NADLER, CUOMO ATTACK DELAY IN SANDY AID
The House of Representatives’ failure to vote on a $60 billion Hurricane Sandy disaster aid bill last week prompted a number of angry responses by local elected officials representing the storm-ravaged city.

“This is a betrayal of the millions of Americans who are struggling after Sandy and a trivialization of the loss of more than 100 American lives,” said Congressman Jerrold Nadler. “Not taking up the $60 billion Sandy funding bill will mean that many Americans could remain homeless, the rebuilding of homes and businesses across the Northeast will be delayed, and the coastal infrastructure of the region will remain damaged and vulnerable to the next storm.”

He noted that agencies including the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers could not proceed with major repairs until funding is secured.

Local governors were similarly incensed. “This failure to come to the aid of Americans following a severe and devastating natural disaster is unprecedented,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said in a joint statement with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. “The fact that days continue to go by while people suffer, families are out of their homes, and men and women remain jobless and struggling during these harsh winter months is a dereliction of duty.”

Mayor Michael Bloomberg expressed more patience about the delay. “You know, democracy is something that takes a while to come together and to get the results,” he said. “As long as it turns out that we get the monies that we think are appropriate for the federal government to send to a part of the country that’s had a major natural disaster, all’s well that ends well.”

The House cast a preliminary vote to direct funds to the National Flood Insurance Program on Friday, and has scheduled to vote on the remaining aid on Jan. 15, the first day of legislative business from the new 113th Congress.

FIRE FATALITIES DROP TO LOWEST NUMBER EVER
Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Fire Commissioner Salvatore Cassano announced last week that 2012 saw the fewest civilian fire deaths in New York City history. Fifty-eight people died in blazes, four fewer than the former record low of 62 deaths in 2010, and a 12 percent decline from the 66 deaths in 2011. It was the seventh consecutive year that fire-related deaths have numbered under 100, which has occurred only 12 times since the city began keeping records in 1916.

The top two causes of fire-related deaths last year were accidental electrical fires and smoking. Forty-three percent of those killed in a blaze were over the age of 70, and 79 percent of the fatal fires struck where there were no working smoke detectors.

Bloomberg and Cassano also announced that FDNY’s Emergency Medical Service set a new record last year for fastest average ambulance response time: The new record, 6:30, is down one second from 2011’s previous record.

“With a record low number of murders and shootings and the fewest fire deaths in our city’s history, 2012 was a historic year for public safety,” Bloomberg said. “The FDNY has consistently improved fire safety over the past decade and has continued to drive response times to historic lows. These achievements and the efforts by our firefighters, EMTs and paramedics to save lives—while putting theirs on the line—is the reason fewer New Yorkers died as a result of fire in 2012 than ever before.”

POLITICAL MEMORABILIA SHOW TO HOST ED POTTER AWARD
The American Political Items Collectors’ Big Apple Ed Potter Chapter is sponsoring its 25th annual Political Collectors Show on Sunday, Feb. 3. The show will run from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Sixth Street Community Synagogue, 325 E. Sixth St., and will feature over 10,000 political items for sale, including buttons, posters, mugs, bandannas, watches and clothing that cover the presidencies of George Washington to Barack Obama, as well as a special exhibition of political memorabilia from the 2012 election.

The show will also include the presentation of the fourth annual Ed Potter Memorial Awards, named after the political memorabilia collector, which are given to those involved in the political process who have used political items and artifacts in their campaigns. This year’s recipients are New York State Assemblyman and City Councilman Adam Clayton Powell and Manhattan Media’s own CEO and mayoral hopeful Tom Allon.

Admission is $3 for adults and free for children under 16. For more information, call 212-764-6330.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who is pushing for high-tech investment in New York, has touted the University of Albany’s College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering. (Photos from College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering)

New York City isn’t the only part of the state that has been attracting a growing number of high-tech companies.

In upstate areas struggling to rebound from the recession and recover from the longer-term decline in manufacturing, the state has been recruiting companies like Yahoo! and IBM to add or expand operations, create new jobs and assist in rebuilding the economy.

To read the full article, please visit cityandstateny.com.

Governon Cuomo. Photo by azipaybarah, via Flickr Creative Commons.

