Elizabethtown is planning a new municipal sewer system— and that’s become a juggle for the small town that hosts Essex County’s main office building, a regional hospital and the confluence of two major streams and the Boquet River.
The town conducted an income survey last year and plans to do a sanitation survey this year, hoping to establish the community's financial and health needs for the state agency that doles out money to support costly water infrastructure projects.
Across the Adirondack Park, and throughout rural New York, small communities like Elizabethtown face hurdles to completing drinking water and wastewater projects, the types of foundational infrastructure that undergird housing expansion, business growth and tourism.
Elizabethtown has debated the merits of establishing a public sewer system since the 1960s, approving a wastewater district in 2010 but failing to agree on a place to put the necessary treatment center.
In the meantime, the hospital and its 25-bed inpatient unit, county headquarters and local restaurants have relied on septic systems, absorbing the
