to more easily access our lands, and we've also partnered with different groups to build trails on our lands to provide recreational access to take advantage of, you know, our purchases of the land for watershed protection.

[00:29:11] Brett Barry: One of the restrictions, I guess, until recently New York City prohibited the running of utility lines through its Catskills land. How significantly do you think that's hampered broadband and cellular infrastructure these past few decades, and not to put all the onus on the city, what other factors are at play there?

[00:29:29] Paul Rush: So, I mean, we're working right now to make it easier to put utility easements onto our land and do construction. I don't think it's really inhibited the growth of utility service or broadband service in the watershed. I think other factors, the large land scale area, were the ones that were driving it and restricting the growth, not those restrictions on running lines across our parcels. I think it's going to make it easier in some cases to get lines in more efficiently, but that definitely was not a factor in, you know, the lack of widespread broadband service in the Catskills.

[00:30:09] Brett Barry: But now that we can run lines through New York City property, it should really help facilitate because obviously for wireless you need wires. I understand that, you know, the DEP itself needed wireless coverage. I assume it's always needed wireless coverage. Why the push now?

[00:30:28] Rit Aggarwala: Well, look, I'd say we, as Paul was saying, should split up kind of the question of running wires across our land. I mean, at the end of the day, most utility channels follow roads just because that makes maintenance easy, and so that's not really the issue. I think what you have, of course, with cell phone coverage is the need to get areas that have that direct line of sight to a wide location, right? Most of the roads are in the valley. The places you want the cell phone towers are really up on the side of the mountain. A lot of our land is going to be up on the side of the mountain, so that's, I think, one of the opportunities for us, and look, I think, you know, yes, we like everybody in the Catskills. We've needed better cell phone connectivity for our operations. You know, many of our cars are equipped with radios just for that reason, but it just seems right now that the state of the cell phone industry is such, the technology is such, and frankly, I think the increased focus that we've had on security and ensuring that we can always stay in touch with our employees and the efficacy of our DEP police up there. I think those are among the things that have led us to think about this, but it's also just an opportunity that I think we're realizing that we need something, and there is probably an opportunity that the private sector, if it can use facilities we build to help DEP operations, also to provide cell phone access to the public, that may be a way to subsidize this infrastructure that will make our operations better anyway.

[00:32:06] Brett Barry: Commissioner, you just mentioned changing technology and cell service. What do you think this will look like? Is it going to be towers on every mountaintop, or is it something more subtle, hopefully?

[00:32:17] Rit Aggarwala: Oh, okay. I don't know. We don't know. One of the reasons that we started with an RFI, which is really just going to the world and saying, "Hey, we're interested in this. Tell us what you think. Tell us if you would be interested in, you know, what kinds of business models you do, because we don't claim at DEP to have any expertise whatsoever in telecommunications." It's not what we do, and so I have no informed opinion about what might come out of this. We received a number of responses, and we're really excited about that, and what that really does is it gives us a list of organizations now to have conversations with to learn more and to think about how this program could evolve.

[00:32:58] Brett Barry: Those responses, are they coming from the big cell phone carrier-type places?

[00:33:03] Rit Aggarwala: There's an industry that does this. Some of them are companies that most people have heard of. Some of them are companies who really are providing service to the cell phone networks that we all know, right? And the people who build the towers may be a company that most people have never heard of, but that's part of what we were seeking out. It also frankly helped us further and expand conversations with the counties, particularly Ulster and Delaware, and with the state of New York, and I think that will wind up being a big component of this.

[00:33:34] Brett Barry: So RFI stands for request for information, and it's seeking the wide-scale establishment and enhancement of wireless communications and broadband capacity throughout New York City-owned lands and roadways. First off, RFI, that sounds like a very early stage of a process. Do you have any sense of the process and the timeline on this?

[00:33:54] Rit Aggarwala: I don't think we know. I think you know this. This was a first step, as you know. We're a government organization. We can't make a decision on a dime, and for something like this, where we genuinely don't have the expertise, we really need to understand what's out there and what kind of partnerships are possible before we move forward, so it is very much a first step. I think this is going to be a multi-year process. There is no way around that, and you know, and frankly, success is not guaranteed. You know it could turn out that the costs are still too high. It could turn out that it would only serve one or two places. I'm not sure what we're going to find, but if we don't start this first step, we'll, we'll never learn what's possible, so that's really what we're doing here.

