DATE=March 26, 2002

TYPE=English Programs Feature

NUMBER=7-36105

TITLE=Dateline: The Environment of New York

BYLINE=Adam Phillips

TELEPHONE=212-264-2148

DATELINE=New York

EDITOR=Nancy Smart/Neal Lavon

CONTENT=

DISK: CUT 1,SIDEWALKS OF NEW YORK, PLAY IN FULL, :18, TAKE UNDER AND OUT BEHIND:

"Oh, boys and girls together,

Me and Mamie Rorke,

Tripped the light fantastic

On the Sidewalks of New York…"

INTRO: The sidewalks of New York are the last thing you would think of when it comes to the environment. But the City of New York does have a top official whose job it is to improve the city's environment. Joel A. Miele [MEAL-eh] is getting ready to end five years as the Commissioner New York City's Department of Environmental Protection. His views on the urban environment and his accomplishments in New York may surprise you. Adam Phillips spoke with him at length on this edition of Dateline. He began by asking him about the challenges of protecting the environment in New York City.

"JM: Here in New York, it's a unique responsibility. Besides the normal environmental responsibilities such as running the environmental court system in the City of New York. What I am responsible on the court system is that I am chairman of the Environmental Control Board. The Environmental Control Board is the adjudicatory body, if there is an environmental violation issued, if you have done something to dirty the environment or disturb the environment negatively, a summons will be issued by some agency. And that will be heard in the environmental control courts. So we bring together all of the environmental enforcement, if you will within that agency.

The second part that we deal with directly as far as the environment goes is hazardous materials. We are responsible for the removal and remediation of all hazardous material it he City of New York except nuclear material, radioactive material. That is fissionable material. And as a consequence, we run the hazardous material situations. When the fire department or the police department run into something that indicates a hazardous material on site, our people will report, our people will provide the expertise, and in most cases our people will remove the material.

Now on a completely different side, we are effectively a public utility because we run the drinking water for the city of New York as well as handle all of the wastewater treatment in the City of New York. And in the drinking water end of it, we also supply water for about a million people who live outside the city of New York.

AP: So it seems that the Department of Environmental Protection, is almost as all inclusive and all pervasive as the environment itself. Most people, I mean many people, sophisticated people, will admit that they don't' even think that the City had an environment. The environment is something that is 'out there' in the West where the wind is blowing and everything. The idea that New York City actually has a natural environment that has to be protected aggressively is a surprise to many.

JM: Well, you mentioned that you likened this to the problems that might be occurring in the West of the United States. Interestingly enough, the prevailing winds in the United States tend to blow from west to east. And since New York City is on the East Coast is air contamination that comes from industrial sites in the United States, which are wind borne to this area. And one of those is the acid rain. The acid rain is primarily from air pollutants that come from industrial plants that blow out of the tacks in the Midwest of the United States, are blown on the winds easterly, and then settle on the waters that are in this area.

AP: It's funny because most people would think of New York as being the ultimate culprit of all these things, that New York City generates all of its own air pollution. But apparently not!

JM: Interestingly enough, the major pollution in New York is the exhaust from automotive vehicles and from heating stacks from heating plants.

AP: Tell me about the natural environment, you're looking out, here. I guess you have a lot of visual experience of what the environment is like. What is it like inside? What do you get when you look outside. Has your view of the City metaphorically changed since you've been in the job?

JM: The most important measure for us is rainfall since our water system is an open system. We capture rainfall in reservoirs and then use the rainfall drinking. That is rather unique in the world. Most other rivers use river water, which is used by other people upstream and which will be used by other people downstream when we're finished with it.

So that fact that we use water that has fallen from the sky, then we drop it into the ocean, because we are on the ocean, that means that the water we drink is used only be one person and then goes back up, gets transpired back up into vapor and falls as precipitation. So we get a natural filtering action by the way our cycle works. It works out very well.

AP: It's interesting that you mention the ocean because, as a New Yorker, I very rarely even think of as even being on the ocean. I mean the idea that we are really a maritime city like Seattle would be is really a novelty for many New Yorkers. Yet it must be paramount in your own considerations of what is going on here environmentally.

JM: Well, from the wastewater standpoint it is. Because for many years, what we used to do with the sludge, that is, the concentrated waste that ended up in the product that we manufacture at the plant, that sludge was taken out to see and dumped past the hundred mile limit out into deeper waters. The federal government prohibited us, many years ago, about fifteen years ago from doing that and longer and we had top come up with another solution for what to do with the sludge that we produce.

And today, basically what we do is dry that sludge, and then it's processed by contractors who work with us and for us and then becomes a fertilizer product that is used by farmers and people who grow things on their land and it is basically being used for the first time I this city's history. We solve the problem of what to do with the sludge and at the same time help other people to grow better crops.

AP: What about the idea, though, of balancing off, again, the interest of the environment to do its increasingly wilder and wilder 'thing' and the urgencies of a fixed urban space where many, many people are trying to live in a relatively small amount of land. Do you have sort of a double charge, or is one or the other of them really your taskmaster?

JM: I think you have to balance both. I think all of the people who work at the agency and all of the people who basically run the government in the City of New York, as in other communities, recognize that they have an obligation not only to the people who are here today but to the future generations that will be born here--our children, our grand children and our great grandchildren-to make sure the environment is a clean environment and that we leave it better than we found it when we got here. I think that's happening, but there is a price to pay for it, and consequently, we have to balance that.

I would love to do other things but if I do other things, I'll call them voluntary as opposed to not mandated by the federal government, I might be improving the environment but I would also have to balance that against the political effect of having to raise rate and having to complain about the increased rates at the same time.

So while we have the obligations to do certain things. I can go to the public and say 'Look, this is something we're mandated to do,' and they can recognize that and kind of accept it. But if I go out and try to do too much in an area where they don't think there is a benefit to themselves generally, they tend to protest a little bit."