New York City’s management of the reservoirs that supply drinking water to nine million people in the city and nearby counties has been praised for assuring quality and avoiding the need for filtration. Still, it has been criticized for contributing to flooding and pollution problems upstate.

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

On Wednesday, environmental regulators from the city and the state announced that they had negotiated an accord that they hope will alleviate some of those problems while keeping up the quality of the city’s water, which many drink straight from the tap.

The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and the New York City Department of Environmental Protection said that the accord, in the form of a draft consent order, would mitigate the environmental consequences of operations of the city’s water supply system in the Catskills. Among the contentious issues are ridding the city’s Ashokan Reservoir of pollutants stirred up by rainfall by regularly discharging muddy water into the Lower Esopus Creek in Ulster County.

The draft order requires the city to conduct a review of the environmental impacts of its water management on the Lower Esopus and consider different options. It also requires that the city come up with two turbidity reduction projects on the waterway by the end of this year and to commit $750,000 to finance them.



But the draft agreement, on which public comments will be received through July 2, has done little to appease critics. Among them is the Ulster County executive, Michael P. Hein. He called the financial terms of the draft order, which calls for the city to pay another $950,000 to finance environmental projects like stocking the Lower Esopus with fish, “woefully inadequate” for the damage that is being done to stream banks, public beaches and properties from the muddy releases.

More important, he said, the agreement does nothing to stop the discharges when it rains. “There’s no relief in sight in the near term,” Mr. Hein said. “There’s been no good-faith effort to make things right.”

State officials say the environmental review will help them draft a better and more permanent solution to the discharges.

The dispute will get a public airing on June 19 at the State University of New York at New Paltz. Comments can be submitted until July 2 to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation by e-mail (ashokan@gw.dec.state.ny.us) or by writing to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, Diivision of Water, Bureau of Water Resource Management, 625 Broadway, Albany, N.Y. 12233.