[00:34:41] Brett Barry: Speaking of costs, where's the funding for this project? Does it all come from the city, or are you working with other organizations or government entities?

[00:34:48] Rit Aggarwala: We're going to see what funding is out there again. You know, the state of New York is investing in expanding broadband and wireless coverage across the state. They also don't have unlimited funds. The Catskills is an area they've identified as a priority to them, but again, one of the things that we're going to be trying to uncover as we talk to some of these providers is what the economics of these might be, because, you know, again, DEP has functioned for a long time without this. It's a worthwhile investment for us, but it's not something where we have unlimited amounts of money to invest.

[00:35:24] Brett Barry: And so the infrastructure for this public cellular system would be situated mainly on New York City land, is that... I mean, you could have gone with a private cell network, but you decided to open it up to Catskill watershed residents.

[00:35:40] Rit Aggarwala: Well, and, and, and look, once again, we gotta, we can't get ahead of ourselves. We don't know what we're going to do yet, but the idea exactly as you say is we can't build cell phone towers just for the public on watershed land that would be an inconsistent use, but we can install equipment that helps watershed and water supply operations on our land, and the reality is once we build that, you could split the switch and make it accessible to the public, and that's what we're trying to explore. We want to understand what the economics of that might be, what the practicality of it is. It's a vision or a hope that we're trying to figure out how we would turn that into reality. Paul, did you want to add something?

[00:36:22] Paul Rush: Yeah, I mean, I think a way to look at this, Brett, is another step in the continuum where we're looking to become more efficient and improve communications for the water supply and for our workers. When the Catskill Aqueduct was put into service [1915], there wasn't a well-developed phone network, but there had to be communication to make flow changes reflecting the needs of the city, and one of the things that was done in the construction of the Catskill Aqueduct was there were actually telephone lines put in on the crown of the aqueduct down the length of it so there could be communications along those lines, so that was a way we dealt with making operational decisions and communications based on the technology of the time as a system continued to expand. You know, eventually we had the radio systems. We had low-band radio [42 MHz], and that operated for a very, very long time [and us communicating with our workforces and communicating through different sites as a primary means of communication]. In the 2000s, you know, post-9/11, post-water supply, the FAD agreements buying the land, we knew we had to improve communications out into the watershed beyond using that low-band radio, and we took steps to, you know, work with a contractor, similar to the emergency services and run off of their networks using radio communications. Also, when we operated facilities, we had telephone lines to get data back and forth, old copper lines that technology many in many cases no longer supported, so we've shifted to using broadband capabilities at facilities that we have, but we're not covering all our lands and all our facilities, and the next step to really help us communicate with our staff, now that has to, you know, we have all this land we have to maintain, we have staff out there, we also have our security function, you know, getting and communicating with them, this is really the next step, but we're doing it in a way to take advantage of the land that exists, that we bought perhaps that could help with the communications and also, you know, it's an opportunity to provide a benefit to the public as well as for us, so I think this is just another step in the continuum. This is a step where we're looking, you know, to partner with the folks who live in the watershed and help protect the quality of the water of the city, and you know a lot of communities north of the city use and rely on.

[00:38:50] Brett Barry: Is there a way or a mechanism for the public to keep track of the progress of this particular project? I know that the RFI is out there, but in terms of next steps, how do we know what's going on? I think there's a lot of us, including me, who are very interested in this project as someone who lives 15 minutes from the nearest bar of cell service.

[00:39:10] Rit Aggarwala: Look, I'll say I don't think we have any, any ongoing updates that will be scheduled. I'm super excited about all the enthusiasm this has generated. I think we're very excited about it. A number of elected officials are very excited about it. I think probably they're the ones who are gonna be asking us on a regular basis, and so that'll always remind us to keep moving forward on this, but I think we just, we will need some patience because, as I said, "We've got a lot of conversations to have. We don't have a dedicated team that's doing this. We are going to try to move this as quickly as we can, but it's a little bit of unknown territory for us, so we're taking a bit of a gamble."

[00:39:47] Brett Barry: Anything else from either of you that you'd like Catskillers to know about the relationship or changing relationship between New York City and the Catskills?

