newjerseynewsroom.com

Yuck!

That’s how one Staten Island official summed up the taste of New Jersey water last summer. Yet those who live in that borough might soon need to acquire a taste for Garden State water if a water tunnel repair project deprives the island of its usual source.

"Anybody can tell you they go to New Jersey and they taste the water and it stinks," Nicholas Dmytryszyn, Staten Island’s environmental engineer, told the Staten Island Advance last July.

On Friday, a gaggle of the borough’s most influential elected officials joined together to voice their united sentiments on the subject.

"Leaving Staten Island 'solely dependent' on water supply — or, during a drought, the lack of water — from private water companies in the state of New Jersey is totally unacceptable," Staten Island Borough President Jim Molinaro was quoted as saying in the Advance on Thursday.

The New York City Department of Environmental Protection’s plan to repair an upstate aqueduct that is leaking thousands of gallons of water a day includes construction of a temporary bypass tunnel that would allow water to flow during the shutdown.

But the DEP’s preferred scenario, the Advance reported, is to cut Staten Island off from the water being supplied to the rest of the city and interconnect the Island to New Jersey water supplies.

The team of politicians responding to a DEP’s draft environmental impact statement for the project said they were opposed to the idea that the agency “would propose cutting off entirely one of the boroughs from the city’s water system.”

The statement also said that DEP’s “preferred scenario involves supplying water from New Jersey to Staten Island through transmission lines that would need to be constructed under the Arthur Kill, connecting infrastructure owned by New Jersey water suppliers with DEP infrastructure within Staten Island."

Molinaro insisted the borough receive the same water as the rest of the city and only take water from New Jersey if it still were needed to supplement the borough.

The Island would need the alternate water supply for up to a year in 2018 and 2019 when the billion-dollar project that will shut down the Delaware Aqueduct to install a two-and-a-half-mile-long bypass.

—JOE GREENE, NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM