BY ADAM ATKINSONNorth Country This Week

POTSDAM — A local river advocacy group is calling for both village and town to adopt a resolution which would provide more legal recourse to handle environmental issues dealing with the Raquette River.

Some members of the Talking Rivers group, along with local community activists speaking out for the law, say additional legal rights for the Raquette could come in handy in the face of proposed construction of artificial intelligence data centers, data mining operations and nuclear plants across the country. Several such developments are being proposed in the North Country. 

All such centers use copious amounts of water for cooling operations and the local advocates suggest establishing a legal base to prevent local rivers and water from being taken and used for those operations by outside corporate interests.

Members of the effort have been speaking to promote the resolution at local government meetings for the last few months.

The village board of trustees at their meeting March 23 heard a presentation on the Rights of the Raquette resolution from former town board member Lynn Hall (member of the Potsdam Climate Smart Communities Task Force), along with Blake Lavia and Tzintzun Aguilar-Izzo of the Talking Rivers group.  

Several other people also spoke in favor of the village adopting the resolution at the village meeting following the presentation.

During the presentation, Hall said the resolution was being proposed to heighten “awareness about the river and what's happening to the river with climate change, with climate migrants, people who come in here for the water to increase consumption, and AI, which is calling very quickly for more and more cooling centers.”

“And because we have so much water here, I've been very concerned and others have been very concerned about how to protect our water so that we can still have it, and so that non-humans, you know, beings that live in the watershed, can also thrive,” Hall said.

She said that municipal governments in rural communities are often caught “unawares” by corporations which seek to relocate near fresh sources so they can utilize them in production situations.

“And municipalities have no information or have very little information about the impact. They only hear ‘lots of jobs,’ which is important, no doubt. But I worry about the quality of our life and the rural area that we live in,” she said.

Hall said the resolution proposed securing rights for the river would allow for a higher level of environmental protection as statewide and federal protections are minimized.

“We do acknowledge that bringing forward this law, there are already state and federal agencies who have been working for decades and have been doing a really good job objectively. But as they mentioned, of course, unfortunately these agencies have been losing money and they're understaffed,” said Lavia.

Lavia said if the resolution was established as a law that local governments would be able to establish a committee to mitigate any conflicts or handle enforcement of the river rights.  

Aguilar-Izzo said the proposed resolution would establish three key things to protect the river.

“The first one, it gives every person the fundamental right to clean water. It also establishes something that has not been done in many places around the world. It's not, but not in many places, that the Raquette River and the watershed possesses the right to exist, regenerate, flourish, evolve, adapt and thrive. And then this would also create the Raquette River Watershed Protection Committee and this would be comprised of residents of the watershed and it would ensure awareness and promote education and understanding,” Aguilar-Izzo said.

Village Mayor Alexandra Jacobs Wilke said she would like to collaborate with the town and through the joint Climate Smart task force to look more closely at the proposed law.

“Knowing that the town is looking at this and has their planning and zoning boards also reviewing, and that we work so well and collaboratively together through the Climate Smart Communities Task Force, I would be interested to perhaps collaborate in how we approach this proposal and look at the law,” the mayor said. “I think we all agree on protecting our river. I think everyone agrees with that concept.”

“But getting into nitty-gritty of what it might mean and how, how would that work in practice as we move forward, especially since it sounds like we would be at the forefront of this type of movement and anticipating unanticipated legal concerns that we just have to think through to be good steward of our fiscal resources here in the village, I'd be interested in having either a subset of that Climate Smart task force or we can discuss perhaps a different ad hoc committee, which I think naturally should include members of the village staff to review this proposal and look at it more in depth,” Wilke said.

The mayor said in addition that any changes to the village code would also go through the village planning and zoning boards for review as well.

Numerous members of the public also spoke in favor of the law.

“I've seen this law grow over the past few years and what I love about what I see now,” said Clarkson graduate student Elle Belby. “It allows for the river to establish standing in court. Oftentimes we're not able to . .  . establish standing and not able to be brought to court because injury is very difficult to prove.”

“By all the people that have showed up here today, I think it's obvious that the river and the nature that we have here is incredibly important to everyone in this town. And so because of that, I think it's important to move forward with this,” she said.

“I support the rights of the river law, because my perspective is that I am a native of the state of Colorado and I grew up there and the water problems in the West are very great,” said St. Lawrence University physics professor Eileen O’Donnahue. “As an undergraduate I lived on the west slope of the Colorado Rockies, where it borders on the high desert of Utah. And one of the problems that they have in the West is that no rivers flow into Colorado, they all flow out.”

“The people at the top of the watershed can't come to an agreement with the people at the bottom of the watershed in Arizona and California, where they depend on the Colorado River and when the moisture varies, the state of Colorado, they can't get any more, but the downstream people have demands. This is what we have to prevent by protecting our river,” she said.

“Now there are people in this country who look to places like Potsdam, NY and say nobody lives there. We can take their water. Our water is precious,” O’Donnahue said.

“We have a magnificent opportunity to allow this river its rights in this structure in order that it will have a chance to regenerate, to be able to handle (usage), and for us to be the stewards. There is no other community on this river that hasn't done it yet and I would be honored and very proud that we give the right, the first voice to the river,” Gary Parker of Canton said.

Several others also spoke in favor of the village adopting the resolution. 

To read a copy of the resolution the group has crafted for the town of Potsdam, visit https://content.app-sources.com/s/36543528885092948/uploads/Images/Rights_of_Raquette_RESOLUTION-8530825.jpg .

To read more about Talking Rivers and the resolution proposed visit https://talkingrivers.org/raquetteriver .

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