NOTE: There was a big mistake in the original headline of this post about the amount of property taxes that would be generated over 10 years. The correct number is $4.3 million, not the significantly higher number previously quoted.
Batavia Towne Center, in the four years since the first stores
Associate Professor Stephen Shaw Photo from SUNY Environmental Science and Forestry website
With so much talk about global warming and climate change, that would seem to be the likely culprit for drought so extreme it has dried up dozens of wells in pockets of Genesee County.
However, Stephen Shaw, associate professor for environmental resources engineering at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, says it might be much more random than that.
Shaw has just completed a 20-year analysis and a report about dry wells across the entire northeast. He found that a drought in 2016 was “pretty intense,” especially across Western New York and Buffalo in particular. That didn’t match what these towns — the volume of households — in Genesee County have experienced, he said.
Asserting rights over the Iroquois National Wildlife Refuge, the Tonawanda Seneca Nation has filed a lawsuit against the federal government in U.S. District Court over the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s approval of a right of way for an industrial wastewater pipeline through the Iroquois National Wildlife Refuge.
The lawsuit asserts that the Nation has standing to sue because the refuge is historically and culturally interrelated with the Nation's ancestral territory, even though it is outside the boundaries of the Tonawanda Indian Reservation.