Following the completion of a Department of Environmental Conservation environmental impact study, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is expected to decide this week whether or not to allow natural gas companies to extract gas by hydro-fracking, a drilling technique that blasts a high-pressure mix of water, chemicals and other materials deep underground to crack open rocks.

New York is sharply divided over the issue. Many towns have enacted temporary moratoriums on fracking, while many others have passed resolutions supporting it, the Wall Street Journal reports. Cuomo is anticipated to allow drilling to begin on a limited basis in the latter towns along the Marcellus Shale, a gas-rich underground rock formation in southern New York that extends out to Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia.

Proponents of hydro-fracking argue that the technique would help to bolster the state’s economically depressed region by generating tax income for local governments and creating 15,000 of jobs, according to NPR. Pennsylvania, for instance, has experienced a natural gas boom in the past decade by allowing high-volume fracking.

Opponents worry about the practice’s environmental costs. They argue that blasting chemicals deep into the earth threatens small town groundwater supplies. Celebrities including Yoko Ono, Paul McCartney and Alec Baldwin have banned together to fight fracking in the state, and over 1,000 demonstators marched to the Capitol on Monday to make their voices heard.

Check back for updates as Cuomo prepares to announce his decision.

by Alan Chartock

Conservative predictions about gay marriage haven’t come true

What was all the fuss about? Gays and lesbians wanted to marry. You’d have thought the world was going to explode. Nothing made for better news copy. Some evangelicals literally raised hell; we were Sodom and Gomorrah. God would punish us. Leviticus in the Bible was quoted again and again: “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.” We were about to revisit Jonah’s Nineveh. The cry urging repentance was heard throughout the land.

Incredibly, an awful lot of people went along with the bigotry and nonsense and more than a few still do. But, as so often happens, an oppressed group followed Joe Hill’s advice and went on to organize. Since the Stonewall riots in New York’s Greenwich Village, gays have been turning on their oppressors and saying “Enough.”

From then until now, tremendous strides have been made. Our politicians have eschewed the old safe road that condoned bigotry; kicking and screaming, they have been turned around. Sure, some have done so for so-called “political reasons,” but that’s OK. It is classic Americana that getting politicians to have some guts is always helped along by the old labor leader Samuel Gompers’ message that we reward our friends and punish our enemies.

No one likes to recognize it, but even President Barack Obama was late to the marriage equality party. That’s OK; at least he seems to have gotten there. In New York State, Gov. Andrew Cuomo is portrayed as a hero for kicking legislators in both parties until they did the right thing. That may be true, or perhaps he saw a wonderful opportunity to cover his blue dog conservative Democratic tracks by supporting a gay rights campaign.

Frankly I don’t give a damn, since he did the right thing. His father, Mario, found a lot of similar traction in his stance on the death penalty. They both did what was right and were rewarded for it.

I love the fact that what started as one of the biggest political battles in New York is already being taken for granted. There will be no retreat. There will be no return to the bad old days. The same thing happened with abortion, and many of the same political forces and coalitions were behind the rear guard there, too. One can only wonder what in the world the conservatives see in this, as they always push to stay in office and to survive.

I have talked to many of these politicians and they always tell me the same thing: The most important thing is “the sanctity of the family.” I often ask them how gay marriage desanctifies marriage or goes against natural law. They always mumble and repeat themselves. At that point, there is little you can do. When asked why two people who love each other shouldn’t be allowed to marry, they come back with all that mumbling again.

This brings us back to Chartock’s first law of politics. It’s called political saliency. That means that many folks vote based on a single overriding concern. In some cases, the issue is a woman’s right to choose. In others, it’s the political survival of Israel. Here, it’s a gay or lesbian couple’s right to marry, to have families, to be able to visit a loved one in the hospital.

So gays and lesbians and their allies got together and, like the little engine that could, they began to climb that mountain very slowly. But when they reached the top, they picked up speed. They’re not there yet. Not in places like North Carolina, where people get behind that voting curtain and let all their bigotry hang out. But in New York, in Massachusetts and in so many other states, it turns out, it’s no big deal.

So what was all that fuss about, anyway?

Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.

