The city is advocating a less aggressive approach to reducing nitrogen pollution in Jamaica Bay when compared with similar efforts to safeguard other city waterways, advocates charged last week.
The city Department of Environmental Protection recently proposed a cheaper method for reducing harmful nitrogen discharges into the bay from four city wastewater treatment plants.
But advocates say the proposed method - known as carbon addition - is a delaying tactic against state regulators.
"They're taking a different approach, a slower approach and a cheaper approach," said Brad Sewell, a senior attorney for the National Resources Defense Council.
Jamaica Bay "is not being afforded, by anyone's measure, equal treatment" with other city waterways, said Sewell, who is co-chairman of the Jamaica Bay Advisory Committee.
"Nitrogen pollution reduction is absolutely necessary for the bay to be healthy and for the marshes to survive," he said.
The committee released a study in August predicting the bay's marsh islands could totally disappear by 2012 - twice as fast as originally forecast.
Sewell and other environmental advocates noted that the state courts have compelled the DEP to retrofit four sewage treatment plants along the East River and western Long Island Sound with more stringent nitrogen-reducing technology.
Advocates wonder why the city stopped short of proposing the same approach for Jamaica Bay.
Talks are underway between the DEP and the state Department of Environmental Conservation on the subject of nitrogen reduction in the bay. A DEC spokesman said it was too soon to discuss the details of the talks or say when the talks would conclude.
And a DEP spokeswoman redirected questions to the DEC - and refused to say how much nitrogen the four plants currently discharge into Jamaica Bay.
Dan Mundy, a member of the environmental advocacy group Ecowatchers, said the city had promised in the past to retrofit new technology when it became available. But now that it's here, the city agency is balking, he said.
"It's a matter right now of putting dollars over the environment," Mundy said.
DEC spokesman Yancey Roy said the city's most recent report to the state agency, submitted in the summer, was for a total of 39,900 pounds of nitrogen per day. DEP officials testified at a September City Council hearing that they are shooting to reduce the total output to roughly 27,000 pounds a day.
But an engineer hired by the Jamaica Bay Advisory Committee questioned how such a reduction would be possible through carbon addition alone.
"It's not clear how they can get that," Sewell said.
City Councilman James Gennaro (D-Fresh Meadows), who heads the Council's Environmental Protection Committee, said the state must hold DEP accountable.
"We need the state to make sure that DEP does as much as possible to reduce nitrogen in the bay," Gennaro said.
