New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced a major, long-term investment in water quality infrastructure as part of her 2026 agenda.
WSHU’s Desiree D’Iorio spoke with Julie Tighe, president of the New York League of Conservation Voters, about what it means for Long Island.
WSHU: So $3.75 billion over five years. That's a lot of money.
JT: This is a historic amount of money. And, you know, given the state's, you know, financial position, I think it's really important that she has advanced this amount of money and shown like knows that it's going to help us to get more jobs out there that's going to help us deliver safe, clean drinking water, or to make sure that we're properly handling our wastewater and not contaminating our bays and our lakes and our waterways or our drinking water. In the case of Long Island, we know there is great demand for water infrastructure, both on the drinking water side, to protect for things like merchant contaminants. You know, we've heard about these issues on Long Island with PFAS and one for dioxin. We know that some of the municipalities on Long Island got grants to help support their communities, making upgrades to their infrastructure to protect their drinking water. And we've also seen this in a sort of twofold, like one is building sewers, where in places that are already developed, in many cases, we're still looking into the details. We'll have to wait and see what's in the executive budget, but the, you know, in the regulatory review, streamlining that she's proposed.
The governor was talking about making it easier to build housing on previously disturbed land, but they want that to be connected to water and sewer, so that it reduces the potential for negatively impacting the natural resources that would otherwise be impacted by sewer infrastructure. And so that could potentially be, you know, a really smart way of doing this and making sure that we're not building new houses that, like too much of Suffolk County, rely on septic systems. And again, we'll have to wait and see what's in all the details when it comes out in the budget next week. But some of that funding has also gone towards upgrading the septic infrastructure so that you're moving off of these really old and leaking septic systems and onto very modern ones that really help to manage nitrogen and other pollutants out there in places that it doesn't make sense to have sewer infrastructure.
WSHU: Suffolk County Executive Ed Romaine has always done a good job, I think, in talking about how necessary sewering is for the overall economy in terms of housing and business development, and it looks like Hochul is doing that too.
JT: I think there are two things. One is we want to make sure that we're not incentivizing sprawl, right, as opposed to the way she talked about housing development from streamlining the regulatory process, the review process, the environmental review process, is really talking about places that were previously disturbed, right? So we don't want to just build out water infrastructure into green spaces unnecessarily, as opposed to making sure we're having that water infrastructure necessary to support smart growth of communities. But what's also as important to highlight, especially on Long Island, is how important that impact on surface water is not just surface water, but groundwater, right? Because, you know, Long Island is a sole Market Source or aquifer, and if you're, you know, using bad septic systems, or you have sewer infrastructure that needs to be upgraded, then it's going to be impacting the drinking water supply and also impacting poorism Potentially, and putting, you know, health at risk when you have harmful algal blooms, for example.