By Alan S. Chartock

You cannot have democracy without good information. How are any of us expected to vote intelligently if we don’t know what is going on?

Andrew Cuomo campaigned for office on a platform of transparency in government. As attorney general, he employed Blair Horner to create something called “Project Sunlight.” For 25 years, Horner was (and still is) one of the most respected men in Albany. He was a good government lobbyist who kept legislators’ feet to the fire. He was always Mr. Integrity, so when Cuomo hired him, those of us with some lingering doubts took notice.

Horner was responsible for setting up a database that was supposed to tell all. However, after a relatively brief amount of time, Horner resigned from the Cuomo administration, suggesting that he had accomplished what he set out to do. A man of conviction, he now works for the American Cancer Society and appears weekly on public radio. I did my best to get Horner to tell me why he left so early in the Cuomo timeline, but he stuck to his story. I like a man of character.

Now we are starting to see some other troubling signs from the man who was going to lead the most transparent gubernatorial administration in history. It turns out that Cuomo is committed to secrecy. Several news items have appeared in the New York Times and the Albany Times Union suggesting that Cuomo is dedicated to anything but transparency.

We all know that it’s easier to operate in secrecy than to show your cards to your opponents in the political game. The problem is that politics can be brutal. If your opponents sense your vulnerabilities, you can be sure they will use them against you. The current assumption is that Cuomo the Younger wants to do what Papa couldn’t: run for president.

Let’s face it, if you had his office, you might do the same thing he’s doing. When he was attorney general, Cuomo did a lot. At the conclusion of their terms, attorneys general customarily do what Cuomo’s predecessor, Eliot Spitzer, did: send thousands of pages of documents to the state archives. Cuomo didn’t.

When two ace investigative reporters from the Albany Times Union went to the archives to look around, they found a memo having to do with something called “Trooper Gate.” It turns out that soon after they got hold of that memo, the files of the state archivist were combed by the Cuomo people and lots of material, including the “Trooper Gate” memo, disappeared. Now people are calling that disappearance “File Gate.”

The Cuomo people say they have the right to remove such documents—and it turns out they do. At least one top source says the original memo was removed because of a single sentence suggesting that the Cuomo investigation was less than stellar.

Cuomo worked hard to create the aura of a strong attorney general. He said that he would let the facts lead him. However, this case hints that there may have been some political motives to his investigation.

In the old days, Cuomo had a reputation as a political enforcer for his father. At one point, he accused me through an operative in the strongest possible language of having written an anonymous New York Times op-ed about his father. I had not, and the father sort of apologized. When he ran for governor, we were told that it was the new Andrew Cuomo. Now we hear that communications between top Cuomo people are not done by email but on devices that don’t create replicable records.

None of this passes the stink test. Right now, Cuomo is very, very popular. People think he is efficient. Try looking through history and notice who else was characterized as efficient in the beginning.

Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.

Like most of us, politicians prefer to avoid pain—they’d much prefer to take the easy route than tackle the tough issues. Here are a couple of examples.

The Legislature has gone along with Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s tough fiscal regimen on its agencies and citizens. Tax caps, the lack of a hike in the minimum wage and finger-wagging at teachers all come out of what is known as “The Second Floor,” Cuomo’s office. The hypocrisy comes in when, during the lame duck session that follows an election before the new Legislature is sworn in, they raise their own pay. They do this because they desperately want the money but also know that people who have been hurt by governmental austerity are deeply resentful when the government types raise their own pay.

The solons have to do this in two separate sessions. Of course, they could do it the honorable way—vote the pay raises in and then suffer the consequences with the voters—but they are loath to do that. I suspect that if you were a legislator, you might opt for the less painful way yourself. Aw, come on, of course you would.

Naturally, the governor (with his 70 percent approval rating) has to sign the pay raise bill. That’s where the trading comes in. If they want the raise, they’ll have to give him something significant in return. It’s the American way, you know. Governors have been doing this for years.

If there is one thing that Cuomo now understands, it is that the people will not hold him responsible. After all, he campaigned on the platform that he would not allow the majority parties in the Legislature to follow the despicable process of drawing districts where they had the best chance of winning. When he broke his word, no one seemed to care. They gave him credit for cleaning up Albany.

