New York Senator Charles Schumer was in Plattsburgh this morning to announce the town will be able to secure funding through the Lake Champlain Basin Program to fix deteriorating infrastructure on the former Plattsburgh Air Force Base.
The former air force facility covered more than 3,400 acres. When it closed in 1995 ownership was transferred to the Town of Plattsburgh. The water and sewer infrastructure was not upgraded before the ownership transfer and some of it is beginning to collapse. Town of Plattsburgh Supervisor Chuck Kostyk described the dilemma.
“On June 20, 2024 the Plattsburgh area suffered a weather micro-burst event with several inches of rain falling in a very short period of time. The rainfall was more than the 70-plus year-old infrastructure could handle. Numerous sinkholes appeared and several roads in the area had to be closed. Emergency repairs to those roads at the time approached three-quarters of a million dollars. The challenges have not lessened since then, and please pardon the pun, they’ve actually deepened.”
New York Senator Charles Schumer, the Senate minority leader, was at the former base on Friday to look at some of the infrastructure that needs replacement.
“The Cold War infrastructure that was here is falling apart and now it’s getting so bad that it’s creating sinkholes on our streets and sending unwanted sentiments [sic] into beautiful Lake Champlain.”
Schumer asked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to assess the situation and the Corps subsequently suggested approaching the Lake Champlain Basin Program.
“The coordination led to the town’s inclusion in the program’s Watershed Assistance Program. And that’s going to unlock new federal funding so we can clean this up without the taxpayers having to shell out more money. It’s a great first step. Of course, we have to do more, so I’m here to launch my push to reauthorize the Lake Champlain Basin Program and secure increased funding for the former air base.”
Lake Champlain Basin Program Healthy Ecosystems Coordinator Meg Modley says they are concerned about water quality issues arising from the legacy infrastructure on the former base.
“This is a significant water quality issue with the stormwater infrastructure running off from the old base into outfalls that go directly to Lake Champlain. So we are concerned about water quality issues related to this infrastructure.”
Town of Plattsburgh Senior Planner Trevor Cole explained that the work area includes about 21 miles of the buried stormwater infrastructure built in the 1950s.
“Everything that was constructed out here was built also to take stormwater from a massive flightline. For example, some of these pipes are built 20 feet underground and they’re 72 inches. You know you can practically drive a car through them. The Town of Plattsburgh doesn’t even own digging equipment that could go that deep. But that’s the infrastructure we inherited.”
Modley explained that the next step is to conduct a study of what’s needed to fix the infrastructure.
“We’re really thrilled to move forward on studying this project and learning more about what we can do to reduce the amount of runoff coming into Lake Champlain. This is your drinking water source. This is where we recreate. This is where we fish and swim. And we’re really looking forward to understanding better how much it might cost to remediate this problem.”
Cole says the study is critical to understand the problems before they try to start fixing the infrastructure.
“Some of it we know. It’s obvious that we have crumbling, old infrastructure. But to what scale and how we should fix it is the first phase. So it’s a full assessment of the existing infrastructure, the condition that it’s in, where it exists, because there are some unknowns. We inherited pretty good mapping from the military but it’s incomplete. So we need to understand where everything is, the condition it’s in. And then the next phase would be working on the design for the modern appropriate replacement of that infrastructure.”
The study is expected to take about two years to complete. Preliminary estimates, based on current construction costs, anticipates replacing the infrastructure will cost about $30 million.
