Enacts the Mohawk River Basin management act

Showing the cosponsors who are on Agora, A to Z. The official record may list more.

• Democratic6
• Republican5

This bill has cosponsors from more than one party.

Shown in neutral colors by design; Agora is non-partisan.

◆ The sponsor's argument

Why Patricia Fahy says this is needed

The Mohawk River, its estuaries, and its river basin spans a region of nearly 3,500 square miles with 14 counties, 172 municipalities, and over 600,000 constituents who depend on the region's economic contributions from agriculture, manufacture, storage, and shipping. Beyond the impacts to residents, the Mohawk River Basin has a significantly sized ecosystem including 6,600 total miles of rivers, canals, and streams, and 135 lakes, reservoirs, and ponds. The Mohawk River Basin is respon- sible for roughly 25 percent of the entire Hudson River drainage area. The Mohawk River Basin has numerous native aquatic species that need protection from invasive aquatic species such as the Round Goby due to recent capture of invasive species samples in the Mohawk River as well as connected to the Hudson River. The Mohawk River Basin experiences pollution from numerous sources, including sediment, nutrients, and bacteria from agriculture, construction, and eroding banks. According to a 2024 report, gaps in environmental regulations enabled 89 million gallons of landfill leachate, chemically laced water runoff, to be dumped into the Mohawk and Hudson Rivers annually from 2019 to 2023. This bill would allow for the continued addressing of these concerns and longterm planning and preservation of the Mohawk River Basin District. The established management program, combined with the efforts of the appointed committee and coordinator will be best-equipped to guide ecosystem-based watershed management, updated at least every 10 years. This oversight will provide for a new focus on identifying flood-vulner- able communities and implementing strategies for resilience, as well as the monitoring of pollutants and the suggestion of new policies to address new conservation issues. Finally, an invasive species management plan that addresses aquatic invasive threats will better address inva- sive species and native species' interactions with the Canal and histor- ic watershed divides.

This is the sponsor's own case for the bill, quoted from their memorandum. It is not Agora's description of what the bill does.