The towns of Hunter and Windham have been awarded $50,000 each in state funding for engineering studies to address problems with their wastewater systems and help them pursue grants for construction.
The awards are part of an $80 million package Gov. Kathy Hochul announced last week to improve resilience to extreme weather. The grants will fund engineering plans that Hochul’s office said can help the towns “access additional funding for construction.”
Hunter’s grant will fund a study of the town’s proposed conversion of the Hunter Highlands Wastewater Treatment Plant into a pump station, Supervisor Sean Mahoney said. Windham’s study will identify where groundwater enters its sewer system, helping officials determine what repairs are needed.
The Hunter Highlands plant on Ski Bowl Road was built in the 1970s to serve residential developments, including the Hunter Highlands and Trailside condominiums, Mahoney said. Its former operator, Highlands Pollution Control Corp., abandoned the privately owned plant amid regulatory and discharge violations documented by agencies including the state Department of Environmental Conservation and the New York City Department of Environmental Protection.
The town filed a legal complaint against the company in 2025, seeking possession of the facility and contending that its abandonment posed risks to public health, the environment, and New York City’s drinking water supply.
Since the town took over the facility last year, Saratoga County firm Cedarwood Engineering Services has overseen its maintenance and operation.
“It’s been in really, incredibly rough shape,” Mahoney said. “There’s an incredible amount of testing and maintenance that needs to be done to that plant.”
The study will help the town determine how to convert the facility into a pump station that would send wastewater to the village of Hunter’s treatment plant off state Route 23A, Mahoney said.
“Now we can get going on this engineering study that we can then submit to the state agencies and the city of New York to hopefully put together a robust plan to convert this thing,” he said.
Mahoney said the conversion would be more efficient and financially responsible than continuing to operate the treatment plant.
“It’s like keeping a very old car running,” he said. “It’s not efficient in any way.”
Windham’s grant will fund an engineering study to identify where groundwater enters the collection system serving the town’s wastewater treatment plant on South Street, Supervisor Tom Hoyt said.
“We’ll do an RFP (request for proposal) for professional services to have someone study to find out where this water is getting into our system, that we have to treat at the wastewater plant,” he said. “It costs money to treat rain water, so if you can eliminate the source, you’re further ahead.”
Hoyt said groundwater enters the collection system during rainstorms. Problems are infrequent, he said, though the plant was affected by flooding in July, when nearly 10 inches of rain fell on parts of Greene County.
Town officials hope to use temporary cameras or flow meters within the collection system to pinpoint where the water gets in.
“Once we get that, we can make the repair and go from there,” Hoyt said.
The Windham facility was built in 2005, but parts of its collection system connect to older pipes on private property, he said.
“It has to do with the laterals,” Hoyt said. “They go far off the right-of-way into a homeowner’s land, because when we built the system, we tied into piping they may have had on their property that may be aged.”
Hochul’s office said modernizing wastewater facilities can help them withstand future extreme weather.
Wastewater infrastructure is particularly vulnerable to storms and flooding, said Christine Kirchhoff, a researcher and associate professor at Penn State University who specializes in water governance, planning, and management.
“Wastewater systems tend to be in low-lying areas, because we like to use gravity to do the work for us,” Kirchhoff said. “They tend to be near rivers, or where they’re discharging the treated wastewater to. When those rivers rise or you get heavy storms, you’ve got both the plant facility itself, but also the manholes, pump stations, and the pipes can be exposed as well.”
Flood protection can be as simple as changing a manhole or as complicated as moving an entire system to higher ground, Kirchhoff said. In other cases, parts of a system can be redesigned.
“Sometimes it’s redesigning the system so that the pumps could be submerged, so that if it does flood, it’s not going to damage the pumps themselves,” she said.
Kirchhoff said her research on wastewater systems in Connecticut found that operators often acted in response to damage or disruptions, rather than expressly to prepare for climate change.
“There weren’t a lot of systems that were doing things expressly because of climate change,” she said. “They would do it because they’ve been hit by storms or extended power outages, or they lost access to a plant because a nearby road flooded, or maybe even their chemical deliveries were disrupted.”
Kirchhoff said she hoped environmental concerns would play a greater role in wastewater infrastructure development.
“We haven’t been investing in the ways that we really need to,” she said. “If we start to see these repeated impacts just tearing infrastructure apart, it’s going to have huge impacts for our communities.”
Connor Greco is a staff reporter for The Overlook covering Windham, Hunter, and surrounding Greene County communities. Send correspondence to connor@theoverlooknews.com.
