In 1997, ninety stakeholders including New York Governor George Pataki, New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Regional Administrator Jeanne Fox, five New York State and New York City agency commissioners, the executives of six upstate counties and supervisors of seventy five upstate towns joined leaders of New York State’s environmental community to sign the historic 1,800 page New York City Watershed Agreement.

That agreement obligated the city to spend $1.5 billion purchasing buffer lands and rebuilding environmental infrastructure in its upstate watersheds. In turn, EPA agreed to wave a catastrophically expensive order requiring the city to filter its water and the watershed communities agreed to allow the city to regulate pollution and development in its 2,000 square mile reservoir watersheds. The agreement had taken two years of blistering negotiations among stakeholders. I was chief negotiator for the environmental parties and water consumers.

For environmentalists there was no provision of the Watershed Agreement more important than the state’s agreement to seek funding to create a state-of-the-art "enhanced monitoring program" that would identify the sources of pollution in the watershed and determine whether the agreement was actually protecting the reservoirs and tributaries from deterioration. The parties intended the program to serve as an "early warning system" allowing us to spot weaknesses in the city’s regulatory and enforcement structure long before irreparable injury effected to the system.

Congress provided the funding for our program — up to $15 million per year — in a special amendment to the Safe Drinking Water Act. Soon after signing the agreement, we began a national search to find a scientific consultant who could design and execute a stream sampling program that would meet our ambitious objectives.

All roads lead to Stroud. I had known about Stroud Water Research Center for about thirty years. As a young man, I had an intense interest in streams and fishes and had visited the center in 1969 when I was still in my teens and curious to see the famous laboratory where the stream flowed indoors.

Today, Stroud Water Research Center is known to stream specialists around the globe as the world leader in stream research and waterway restoration. During the 1980’s and 1990’s, Stroud revolutionized the study of stream ecosystems. Stroud gave the world its first definitive description of the complex interactions of stream ecology from bacteria to fish to humans. It was Stroud researchers who helped establish the correlation between species diversity and stream health, the critical importance of small headwaters to riverine ecosystems, the role of leaf litter in fostering and preserving health, biological diversity and basic function of stream chemistry and the dynamic spiral of oxygen, carbon and nutrient cycling. Among its many extraordinary accomplishments, Stroud was the first to document the critical importance of forested buffers to water quality and ecosystem health. These lessons are now regarded as the fundamental gospels of modern stream research. It is rare that a single institution plays such a central role in changing the paradigmfor an entire scientific discipline. But Stroud has been at the forefront of the most groundbreaking and critical stream research over the past three decades and many of these discoveries now provide the basic assumption of stream research. Its long list of accomplishments has made Stroud the Woods Hole of the freshwater ecosystems. Stroud is currently designing an enhanced monitoring program for the New York City watershed. I feel confident that the city’s water supply couldn’t be in better hands.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
President, Water Keeper Alliance