The Undead Pipeline

Remember the KJ Pipeline?

Thought it was a dead issue?

Nope, it's just been tunneling unseen through the court system:

KJ tells court it did enough for pipeline
By Oliver Mackson

September 05, 2007 Times Herald-Record

White Plains — The Village of Kiryas Joel is the victim either of a judge who made a bad call or its own failure to abide by state environmental rules, lawyers argued yesterday in a state appeals court.

Kiryas Joel, a 30-year-old village of Satmar Hasidic Jews, wants the Appellate Division of state Supreme Court to overturn a 2005 lower-court decision that stalled construction of a 13-mile, $22.1 million water pipeline from Kiryas Joel to a hookup with New York City's Catskill aqueduct in New Windsor.

Yesterday's arguments were another procedural chapter in one of Orange County's most heated disputes, pitting officials of the fast-growing, politically potent village against people in neighboring towns and county officials who fear the pipeline could cause Kiryas Joel's growth to overwhelm its neighbors.

Mitchell J. Katz, a lawyer for Orange County, argued yesterday that the appeals judges should uphold the October 2005 decision by acting state Supreme Court Justice Stewart Rosenwasser. Katz said Rosenwasser was correct to rule that Kiryas Joel didn't take a hard enough look at alternatives to the pipeline, or at the possibility of increased sewage that the pipeline might generate.

Kiryas Joel's lawyer, Kevin Plunkett, told the four justices that "the question here is, 'was enough done here,' not 'could more have been done?' This process (the State Environmental Quality Review) is not supposed to have a deterrent effect."

Hasidim tend to have large families, and Plunkett told the judges yesterday that the population is driven by the growth of families, not by people moving into the village from elsewhere.

The village's administrator, Gedalye Szegedin, said after court yesterday that recent census estimates show about 20,500 people living in Kiryas Joel. In 2000, the estimate was 13,100.
The most pointed questions for the two lawyers came from Justice Thomas Dickerson, who said of the pipeline, "This looks like a worthwhile project." But the justices aren't expected to make a ruling for at least six to eight weeks, according to lawyers who were present yesterday and are familiar with the way the Appellate Division functions.

The next stop after the Appellate Division is the state Court of Appeals, the highest court in New York. But the Court of Appeals must grant permission for an appeal to be heard.