Summary
From the article:
New York environmental officials on Monday will unveil the most expensive watershed protection land purchase in the city’s history to add to the protective buffer around its famously unfiltered drinking water.
The nearly 50-acre parcel, bought for $12.5 million earlier this month, is in Westchester County, about 15 miles north of the Bronx. Over the last quarter-century, officials have spent $636 million to take control of over 125,000 acres in hopes of avoiding the construction of a filtration plant, which would cost billions.
[...]
The new acquisition signals a shift by the city agency making these purchases, the Department of Environmental Protection. It plans to refocus its land investments away from the rural Catskills region — a mountainous area west of the Hudson River where six reservoirs provide 90 percent of the city’s drinking water — to a more suburban zone east of the river, officials said. There, one reservoir stores all of the Catskills water before it reaches the city.