Mid Hudson Times Aug. 22 2018

T IMES MID HUDSON Vol. 30, No. 34 3 AUGUST 22 - 28, 2018 3 ONE DOLLAR Native American celebration Page 12 SERVING NEWBURGH AND NEW WINDSOR City’s legal fund grows to $800,000 for PFOS battle By KATELYN CORDERO [email protected] The City of Newburgh budget took a hit from the potential litigation fees covering the PFOS lawsuit. Comptroller Katie Mack says the city is using money that was saved over the past two years to cover the litigation fees. Nearly $800,000 was moved from the city’s overall budget to cover potential litigation costs. The money comes from two separate areas of the budget according to city comptroller Katie Mack. Nearly $130,000 came from savings in the employee salary and benefits budget. The rest is coming from the water fund. According to Mack this is money that has been saved from 2016 to 2017. The $700,000 is in addition to $100,000 put into litigation cost in February of 2018. Overall the money put aside for litigation comes to about $900,000 for the 2018 budget. According to Councilman Jonathan Jacobson the city anticipates getting all the cost associated with the litigation to come back after a positive verdict is reached. The lawsuit comes just before the city is forced to temporarily switch its water source from the Catskill Aqueduct to Brown’s Pond. The Catskill Aqueduct will be under maintenance for 10 weeks this fall. Brown’s Pond is the emergency water source for the city of Newburgh and the Town of New Windsor. The Pond cannot support the two regions with enough water for the 10 week maintenance. According to the Operations Engineer of New Windsor, John Egitto, New Windsor does not anticipate using the emergency source with the new wells nearly ready to provide clean drinking water to the town. In case the wells are not finished in time the town has an interconnect with the Town of Newburgh groundwater treatment plant, which can produce water at a small rate. Rapper’s plane makes emergency landing Brian Wolfe A private jet carrying rapper Post Malone landed safely at New York Stewart Airport, Tuesday, after circling the greater New York City area for nearly four hours after blowing out two tires during takeoff on Tuesday. The jet carrying 16 people took off from Teterboro Airport, located just outside New York City, just before 11 a.m. when the pilot reported experiencing trouble. It was headed to London, one day after the rapper received an MTV Music Award for song of the year. Instead, the Gulfstream jet landed safely at Stewart after burning off 3,700 gallons of fuel. WWW.MIDHUDSONTIMES.COM