I suspect this pay raise business will follow the same sort of track. Not only that, my bet is that Cuomo will either not accept a raise for himself (he’s got plenty of money) or announce that he will give it to charities of his choice. After all, he’s running for president.

You can see another example of pain avoidance in the massive toll hike that has been proposed for the New York Thruway. That road is already one of the most expensive in the nation when it comes to making truckers pay. That, of course, is the point. The Thruway authoritarians, who have been severely criticized for sloppy work by uncompromising State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, know that many of the truckers who use the Thruway are out-of-staters. Of course, out-of-state folks don’t vote in New York, so the idea is to soak them. The politicians probably figure that the truckers will just raise their rates and we’ll all end up paying more at Walmart and the grocery store to offset the increased trucking costs.

When you raise tolls on commuters, however, you do so at your own risk. When you give this kind of power to so-called “independent” authorities, politicians are shielded from having to accept the political responsibility. The governor has declined to say much about the toll hikes on the Thruway except to suggest that if the hikes are needed, they are needed. Anyone who thinks that even the isolated members of the Thruway Authority would proceed with the draconian hikes without a wink or a nod from the governor’s office must live on another planet. Just sayin’.

These politicians are really pretty clever. The last thing you want to do is to bear any pain. Rule No. 1 for politicians has always been “Get re-elected.” Rule No. 2 is also familiar: “Never forget rule No. 1.”

Alan S. Chartock is president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and an executive publisher at The Legislative Gazette.

James Carville. Photo by jdiasica. Photo courtesy of Flickr Commons.

Former Bill Clinton advisor and Democratic strategist James Carville added another log to the bonfire of speculation about Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s 2016 presidential chances. Carville was on stage last night at the 92nd Street Y for a forum moderated by Buzzfeed’s Ben Smith to talk about the middle class, but when the conversation drifted to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s chances at the Democratic nomination for 2016, New York’s governor came up. “I think Andrew is going to be front and center,” Carville said, when Smith mentioned Cuomo as a contender. But Carville wouldn’t rule out Hillary either, saying, “Running for president is like having sex: nobody does it once and forgets about it.”

To read more from City & State click here.

Josh Fox

By Mayara Guimaraes

Josh Fox has been loudly proclaiming the dangers of hydrofracking with his words and films ever since a gas company sought to lease his family’s land in Pennsylvania several years ago. After he conducted some research into the controversial process, he declined the $100,000 offer and set out to educate others on what he had discovered. The result was his Academy Award-nominated documentary, Gasland.

Now at work on Gasland 2 and petitioning local governments to prohibit fracking, Fox spoke to Our Town about the latest developments in New York State and why he thinks Gov. Andrew Cuomo is about to make a catastrophic mistake.

Our Town: Do you think that by sharing hydrofracking regulations with the gas industry before they were released to the public, the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) gave the industry an advantage?

Fox: I think that this shows the deep and very cozy relationship between the gas industry and the agency that is supposed to be regulating on behalf of the people. What is even more shocking is that they were answering questions about the regulations, back and forth with the gas industry, but they weren’t answering the people’s questions. We submitted a list of 25 very technical questions, very similar questions to the ones sent by the gas industry, and we received absolutely no response. This could become a moment where people will say the gas industry has bought out our democracy. Why is that the industry gets to write the rules?

How is the fracking debate here in New York different than in other states?
New York had the benefit of taking a looking at what happened in Colorado, Texas and Pennsylvania—they had the benefit of knowledge. In Pennsylvania, Gov. Rendell and Gov. Corbett rolled out the red carpet for the gas industry. The people did not know what fracking was, and as a result Pennsylvania is being trashed. It is a devastating situation. We have nightmare after nightmare in environmental disasters unfolding in Pennsylvania, and it is the same in Colorado, Wyoming and Texas. But New York had the benefit of looking at this and getting really well organized.

