ALBANY — The Bill of Rights in the New York State Constitution protects a number of essential liberties. Freedom of worship? Check. The right to assemble? Check. Freedom to divorce? That, too. The right to play bingo and gamble on horses? You bet.
But environmental activists and some lawmakers say that one liberty that is conspicuously absent from the Constitution’s Bill of Rights is the right to a clean environment. Citing recent instances of contaminated water supplies and what they call an assault on the environment by the Trump administration, they are now determined to change that.
“I would think that people would put betting on horses and playing bingo on a par with a right to a healthful environment,” said Peter M. Iwanowicz, executive director of Environmental Advocates of New York, a nonprofit lobbying group based here.
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The State Senate, where the legislation has several Democratic sponsors, is pondering the bill. To amend the Constitution, the bill needs the support of both chambers in two successive Legislatures. If the legislation passes the Republican-controlled Senate, where its chances are far from certain, it would then have to be approved by the Legislature again in 2019 before being put to voters as a state referendum.
But while supporters embrace the bill’s sweeping language, critics, including the Business Council of New York State, argue that it is so broad that judges could have too much leeway and set environmental policy through their decisions. On Wednesday, the council issued a memo opposing the proposed amendment.
“It’s unneeded,” said Darren Suarez, the Business Council’s director of government affairs. He added that residents struggling with contamination of their drinking water supplies, as in Hoosick Falls, N.Y., “already have multiple means of legal recourse.”
Mr. Suarez was referring to a health emergency in Hoosick Falls, a village near the Vermont border where the public water supply was found to be tainted with high levels of perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA. A toxic chemical, it is linked in some studies to an increased risk for cancer, thyroid disease and serious complications during pregnancy.
Last year a federal class-action lawsuit was filed against Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics, the owner of a plant that the state said was the source of the PFOA contamination, and Honeywell International, a past owner of the plant.
Mr. Suarez and other business leaders fear that the provision would undermine economic development in the state by holding projects to an unreasonable — and unattainable — level of environmental stewardship. For example, he said, an activist judge could decide that allowable levels of contaminants under state and federal laws did not meet the hazy standard of a “healthful environment.”
“Then we start to go away from hard science and we head to a place where decisions aren’t made on the merits, but on feelings,” Mr. Suarez said.
Advocates for the environment and victims of contaminated water supplies disagree. At a news conference on Wednesday in which lawmakers and supporters of the legislation called for its passage, residents of Hoosick Falls shared their stories.
Silvia Potter, a counselor who has lived in Hoosick Falls for eight years, said she was afraid to use the water, which is now being filtered, for cooking or bathing, even though the state has deemed it safe. “I scrub my toilet and scrub my floor with the filtered water and that’s it,” she said. “I hope Hoosick Falls is a huge wake-up call.”
Several states, including Pennsylvania and Montana, already have similar environmental protections in their constitutions, which environmental groups have used with varying degrees of success to fight polluters and challenge state laws and regulations. In New York, the Constitution, under Article 14, already has language requiring the state to “conserve and protect its natural resources.”
The Delaware Riverkeeper, Maya K. van Rossum, told lawmakers at the news conference how her group and several municipalities had used the environmental clause in Pennsylvania’s Constitution to challenge a pro-fracking law that would have pre-empted local zoning and imposed a gag order on health professionals.
In 2013, Pennsylvania’s highest court rejected provisions of the law, citing Article 1, Section 27 of the Pennsylvania Constitution. Since its passage in a referendum in 1971, the article has guaranteed a “right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and aesthetic values of the environment.”
Ms. van Rossum said the fracking debate had helped revive the little-known provision. “In bringing that litigation,” she said, “not only did we successfully defeat that very devastating piece of legislation, but we breathed life into Article 1, Section 27, of Pennsylvania’s Constitution, which had been ignored for over 40 years.”
Despite the campaign to raise awareness about the proposed amendment in New York, it is unclear whether the Senate will vote on it this session. The legislation is sponsored in the Senate by David Carlucci, a member of the Independent Democratic Conference, a coalition of eight Democrats who have a power-sharing agreement with Republicans. The conference has taken credit for using its leverage to help pass left-leaning legislation.
Mr. Carlucci, whose district includes parts of Rockland and Westchester Counties, said the Constitution needed to be updated to reflect modern-day environmental problems and current politics.
“We are getting hints of what the E.P.A. budget is looking like,” he said, referring to the federal Environmental Protection Agency under President Trump. “We hear they want to cut it by 31 percent and decimate programs to clean up the Great Lakes and get PCBs out of the Hudson River. We have to be pre-emptive.”
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