[00:39:57] Paul Rush: So I grew up in Sullivan County. I live in Grahamsville. I took this job, and when I was first asked to take the job, I was asked to be based out of Westchester, and I spoke aloud with the commissioner at the time about the importance of improving the relationship in the Catskills, and it'll be valuable to have me to have my base actually in the watershed, and I've been working on that and trying to work to improve the relationship, along with the commissioners that have been here to build and improve communication and take actions that make sense and make changes in policy that make sense that benefit both the city and the watershed residents, and I think we've been successful. There's still work to do, and you know when Commissioner Aggarwala came on board here, I mean, one of the first things he did is take time, spend two days in the watershed meeting with the staff, and understanding that, and he's recognized the importance of this, and he's recognized it and put it on the top, you know, the top of his agenda, and he's up here regularly communicating, and I think those direct communications, you know, there's all these anytime there's a partnership, there's an opportunity for disagreements to happen and differences of opinions, but having the communications and those contacts makes a huge difference, and you know that's been done purposeful, and that's certainly, I think, we're going to continue in that direction.

[00:41:30] Rit Aggarwala: Yeah, thanks, Paul. I'll just, I'll add [Brett] that with any relationship, you can approach it with suspicion, and you can focus on the negative, or you could focus on the upside, and I think one of the things that's incumbent on us, and Paul embodies it, is to look at the upside of the phenomenal presence that we have in the watershed and all of the value it can bring that requires creativity on our part, and I think this cell phone RFI is an example of that. You know, we didn't have to do it this way, as you pointed out, but there's an opportunity to create value for a lot of people here, and if we can do that in a way that's consistent with our mission and our responsibilities, we can, and we will, and we should. My hope, and I think I've seen it over the last couple of years, is that the residents and the leadership of the Catskills responds that when we act with that kind of creativity and generosity, what we get in return is partnership. What we don't get is cynicism and mistrust. What we get is a recognition that DEP is actually an important and valued presence in the watershed, and I think that's just to the benefit of everybody, both who lives and works in the watershed and in the Catskills and everybody who drinks our water, and I guess I'll close on the fact that it's often cast as the Catskills and the city, but one of the things that many people don't remember is that the water that we collect in our reservoirs and take care of is also drunk by the vast majority of the people who live in Westchester County, by the city of Newburgh, by New Paltz, and in fact now by Kiryas Joel, one of the fastest growing communities in New York State, so we're not just serving New York City. We're actually serving well over half of all residents of New York State, and it's, I know, one of the things that I see, and I grew up in and around New York City, including up in Westchester, so the Catskills are part of my entire life as well, and you know I know people in the Catskills take pride in the fact that part of the community's thing is taking care of this amazing asset and this great export, and so I think it's a wonderful relationship.

[00:43:42] Brett Barry: Commissioner, you're also the city's chief climate officer in that role. Can you tell us anything about your predictions for how climate change will impact our relationship in terms of supplying water for the city?

[00:43:54] Rit Aggarwala: Oh, okay, I think one of the things that makes us all lucky is that the Northeastern United States is one of the few parts of the world that is going to get wetter with climate change rather than drier, and so happily we don't face the kind of existential questions about our water supply that people in the Western U.S. or Southern Europe or other parts of the world are having to face so I think the long-term future of New York City's water supply is really quite good and it's really quite stable. I don't expect it to change radically as a result of climate change. However, what will change the weather is going to get more extreme. You know, we had forest fires on two of our watershed lands last fall here in New York City. We had forest fires in Prospect Park and in Upper Manhattan. I mean, how crazy is that? And so in the context of a lot of wet, we've also got a lot of dry, and so those extremes are going to characterize our future, and it's going to require us to be a lot more nimble in any number of ways. One of the things that really drove home how important this is is that the forest fire that DEP police contributed to addressing in the Catskills last fall was at a site that had no cell phone coverage, and so I'm sitting here in New York waiting for updates, and our chief of police is telling me, "Well, once the officer drives down the mountain to get into coverage, he's going to give me an update, and then as soon as he does, commissioner, I'll call you with it, right?" And so that's a clear example of how climate change is going to require us to operate better because we're going to have more things thrown at us.

