The two greatest threats to the water supply are sprawl and lack of enforcement.

Sprawl

• Sprawl is defined by the National Trust for Historic Preservation as “low-density, land consumptive, center-less, auto-oriented development typically located on the outer suburban fringes.”
  
  
• The East-of-Hudson watersheds are suffering an onslaught of real estate development at an unprecedented pace and scale. Developers are pushing into every unoccupied corner of the watershed, building roads, strip malls, office complexes, apartment buildings and residential subdivisions.
  
  
• Putnam County is the fastest growing suburban county in the state, and development there has put the drinking water for 9 million New Yorkers in jeopardy.
  
  
• Sprawl creates a preponderance of impervious surfaces (roads, parking lots, building footprints). Impervious surfaces devour open space and curtail the landscape’s ability to purify stormwater naturally. Rain collects on impervious surfaces, scours pollutants off roads, gathers velocity, and runs off into the nearest surface waters, which are part of our unfiltered drinking water supply.
  
  
• Recent watershed research shows that impervious cover has a profound and often irreversible impact on the quality of aquatic resources. Over thirty scientific studies show that the quality of streams, lakes and wetlands dramatically declines when impervious cover in watersheds exceeds just ten percent.
  
  
• Sprawl increases traffic, air pollution, noise pollution and infrastructure costs, while degrading water quality, reducing biodiversity and reducing open space.
  
  
• For more information on sprawl in the New York City watershed, see the Second Report in Enforcement History.

• Historically, New York City has failed in its mandate to enforce environmental regulations against existing pollution sources. The Environmental Enforcement Division (EED) of the DEP police has been seriously undermined and demoralized by disastrous mismanagement, institutionalized neglect and deliberate harassment.
  
  
• Throughout the 1990s, EED was undermanned and its officers were underpaid, under-trained, and starved for equipment. As a consequence, DEP police officers were unable to perform their critical function: protecting the City’s indispensable water supply from pollution.
  
  
• For more information on the lack of enforcement of the Watershed Agreement, see the First Report in Enforcement History.