Only 2.5% of all the Water on Earth Is Potable!
Policy Proposal: June 2025
Perhaps, the most important natural resource in any community is potable water. And after reading an article in the Adirondack Explorer called “Ticonderoga’s Continuing Water Crisis,” I began to ponder the water supply of Windham. Does it have enough? Could we see significant contamination of the water supply from leaking septic tanks? The biggest question is, of course, where does the majority of our drinking water reside in our community? And how will building larger homes and larger housing developments in more remote areas of our community affect the overall resilience of our water systems?
Shortly, the town plans on allowing Windham Skye, LLC to create a 32-lot housing development on County Route 10. This 107.9-acre (±) parcel of land is being targeted for the development of a new housing community. This property will also contain 21 leach fields and 32 private wells. This combination is predicted to create a maximum of 14,080 gallons per day, or 440 gallons per day per home in effluent. These are impressive numbers. What is also impressive is the lack of studies to support the drilling of 32 private wells on the property.
Our concern should be what the state of the water table is in this region of our community. Yes, they are drilling test wells, and yes, this will tell us a picture of the water table at that moment. If we drill in a particularly wet period of time when the water table is extremely high, we might get the false impression that more water exists in this region. That might influence an overzealous response by our community to, as some might say, “Drill, Baby, Drill” in the hopes of getting every last project in the pipeline finished.
Instead, I propose a more conservationist approach to our water supply and our continual reliance on groundwater in our community. Groundwater is vital to the makeup of our publicly owned water system, as well. Currently, according to the Windham Comprehensive Plan of 2020, the town’s water supply for the then 332 customers consisted of 4 wells, 1 spring, and the 2015 Interconnection between Ski Windham (now, Windham Mountain Club) and the town. These sources were offset with a storage capacity of 200,000 gallons in Windham and 80,000 gallons in Hensonville. This is why I believe we need an actual “Water Conservation Commission”.
This “Water Conservation Commission” would be tasked with two critical aspects of this commission will be to monitor the development of water usage in the community, and to monitor the quality and quantity of our groundwater to ensure safety in our community.
Goals of the Water Conservation Commission:
Create policies for the Water Department to save water in the community and reduce the costs of operating.
Create an end-user educational program that will reduce community waste.
Create a program that audits water usage and develops long-term projections of water usage.
Create a policy of prevention instead of reaction to potential water issues that the community may face.
Create policies for consolidating local water systems to reduce waste and create a more resilient supply and distribution system.
Auditing recreational uses of water in our community for snowmaking and the irrigation of golf courses.
As I’ve stated before in the above description of the Windham Skye project, we are seeing what might be the future home developments in our community. While the Windham Skye project is limited to housing on a minimum of 2 acres and a maximum of 4.58 acres lot sizes; however, with future zoning in a rural residential area that will be 5 acres minimum and in a hamlet residential area, 2 acres minimum for single-family unit lot sizes with no town water or sewage. We can see that these properties will become bigger, reducing the number of homes per project, but probably maximizing the size of each home per lot to ensure maximized profits.
We must, as a community, ensure that future generations have access to a viable water supply, and these large-scale projects using wells do not exceed our environment’s ability to recharge our aquifer. Otherwise, we will be spending far more money in attempts to capture, contain, and reuse water. It is more cost-effective in our community to ensure that we monitor this necessity of life and ensure that it is not misused by a few in the name of ever-increasing profit margins.
Beyond the concerns of housing developments, we also have to look to recreational uses of water in our community. The NYDEC reported in 2023 that recreational uses of Golf Course Irrigation and Snowmaking for Ski Resorts represented a combined 40.3% of all water usage marked as “Other”; this category amounted to 83.9449 million gallons of the total 208.3 million in this category. This is certainly going to increase in our region, especially given the effects of climate change on the skiing industry. It has been predicted that by 2050, ski resorts at our latitude could be relying almost completely on snowmaking for the coverage of terrain. This certainly will produce adverse effects on our community’s water supply. A study from Swiss researchers predicts that mountains below 2,000 meters in height above sea level might see a 79% increase in the use of water to create skiable terrain by 2100. If you’re curious, Cave Mountain is only 3,100 feet tall, or 944 meters. A height that is well below 2,000 meters or 6,500+ feet, the researchers found to be the minimum for sustaining snow cover.
If we act before a crisis, we will not only save money but also have more of this precious resource in the future for other uses. We have to act now to prevent potential issues with our water supplies and the extreme costs that catastrophic failures bring with them.