Increased clean water investment is a positive; rollbacks to CLCPA, SEQRA threaten environmental health
More money will be invested in clean water infrastructure, but the longest negotiation process in years resulted in a New York State budget for Fiscal Year 2027 that Save the Sound laments will be more harmful than helpful for environmental protections.
“Not only did the budget process overshoot its deadline by two months, it overreached by gutting critical environmental policies that never should have been part of these negotiations,” said David Ansel, vice president of the Center for Water Protection at Save the Sound and the organization’s lead advocate in New York State. “To compound the damage, the delays ran out so much of the clock that there’s little time left for passing important environmental legislation before the end of session next Thursday.”
For Save the Sound, the bright spot of the budget is the $25 million boost to the Clean Water Infrastructure Act (CWIA), bumping this critical funding source to $525 million for FY2027. With this increase, New York has allocated $6.5 billion to clean water projects since 2017, supporting communities that are looking to upgrade their wastewater and drinking water infrastructure.
“Without the Clean Water Infrastructure Act, it would be impossible for municipalities to afford to upgrade their outdated wastewater infrastructure, which was not built to meet the challenges of climate change,” said Ansel. “We appreciate the Legislature and the Governor making more money available to more New York communities through a fund that is perennially oversubscribed. But with $90 billion in clean water infrastructure needs across the state, we must ramp up our investment more rapidly moving forward.”
The budget also includes $175 million for clean water infrastructure to support housing development. Save the Sound advocated for this money to be added to the CWIA, arguing that money should be spent on improving existing infrastructure rather than on new projects.
“We look forward to working with state agencies to ensure that this funding provides public health benefits to New Yorkers and supports the upgrade of aging, insufficient clean water infrastructure rather than contributing to costly sprawl,” said Ansel.
The FY2027 budget also holds investment in the Environmental Protection Fund flat at $425 million, maintaining the historic funding level for a program that has touched every county in the state and every borough of New York City.
But the wins for clean water are undermined by policy revisions in a budget that resulted in the weakening of two foundational environmental laws: the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA)—New York’s Climate Law—and the State Environmental Quality Review Act (SEQRA), which has protected natural resources and communities in the Long Island Sound region and across the state from unregulated development for 50 years.
When the landmark Climate Law passed in 2019, it required that greenhouse gas emissions be reduced by 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2030. Now, that target is a 60 percent reduction by 2040, though that is not a legally binding mandate. Rather, the state must pursue that target “to the maximum extent feasible.” The accounting method for tracking those emissions reductions has also been changed to a more forgiving formula.
“When it passed our Climate Law in 2019, New York asserted itself as the leader on committing to a healthier climate. Now that the deadline has been delayed and accounting standards have changed, New York has forfeited that leadership role,” said Ansel. “We disagree that it’s too expensive to achieve these goals by 2030. The truth is it’s going to cost New Yorkers much more down the road to transition away from fossil fuels. More money will need to be spent to deal with the consequences of climate change: additional wastewater pollution, stormwater pollution, coastal erosion, more flooding, and more damage to people, property, and infrastructure—particularly in the Long Island Sound region.”
SEQRA was similarly gutted. Since its passage in 1975, SEQRA has empowered decision-makers to balance environmental, economic, and social needs when evaluating the impact of a potential development project.
“Any proposals to alter SEQRA deserved to be debated in transparent public hearings, not this opaque budget process in which the public has no opportunity to contribute,” said Ansel. “Instead, New Yorkers have lost their voice in a process designed to give people a chance to weigh in on proposed projects in their communities. And those communities are now more vulnerable than they’ve been in a half-century to development that—especially when coupled with the weakening of the Climate Law—will result in more wastewater and stormwater pollution, more nitrogen pollution, and more risk to clean water at our beaches, bays, and harbors.”