Water is our most Precious Resource

Saturday, April 2, 2011

The Water Withdrawal Bill (A5318A)

We need to stop legislation that is barreling through the New York Assembly. The water withdrawal bill (A5318A) being considered in Albany will have a huge impact on your rights to our fresh water.

Call and e-mail our state leaders - TODAY! - and tell them to hold hearings on this bill to present the facts about what it will do to our precious fresh water rights in New York State.

Why is it so important that this bill be stopped? Because the proposed bill only requires permits for users of more than 100,000 gallons of water per day. Households use 300 gallons per day, max. But small haulers servicing the fracking industry could use this loophole to extract tens of thousands of gallons from area streams and lakes each and every day without so much as a permit!

In conflicts over rights to water usage, permit holders will have priority water rights over other users, those of us who use far less than 100,000 gallons of water per day!

Speaker Sheldon Silver is well aware of the dangers of fracking and the contamination to our clean drinking water it will cause. But he needs to hear from you that the water withdrawal bill moving through the Assembly is a giveaway of our fresh water rights to the fracking industry.

Call Speaker Sheldon Silver's office at 518-455-3791, or go to his website HERE <http://assembly.state.ny.us/mem/?ad=064&amp%3Bsh=contact> to send him an e-mail.
Call your local representative.
Call bill's sponsor, Assemblyman Robert Sweeney at 631-957-2087.

Call the governor's office at (518) 474-8390 or send a message on his website HERE <http://www.governor.ny.gov/contact/GovernorContactForm.php> . Ask him not to give away our water rights to the gas and water bottling industries. Say we need his leadership on this critical issue.

Tell our state leaders to stop this bill from becoming law. Tell them to hold a hearing to consider all the facts before our precious rights and clean water become a thing of the past.

Please disseminate this to your members and affiliated groups. Thanks,

The Coalition to Protect New York

www.coalitiontoprotectnewyork.org/ <http://www.coalitiontoprotectnewyork.org/>

Thank you, Tom Noonan

PS: The email and website addresses are altered when Facebook forwards them - use the original Facebook email please.