Do you care about toxic chemicals leaking into your drinking water? If so, you’ll have an opportunity to make your voice heard as New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation rolls out a new virtual public meeting series on PFAS, often called “forever chemicals.” The meetings come after Gov. Kathy Hochul’s 2026 State of the State directed DEC to draft new rules that would require landfills to treat leachate for harmful contaminants before it is sent to wastewater plants, with funding proposed to help local governments comply.
PFAS has already become a familiar issue in parts of Ulster County. In Woodstock, town officials have reported PFOS and PFOA detections in one wellfield, with spring 2025 test results showing PFOS at 3.67 parts per trillion and PFOA at 2.06 parts per trillion in a well serving part of the system. In Hurley, the closed town landfill has been a flashpoint over contaminated leachate, and was declared a state Superfund site. The city of Kingston at one point stopped accepting Hurley leachate because of PFOS and PFOA concerns. A broader debate has also been playing out over how landfill liquids are handled in the county, including leachate that has been trucked to Kingston’s wastewater treatment plant.
DEC’s information sessions on the proposed landfill leachate rulemaking are scheduled for Tuesday, January 27, 2026 at 2:30 p.m. and Wednesday, February 11, 2026 at 2 p.m., both online. Another virtual public session, “A Decade of Progress on PFAS and Beyond,” is set for Thursday, January 29 at 2 p.m., and a separate stakeholder webinar on PFAS in biosolids is scheduled for Wednesday, February 4 at 1 p.m.