DAN QUAGLIANA
Managing Editor
Fredonia’s contaminated water under a microscope.
Photo by DAKOTA RICHTER | Special to The Leader
On Sunday, Feb. 3, the Village of Fredonia and the Town of Pomfret announced that they were implementing another boil water order.
Yes, that says “another.” It’s the fifth one in the last 24 months, according to the Dunkirk Observer.
At the time, the village claimed on their Facebook page that the boil water order was caused by “a blown pipe at the current water treatment plant.” Another Facebook post also said that “there [was] a disruption in disinfection treatment.”
The order was lifted on Feb. 8, more than four whole days after it was first implemented. For more than four days, residents in the affected areas were told to bring all of their water to a rolling boil for one minute before they used it. This includes water used not only for drinking but also for brushing your teeth, washing your dishes and basically everything else that water is used for.
The village clarified that the water was still safe for bathing and washing clothes, providing that no water was consumed.
If this was the only time this has happened, no one would care. But five times in the last two years is completely unheard of — not to mention bewildering.
I live in the town of Amherst, New York, in Erie County. As long as I’ve lived there, the town has never had a boil water notice. Every single person that I’ve talked to on campus who doesn’t live in the area has never had to boil their water. Not even once.
And Fredonia has gone through this five times in the last two years.
The current mayor, Democrat Michael Ferguson, made fixing the village’s water a centerpiece of his successful 2023 campaign. And to his credit, he has certainly tried.
Last December, the village board of trustees voted 3-1 to approve the LaBella engineering firm to do a State Environmental Quality Review (SEQR) on the village’s water system, which “is supposed to cover all available options for future projects,” according to the Dunkirk Observer.
The alternatives for supplying water to the village include “improving the village water treatment plant, decommissioning the treatment plant, drawdown of the village reservoir, interconnection of the city of Dunkirk and/or interconnection with the North County Water District.” This review is itself an update of a 2023 study of the village’s water system by the same company.
According to the Observer, the one trustee who voted “no” on the SEQR, Michelle Twichell, says that she voted no because, “The resolution does not name a municipal entity as lead agency for the SEQR, there is no specified deadline for LaBella to complete the review, LaBella’s proposal for the SEQR lists specific concerns that won’t be included and the resolution does not specify a cost.”
“These [specific concerns] include details of the connections and their costs,” Twichell said. “An SEQR without including all details is not worth the paper it’s printed on.”
She also stated that the costs related to the SEQR wouldn’t “be necessary if we choose to maintain our own water system.”
Cost is something that has been particularly contentious regarding this study. Trustee Jon Esperson disagreed with Twichell, stating that this study is needed if the village wishes to fund future upgrades to the water treatment system.
In December 2023, the board of trustees voted to close Fredonia’s water treatment plant and start purchasing water from the City of Dunkirk, but residents of Fredonia by the name of Citizens Action Group for Saving Our Reservoir sued in order to stop that from happening.
“They believe fixing and maintaining the current Fredonia water treatment plant and reservoir is the best course of action,” said Buffalo TV station WGRZ. “They also claim that the resolution was passed in violation of New York State Environmental Conservation Law because a State Environmental Quality Review was not conducted.”
“The village water treatment plant is over 100 years old,” the court filing says. “As such, it is a historic building and resource of the village. [State Environmental Quality Review Act] considers the alteration and adverse consequences to a historic structure to be a significant adverse environmental consequence. Since the village intends to decommission the water treatment plant, without any consideration or information concerning what they will do with the water treatment plant, an Environmental Impact Statement would have to be drafted.”
On May 16, 2024, State Supreme Court Justice Grace Hanlon ruled in favor of Save Our Reservoir’s lawsuit.
This brings us back to the same debate the village government has been having with itself for years. Now that getting water from Dunkirk is off the table, their only option is to completely rehabilitate Fredonia’s water treatment plant.
According to village trustee Jon Esperson, “LaBella estimates the cost to retain the reservoir, spillway and water treatment plant to be $34,314,000. The cost to decommission the water treatment plant, drawdown [sic] the reservoir and build an interconnect with Dunkirk is estimated to be $26,035,000.”
And that’s something that Save Our Reservoir should know — two of its members, Kara Christina and Athanasia Landis, are a former village trustee and mayor, respectively. They are part of the reason that Fredonia’s water problem wasn’t fixed when they were in office, and they continue to be part of the problem now.
But the current treatment plant is an old and historic building, according to them, so we must continue to use it.
“I understand your frustration every time there is an order. We are also under the same order. We are not immune, we are also village residents,” said current village trustee Nicole Siracuse on Feb. 5. “So attacking board members with comments such as ‘poor excuse for a public servant’ and that we’re ‘brain dead,’ are unhelpful and unnecessary. If you think you can do better… There’s going to be two seats up for election this year — have at it. Getting involved is what makes a difference, not making comments on social media.”
Gotta love our current village government, too. While derogatory comments such as “brain dead” are completely unnecessary, the board clearly doesn’t like people complaining about their toxic water, so they ask residents to run for office to fix the problem themselves. Just like the Save Our Reservoir group, the current village board of trustees is apparently made up of people who, when they encounter the slightest setback, won’t lift a finger to go out of their way to help the people they’re supposed to be serving.
Yes, you had a plan a year ago. You were forced to stop it by a lawsuit.
So now you try something else. You keep trying something else until something works. Residents of Fredonia shouldn’t have to live with more than two boil water notices a year.
I’m a current senior at SUNY Fredonia. If someone had told me that this was a problem I would have to be facing just by living within the village boundaries, there’s a very real chance I might not have gone to college here. And I sure as hell wouldn’t ever choose to live here because of it.
Instead, I’ve been forced to suffer through years of former and current village officials blaming each other for a problem that they’re all allowing to happen.
We live next to a lake, for God’s sake. Stop arguing with each other, sit down and figure out how to fix this.
Last weekend, Mayor Ferguson called the village’s water and budget “our first priorities” on Facebook. I’ll believe it when I see it.