What are some things that the average New Yorker doesn’t know about fracking but should?
In general, we are used to turning the light switch on and off and not thinking where the energy comes from. That has to change. The fossil fuel industry started to run out of the easily obtainable oil, coal and gas. Now, a sane person would look at that and think, well, let’s start changing to renewable energy. That is not what the fossil fuel industry did. They decided to go to the extreme type of energy—extremely dangerous, extremely hard to get, involving extreme amounts of energy used to get the energy. What I am talking about is fracking, nonstop removal for coal or deepwater drilling on the Gulf of Mexico, which is unpredictable, as we all saw two years ago with the oil spill that they had. Right now, the clean water supply of New York City is on the hook.

A scene from Gasland

What do you think of the possibility that Cuomo will only allow fracking in a few counties that are in favor of the gas industry?
There is nothing in this proposal from Cuomo that says it will stop the industry from working all over the state. The truth is that this is just a way to open the door and pass regulation; once these regulations are passed, the gas industry is just going to say, ‘Well, there is no such a thing as regulations that only are valid in parts of the state.’ And they will have a point. There is something called unequal protection under the law. There is no way to protect some people and not protect others under the same law. We went to Gov. Cuomo and told him not to do this—not to experiment with poor counties that are less politically represented and are desperate because of economic problems.

The one thing that the governor has done right so far is to not move forward with this proposal. I think that he has shown healthy skepticism. This is going to be disastrous for his legacy. We know by looking at the gas industry documents that these wells are going to leak. We know that there is a statistical probability of blowouts, of contamination incidents.

What can you tell us about your upcoming documentary, Gasland 2?
The film is an investigation about the level of the relationship between the government and the gas industry. There is a level of communication and collaboration between the government and the industry that is outsizing the citizen right now. Right now we are seeing a different type of contamination caused by fracking; it is not the water or the air, it is the contamination of our democracy.

Hydrofracking site in Lancaster, Penn.

By Megan Bungeroth & Mayara Guimaraes

The debate over hydrofracking has been raging in New York for years, and it may be coming to a head this year as Gov. Andrew Cuomo contemplates allowing the controversial drilling technique in the state for the first time.

The state currently has a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing, but the governor has recently indicated that he would be open to allowing the process in certain areas of the state near the border with Pennsylvania, where fracking is already underway.

Fracking is a process used to extract natural gas from shale rock. Large volumes of water, chemicals and sand or ceramic beads are pumped into rock at high pressures, fracturing it and releasing the gas deposits that can then be piped to the surface. It’s a process that has been in practice in the oil and gas mining industries for decades, but a surge in natural gas production in recent years has put the latest hydrofracking methods into the national spotlight, and many New Yorkers don’t like what they’re seeing.

“While I understand the economic arguments in favor, those arguments do not take into account the potential costs—both economic and environmental—associated with fracking,” said State Sen. Liz Krueger. She’s been a vocal opponent of fracking in the state, as have many of her Upper East Side constituents.

“The experience of other states with ground and surface water contamination and well blowouts, concerns about the contents of fracking fluids and the significant damage to existing infrastructure that could result from allowing fracking are simply too great,” she said.
Problems in other states—contaminated drinking water being the gravest among them—have made New Yorkers especially cautious about allowing the process at home. The potential benefits, however, are what have been swaying some upstate lawmakers and landowners to lobby to allow fracking. Aside from the royalties offered to landowners in economically depressed areas of the state where farming has fallen by the wayside, allowing fracking has the potential to create jobs and tax revenue.

There’s also a large U.S. supply of natural gas, which burns cleaner than coal or oil. “You have to look at what’s available and what’s viable,” said Alan Herbst, a principal with Utilis Advisory Group, a New York-based oil and gas industry consulting company that has worked with many clients on fracking for natural gas.

“This checks off a lot of boxes. It’s clean, it’s cheap, it’s domestically available. Is it the perfect solution? Maybe not. But it’s something that’s been developed and it will lead up toward energy independence,” he said.

Some argue that energy companies should be investing in alternative fuels instead of pushing for more fracking.

“We’ve known that we need clean, renewable energy for a sustainable planet for a long time. But now, fracking and other extreme extractions are putting us in a precarious position because they’re giving us more fossil fuels at a very high price to our precious water, climate, ecosystems and environment,” said Elizabeth Kelley, a volunteer with the local anti-fracking group United For Action.
“They are delaying renewable energy development and they are taking climate change to the brink.”