[00:45:36] Brett Barry: We're going to close with a fun question. Deputy Commissioner, you live in the Catskills. Commissioner, you're in the city. I imagine you both have some favorite spots in the Catskills or a nice memory. I'm wondering if you'd be willing to share that.

[00:45:51] Rit Aggarwala: Paul, you start.

[00:45:52] Paul Rush: Yeah, I mean, growing up in the Catskills, some of my most favorite memories are brook trout fishing. You know, Rondout Creek is one place where we came, went up, and did some trout fishing back when I was growing up, getting into Blue Hole up in the Peekamoose in that area back in the '70s with my dad and my brother sneaking up to catch a couple of brook trout, and then just brook trout fishing and trout fishing growing up in Rock Hill on the Neversink, spending summers just doing that, and the connection [the later connection] in life to the water supply from the city, and I remember distinctly When I grew up in Rock Hill, we'd go down to Bridgeville, we'd fish the entire Neversink Gorge, and you'd catch nothing but chubs, maybe a trout every once in a while. The city increased releases out of the reservoirs in '77, and since I've been here, we've been releasing more water, and that has transformed from a chub fishery, you know, very few trout, to a really world-class trout fishery down on the Neversink, and the contrast in having that experience trout fishing growing up, that change that's happened, and, you know, seeing the impact and providing benefits that other people, you know, if you're not in tune to this, you wouldn't even know it, and the reasons that's happened are things that people can't even connect with. I mean, the city's consumption on the city system back in 1977 was 1.6 billion gallons a day on the city system. Today, we're at 1.1 billion gallons a day of water, and instead of letting the water fill and spill over the reservoirs, we've changed our practices in a way to help provide benefits for the community without impacting our water supply reliability, and when we have water available, we push that water out. Those changes were done after opening up dialogue with the fishing community and with the communities in general in the post-MOA era past 1997. There's been such a change in the relationship, and the guidance of commissioners over time has been willing to explore this and not just simply take a one dimensional approach. It's water supply. It's a city way or nothing else. Those changes, I mean, you see the impacts, and I can, you know, relate back to my time growing up in the Catskills and Sullivan County. I mean, it's been a big change, and I'm really lucky and fortunate to have been a part of it over the past 30 years.

[00:48:23] Brett Barry: It's great.

[00:48:24] Paul Rush: I don't know. That was a really long answer.

[00:48:25] Brett Barry: No, you know, and I'm true to being deputy commissioner. I'm thrilled that you took that childhood memory and tied it into benefits that the city is providing in terms of fishing, so Commissioner Aggarwala...

[00:48:37] Rit Aggarwala: I'll just tell you, and it's perhaps nowhere near as serious or thoughtful as Paul's, but you know, one of my favorite things growing up was when we came up to visit the Catskill Game Farm. I don't know. I was probably, you know, [might be] six years old or something, but drinking their purple cow milk out of the cow cup. That was the best thing that my parents could take me to, so that's one of my fond memories.

[00:49:04] Brett Barry: And you come up here as part of your work, obviously. Do you have any time to enjoy the Catskills?

[00:49:09] Rit Aggarwala: Not as much as I would like. I've, you know, just the realities of my job are usually it's a day trip. I've been able to spend on a couple of occasions [a night or two], and I did last summer, though, totally unrelated to work, get to spend some time up there with my family, and I took my kids up to see the Ashokan, and we'll walk in. They said, "Daddy, there are signs we can't come in here without a permit," and I said, "I think it'll be okay. You know, it's all good."

[00:49:37] Brett Barry: Well, Commissioner Aggarwala, Deputy Commissioner Rush, thank you all so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it.

[00:49:45] Rit Aggarwala: Thank you, Brett.

[00:49:47] Brett Barry: Please check out our show notes for more on this issue and be sure to subscribe to our newsletter at kaatscast.com. While you're there, click the voicemail button to share your views about cell service in the Catskills or anything else you'd like us to know. "Kaatscast: The Catskills Podcast" is a production of Silver Hollow Audio in the heart of the Catskills. Lize Mogel was recorded at SUNY New Paltz with production interns Ruby Zuckerman and Isabelle Schuyler. Follow us on Instagram [@kaatscast], where Izzy is posting lots of great content, and don't forget to follow, rate, and review wherever you get your podcasts. Transcription by Jerome Kazlauskas is available at kaatscast.com. I'm Brett Barry. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.