One doesn’t have to look far to find New York State sewer and water projects that need funding. Just this past weekend, Newsday published an article about a denial of funding for the Bay Park Sewage Plant, a plant that suffered major damage from Superstorm Sandy,which could be eligible for Clean Water State Revolving Funds (CWSRF)—the same pot of money that was just tapped to help pay for the New NY Bridge. Mount Vernon is actually paying fines because they can’t find the money to meet their statutory requirements to clean up effluent leaks. Earlier this month Ossining suffered a water main break that led to a several day-long boil order for a central section of the village. Just yesterday Long Island saw an entire year of rainfall in one day, causing massive flooding and drawing attention to water infrastructure vulnerabilities. And on the day that Senator DeFrancisco voted in favor of the controversial Environmental Facilities Corporation (EFC) loan, his hometown of Syracuse suffered from a water main break downtown.

The same day of that vote, July 16, the EFC—without any press release or fanfare— quietly posted “Draft Amendment No. 2” for the 2014 Intended Use Plan for the CWSRF which outlined $570 million worth of sewer and water projects that would go unfunded across the state because the demand “exceeded the available funding.” In New York City alone, $270 million worth of projects were applied for; a need that will continue to go unmet. Other municipalities across the state that applied for money, but were below the funding line, include:

• Town of Rosendale
• Village of Greenport
• Village of Ocean Beach
• Kiryas Joel
• Rockland County
• Westchester County
• Town of North Hempstead
• Town of Oyster Bay
• Suffolk County
• Great Neck Water Pollution Control District

In general, municipalities not getting the funds they applied for—no matter what the pot of money—is not generally news in this era of substantially constrained funding. But when it is repeatedly stated, most recently in the Thruway Authority’s August 5 Factsheet, that these CWSRF loans to help construct the New NY Bridge “will have no impact on water projects in Federal Fiscal Year 2014”, it becomes one more flagrant example of how the public is being misled.