Coalition pushes river preservation

By Jason Whong, Staff Writer

Elmira Star-Gazette

Published 07/31/09

A new coalition of nonprofit organizations with interests in preserving the nation's largest estuary has set its sights on the Southern Tier.

Hillary Harp Falk, general manager of the Chesapeake Bay Coalition, was in Elmira on Thursday to talk to children in the Chemung County Youth Bureau's summer parks program, The Spot, after they picked up trash along the banks of the Chemung River.

The cleanup was organized with Friends of the Chemung River Watershed. She also met with Jim Pfiffer, executive director of the Friends, to talk to him about the coalition. The Chemung River, which begins in Painted Post at the confluence of the Tioga and Cohocton rivers, flows into the Susquehanna River in Athens. Farther south, in Havre de Grace, Md., the Susquehanna flows into the Chesapeake Bay.

Preserving the bay as a habitat has been a focus of more than 20 years of federal policy and interstate compacts. Even so, there hasn't been much progress in restoring the ecosystem. That's partly why Falk is interested in the Southern Tier, as well as communities in five other states and the District of Columbia.

"We're really starting to network all of the environmental groups in the six states to work on very specific federal policy goals," Falk said. Falk said she is meeting with watershed organizations to figure out what environmental issues are most important locally so the new coalition can better understand the people who live in the watershed. "I think this area has a lot of green space and has land use that has protected the waters up here," she said.

Pfiffer said the Friends would probably join the coalition and attend its annual meetings. "We'll sit and talk about what needs to be done," he said. "What should the regional and national policies be? How can we all work together on this?" A Web site for the coalition's first campaign, "Choose Clean Water" is available at choosecleanwater.org.