New York Grows Thirsty For Municipal Water Jobs

October 16, 2018

New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) is in need of more employees, and fast. Currently, over 700 jobs remain unfilled in the DEP, a number that vastly outstrips employee need in other municipal departments.

The DEP is a city agency of nearly 6,000 employees that manages and conserves the city’s water supply. It is also responsible for regulating air quality, hazardous waste, and critical quality of life issues, including noise, says nycservice.org. Recently, New York City reservoir leaks and rainwater flooding have complicated the Department’s water conservation and protection efforts, according to the DEP Press Office.

In 2018, 441 still-vacant DEP job openings were posted on NYC.gov. The Engineering, Architecture, and Planning Division makes up over half of the recent listings, indicating a need for skilled workers in the City’s upcoming sewage projects. 98% of these openings are full-time and salaried, with an average annual pay of $91,000.

Runoff from cloudbursts, a type of heavy rainfall that will become more common as climate change continues, poses a serious risk to sewer systems, a city official said in a New York Times interview. Southeastern Queens is especially vulnerable to flooding because it sits at a lower elevation without adequate sewer infrastructure.

 “The obvious thing is, why don’t you build bigger sewers,” Vincent Sapienza, the commissioner of New York’s Department of Environmental Protection, said in the interview. “One is, they cost a fabulous amount of money to do, and two, on many residential streets, there’s no room for bigger sewers.” Sapienza has decided instead to dig deeper in underground reservoirs, expanding the sewer system from below. The city is allotting $1.9 billion to sewer restructuring in Queens alone, correlating with the recent influx of high-paid, full-time DEP openings.

Rainwater is one of the problems plaguing the city’s sewage and water systems; New York reservoir repair is another. Most of New York’s municipal water system comes from the unfiltered Catskill-Delaware watershed, requiring excessive monitoring to protect from contaminants. By 2020, the DEP Reports, large repairs of a Catskill-Delaware aqueduct will be underway, in an effort to stem a leakage of 35 million gallons of water per day.

Conservation of city drinking water, optimization of other water supplies in the Catskill-Delaware system, and reactivation of the Queens groundwater system are all required before starting the repair. Workers, especially skilled engineers, are needed to complete these projects in the next three years to prepare for aqueduct shutdown.

The Department of Environmental Protection is working hard on these long-term projects, but the shortage of workers places stress on current DEP employees. Their expertise is in high demand, resulting in long workdays and frequent overtime hours.

Of the ten largest city-overtime recipients, five work in the Department of Environmental Protection. “New York’s sewers run 24 hours a day with more than 1 billion gallons of wastewater and these engineers protect public health by ensuring it all flows in the right direction,” DEP spokesman Ted Timbers said. In 2018, the DEP has already hired 31 senior engineers and is searching for more.

Manpower for the sewer and watershed systems has been in high demand for the last two years, as reflected in NYC’s overtime payments. The city has paid $1.89 million for more than 33 million DEP overtime hours in 2018, compared to $1.96 million and 33.8 million in 2017. “Overtime is occasionally necessary to deal with unplanned events or to handle urgent operational needs,” said Raul Contreras, a spokesman for Mayor Bill de Blasio. However, the overtime spending “is significantly outpacing the city’s budgeting for the expense”, calling for  more workers in the DEP and less overtime pay from the city.

The Department of Environmental Protection makes up a large portion of New York City’s 3,500 municipal job openings. The watershed and sewage projects are long-term and require hundreds of new employees to complete, an addition that would help the city’s budget and the quality of life of its current workers. While New York is making changes to maintain the city’s water supply, city data shows the need for new skilled workers to complete these initiatives.

“The city’s water system could well be its single most important capital asset — or at least on par with the subway system,” said Eric A. Goldstein, a senior lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a New York Times interview. “Imagine living without clean running water in New York City for even a single day. Life as we know it would grind to a halt.”