A Real Estate Battle Tests the State’s New Superfund Powers

The Amawalk Reservoir, which provides drinking water to three northern Westchester County towns and New York City, looks like a tranquil spot, covered in a blanket of snow in midwinter with Canada geese flying in formation overhead. But the Amawalk has become the center of a battle over who pays for environmental cleanups in the state.

Will New York taxpayers be on the hook, or will it be a development company the state has deemed responsible for paying the bill?

The developer, Suelain Realty, hopes to build 23 single-family homes on a parcel bordering the reservoir that was recently cleaned up through the state Superfund program, which identifies contamination and conducts remediation.

Critics of the project fear that runoff from the Granite Pointe subdivision in the town of Somers will worsen the water quality of the Westchester reservoir, which is already contaminated by PFAS “forever chemicals.”

That’s not their only concern. They also want the developer to pay for the cleanup of the site. If the company is required to do so, some hope, the project will become cost-prohibitive, blocking it from happening.

A 2025 reauthorization of the state Superfund law makes it easier to recoup money from property owners or polluters. The state has identified Suelain as the party responsible for the $18 million cleanup, but it has yet to seek payment from the company.

“There have been no concrete decisions made regarding cost recovery at this site,” said a spokesman for the state Department of Environmental Conservation, or DEC.

Sarah Wilson, of Yorktown, who is among the 95,000 Westchester residents whose public water comes from the Amawalk, recently spoke at a meeting of the Yorktown Town Board, asking officials to get involved.

“The owners need to pay,” Wilson said. “It’s not that complicated.”

Walter Hang, president of the Environmental Health Research Group and a longtime statewide advocate for toxic waste cleanup, agreed. “What are they waiting for?” he asked. “This is a classic example of how they just don’t rigorously enforce the law, even when the stakes could not be higher.”

State Senator Pete Harckham, a Democrat whose district includes the proposed Granite Pointe project, said it’s time for the state to use its new powers. Harckham and Assemblymember Matt Slater, a Republican whose district also includes the site, have both expressed eagerness to see the state recoup funding for the first time since last year’s Superfund reauthorization.

“I know this will be an effective tool in protecting the environment and ensuring that taxpayers are not required to cover the costs for damage that has been created,” Harckham, who chairs the Senate Committee on Environmental Conservation, said in a statement.

Suelain owner John Harkins said his company should not be held responsible because he was unaware that the site was contaminated when his company took title to the property in 1991. His attorney, Kristen Wilson, wants the state to take that into consideration as it decides whether to seek $18 million from the developer.

“Though we are in the line of title, we weren’t the polluter,” she said in December. “There’s some hope on our end that there needs to be some kind of economic benefit to my client at the end of the day.”

“Not having anything to show for it would be patently unjust.”

Suelain Realty has sought land use approvals at Granite Pointe, a promontory surrounded on three sides by the reservoir, for 35 years. The company’s plans were put on hold for two decades after citizen activists pressed for soil tests upon learning that a recreational gun range had operated at the site from 1938 to 1968.

The tests found extensive contamination from the range’s lead bullets. The discovery led to a tangled 20-year process that resulted in the Superfund cleanup, which was completed in 2024.

Though remediation is complete, the state has yet to file its final report, and the developer still has to satisfy conditions laid out by the Somers Planning Board. That includes approval from the New York City Department of Environmental Protection for the project’s system to control stormwater runoff into the drinking water supply. The city granted such approval in the 1990s, but revoked it after discovering the lead contamination, said city DEP spokesperson John Milgrim.

The new Superfund amendments allow the state attorney general to file an environmental lien on the property to secure payment. Such a lien would have to be satisfied if the land were to be sold.

Local residents have had little luck convincing the Somers Planning Board to reject the project, which has granted Suelain Realty 34 three-month extensions for its application over the past decade.

Residents hired a lawyer to sue the town in 2015 to challenge the subdivision’s environmental review, arguing that the town planning board had failed to address the proposed development’s impact on the reservoir. But a state court judge ruled that the citizens lacked standing to sue the town.

The Amawalk’s levels of PFAS — a class of forever chemicals that have contaminated water supplies across New York and the nation — exceed the federal drinking water standard but are still under the acceptable limit for the state of New York.

