New Haven Independent

The RWA already protects 26,000 acres in the Greater New Haven watershed, which is one-third of all the watershed land. Now it hopes to buy 30 more parcels in 13 towns (but not New Haven), comprising 3,000 acres, over the next decade. Filtering the water through forested land is the cheapest, safest way to purify it.

“A study done a couple of years ago by the Trust for Public Land surveyed 27 water utilities and concluded that treatment costs decreased as forest cover in the watersheds increased,” Hudak said.

The authority budgets about $3 million a year to buy land. It hopes to buy 3,000 acres of the 50,000 acres in the watershed currently in private hands through a combination of outright purchase and conservation easement partnerships with current owners.

The authority also plans to sell 900 acres it owns that are outside the watershed, and therefore not useful for filtering the water used by its 400,000 customers. It can only do so under strict requirements, but the sale would generate funds to reduce the overall cost of acquiring the new acreage.

President and CEO David Silverstone (pictured) said the authority just spent $50 million building the Whitney water treatment plant at the Hamden-New Haven line. That stirred rumors about how committed the agency is to acquiring more land. Click here to listen.

Silverstone said all the variables at this point make it hard to predict how much money would be generated by the sale of acreage, or how much it would cost to buy the additional land.