Herbst said that while the industry and the state should be looking at other forms of fuel as well as large-scale energy conservation, natural gas will continue to be a big part of the United State’s energy plan for the foreseeable future.

“You can’t be against everything,” Herbst said. “You just can’t produce the power you need with solar and wind. It’s too expensive and it’s not what you call baseload—you can’t rely on it 24 hours a day.”

Upper East Side Assembly Member Micah Kellner has acknowledged the potential benefits of accessing the state’s natural gas reserves but urged the state to hold off until a thorough review can be completed.

“You are not talking about drilling for oil in places that have been used to drilling,” Kellner said. “We are talking about drilling in places throughout New York State—some of the last untouched land in the Northeast—that have never been disturbed.”

The Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) is taking all of these factors into account as it conducts a Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement (SGEIS) on hydrofracking—essentially a report on the potential impacts—and considers the 79,700 comments it has received from the public over two separate comment periods. The report should be completed by the end of the year.

The DEC recently came under scrutiny from several local lawmakers, including State Sens. Krueger and Tom Duane, for releasing some information about their study to the gas industry before making it public. Emily DeSantis, DEC’s spokeswoman, defended that decision.
“DEC has regularly and routinely met with environmental groups, industry, local government representatives and other stakeholders as it develops the final SGEIS for high-volume hydraulic fracturing,” DeSantis wrote in an email.

“Under the State Administrative Procedures Act, state agencies are required to assess the impacts of the regulatory action on the regulated entity. Agencies cannot gather this data without holding meetings and engaging in other forms of communication with the regulated community prior to proposing the regulation. Nothing in the regulations changed as a result,” she said.

Opponents of fracking argue that even strict regulations might not be enough to sufficiently protect the state’s water supply, and that the industry will find a way to get around the regulations regardless. Gas companies are seeking to drill the Marcellus Shale, the rock formation under which most of the region’s natural gas deposits sit. It also encompasses the watershed region in the Catskills from which New York gets most of its fresh water, and many argue that in order to protect the water supply, the state needs to maintain the outright moratorium on fracking that is currently in place.

Daniele Gerard, president of the Upper West Side’s Three Parks Independent Democrats, said there should be a hard line to protect the state’s water. “Water is a precious natural resource. We shouldn’t be injecting it with poisonous chemicals to obtain yet another fossil fuel. Energy companies should be using readily available technology to move wholesale to renewable energy and conservation measures,” she said.

The DEC won’t say what factors they are weighing in crafting their recommendations on hydrofracking, citing the ongoing scientific studies, but DeSantis did say that “if high-volume hydraulic fracturing moves forward in New York, it will do so with the strictest standards in the nation.”

That alone may be enough to keep the industry at bay, some argue, as other states open up for hydrofracking with more lax regulations.

“Given the intense interest and degree of concern expressed to date…it’s difficult to imagine that those restrictions would ever be relaxed regardless of pressure from industry,” said Telisport Putsavage, an environmental and energy law attorney with Sullivan & Worcester and former assistant counsel at the DEC.

“There are multiple shale formations and hydraulic fracturing opportunities in the United States, and I believe industry will ultimately gravitate toward the areas where resistance and regulation is less extensive, rather than continue to fight against what will most likely be the strictest regulatory regimen in the country.”

Fracking explained. Illustration courtesy of Wiki Commons.

The Cuomo administration has hinted it may allow hydrofracking to move forward only in municipalities that express support for the procedure, and this week Gov. Andrew Cuomo explicitly said that “home rule” should be a factor in deciding where to allow it. But the technology is such that drilling for natural gas in some locations and not in others doesn’t make sense, several lawmakers argued yesterday. “You may have a town that says no, but if the town next to it says yes … well, it’s horizontal hydrofracking we’re talking about,” State Sen. Tony Avella, an outspoken opponent of the controversial practice, said at a rally on the steps of City Hall. “The pipes are going to go a long distance underground and we’ll have contaminated water seeping into the water supply of a town that never wanted it.” State Sen. Liz Krueger said that polluted water from a single source could contaminate crops and livestock, which would in turn spread through the state. “If one county does it, it can contaminate other counties,” she said. “We are all one when it comes to this issue and we are all interdependent, literally and figuratively.”