Northern Westchester’s water agency reported in its 2024 water quality report that the Amawalk water had 4.6 parts per trillion of PFOA, a common PFAS chemical. The federal limit for PFAS in drinking water is four parts per trillion. The state limit is 10 parts per trillion.

Salinity levels in the Amawalk are also of concern, according to a recent study from the New York City DEP. Westchester Joint Water Works officials are troubled that the Amawalk may be too salty for drinking water by 2050, according to minutes of its July 2025 meeting.

Last year, the northern Westchester water system received a $1.5 million settlement from a lawsuit seeking damages from chemical companies for PFAS contamination in the Amawalk. The agency said the contamination was caused by firefighting foam used by the Lake Mohegan Fire Department and the Katonah Fire Department in the 1970s.

The public water system has until 2029 to either install costly carbon filters on its treatment plant in Somers or find a new source of water. Studies are underway for a six-mile-long pipeline along Route 202 from the New York system’s Delaware Aqueduct, which runs through central Westchester, said Matthew Geho, the water system’s operations director.

Meanwhile, local activists said, the Suelain project threatens to make the water worse with stormwater runoff from the subdivision, with various chemicals from roads and expansive lawns draining into the reservoir.

Somers resident Fred Higham, who became involved in the issue in 2024, said it’s imperative for the town to stop granting extensions on the planning board approval, which is subject to conditions that have yet to be fulfilled. He said the site should remain undeveloped to protect the drinking water supply.

He said he has held six meetings with Town Supervisor Robert Scorrano, but has yet to convince Scorrano to take a stand against Granite Pointe.

“The idea of building 23 one-acre luxury homes on 28 acres, surrounded on three sides by the Amawalk Reservoir, has always been an ill-conceived and irresponsible idea,” Higham said.

Scorrano referred questions on Granite Pointe to the town’s director of planning, who declined to respond to questions.

Since 2003, the state has spent $1.9 billion from its Superfund to clean up contaminated sites around the state. The state reauthorized the program in the 2025 state budget, with $1.25 billion pledged over the next decade. The state will borrow the money in the municipal bond market.

If the state moves forward to collect $18 million from Suelain, it would be the state’s most substantial recovery to date.

The state has three recovery cases pending in federal court, said Sophie Hamlin, a spokesperson for the state attorney general’s office. The largest amount in those cases — $5.4 million — is being sought from a former Nassau County dry cleaning company whose solvent contaminated local groundwater.

Under state law, a landowner can be considered a responsible party for cleanup costs, even if they did not create the environmental harm. A DEC spokesperson said Suelain Realty was deemed the responsible party in 2016, after the state ousted the company from the state’s Brownfield Cleanup Program because it failed to meet program deadlines.

If Suelain had completed that program, it would have been given tax credits that could have paid for 50 percent of the remediation and 14 percent of the cost of building the homes. In 2015, the developer said he planned to build 3,000-square-foot homes that would sell for $1 million each.

The DEC in recent months has provided conflicting statements on whether it plans to recover the $18 million spent on the cleanup. On December 5, in a written statement, the agency said it “will pursue recovery of its costs from responsible parties” at Granite Pointe. At the time, the DEC said it was in discussions with the office of Attorney General Letitia James on commencing an action.

Yet a month later, when contacted again, a DEC spokesperson said it had yet to decide if it would move forward to recover the cost of the cleanup.

George Klein, vice chair of the Sierra Club’s Lower Hudson Group, said it was time for the state to take action.

“The state should move as quickly as possible to collect this money so the state and taxpayers are not left holding the bag for the remediation costs,” he said.

Meanwhile, some environmentalists say the area is more polluted than previously known. Hang’s review of a January 2023 report by the engineering firm Arcadis, which oversaw the Superfund cleanup, found contamination in the soil outside of the cleanup zone. The study said that PFAS levels exceeded the state’s unrestricted use soil standards, and groundwater on the eastern edge of the site — next to the reservoir — contained lead, chromium, and pesticides above state limits.

The DEC said there’s no evidence that the remaining contamination at Granite Pointe is harmful.

“DEC has no information to suggest that known contamination is threatening public health or the environment at this point in time,” the spokesperson said.

Hang, however, thinks a new inquiry is needed.

“It doesn’t appear they investigated the reservoir as a whole to understand the full scope of the contamination problem,” he said. “The highest concentrations were near the shore of the reservoir. You can’t leave pollution next to the drinking water.”