Behind closed doors, New York City, State and federal officials are hammering out the details of a revised plan to safeguard New York City’s irreplaceable Catskill and Delaware water supplies, which provide drinking water to over nine million New Yorkers. The stakes are high. If New York’s watershed plan does not advance stringent pollution prevention efforts over the next five to ten years, water quality in the city’s six giant Catskill mountain reservoirs could decline. That could leave city officials with no choice but to construct massive drinking water filtration facilities at a price tag of over 10 billion capital dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars in annual operating costs and large scale energy demands that would continue for decades. Water ratepayers in New York City and Westchester County would see large spikes in their water bills. And the incentive to head off pollution discharges before they enter our upstate reservoirs would vanish. The new plan, which is expected to be released in draft form within days, is being prepared pursuant to the federal Safe Drinking Water Act. That statute requires all municipalities with surface water supplies, like rivers or reservoirs, to filter their drinking water unless officials can demonstrate that their source waters are of high quality and that they have a comprehensive watershed protection program to minimize the potential for contamination. New York City is one of only five big cities in the nation that has sought to protect its drinking water quality via this pollution prevention approach, rather than by constructing and operating expensive, energy-intensive water filtration facilities. (The others are Seattle, San Francisco, Portland (OR), and Boston.) The draft plan is expected to be open for public comment and hearings this summer, before modifications are made and the final plan and filtration avoidance determination are issued by the State. One complicating factor is the large number of stakeholders involved. New York City, which owns the reservoirs and manages the system, is the key participant. But reviewing the city’s watershed plan are two state agencies – the NYS Health Department, which has authority to approve a filtration avoidance plan or order the city to construct filtration facilities and the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation, which has specialized expertise in the mechanics of protecting watershed lands and the streams and rivers that flow into city reservoirs. Also involved is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It…