A new water plant in Webster will bolster the regional water supply but it could also be a sprawl enabler.

The Monroe County Water Authority has received the permits it needs from the Department of Environmental Conservation to build the plant. There are more permits to be obtained from other agencies, but the DEC permits are the most significant step, say authority officials.

The plant will give the authority the ability to provide a greater amount of water to customers, present and future. The authority will be better able to handle new requests for service; whether it's growth in an area already served or if a smaller supplier wants to turn its operation over to the authority. That's part of the role of a regional supplier: to provide water to not just one or two communities, but to a county or several counties.

But critics say the new plant could drive accelerated development in outlying areas - in other words, sprawl.

"Once government has put all that infrastructure down, of course developers are going to come in and snap up that land and build on it," says City Council member Bill Pritchard.

Authority officials asked the DEC for permission to build a plant on Basket Road that would be capable of drawing 35- to 50- million gallons a day from Lake Ontario. They want the plant for a number of reasons: safety, energy efficiency, and as a backup to the authority's Shoremont plant. They also said it would be necessaryto meet anticipated future water supply needs.

And there are 14 smaller suppliers in the region that may, at some point, want the authority to take over their operations, says authority Executive Director Ed Marianetti.

"Our customer base grows every year," he says.

For an example of how that happens, look to the town of Webster. Prior to 1998, town residents got water from the village of Webster's water system. The village system is slower to replenish its reserves because water is provided by wells drilled into an aquifer, not by drawing it from a lake. Growth in the town outpaced what the village's water supply could handle. The water got increasingly hard and, on some summer days, residents were warned not to use water unnecessarily.

Webster officialstried other solutions, but ultimately the town tied in to the Monroe County Water Authority system.

But Hugh Mitchell, of the Rochester Sierra Club, says consolidating water systems is not wise. Smaller providers will help limit growth, he says, and serve as an effective backup if a neighboring treatment facility goes down.

"Our region is much safer with a variety of water sources than one huge system," Mitchell says.

Other critics fear that the new Webster plantcould be used as leverage against the City of Rochester in ongoing water sharing talks. Instead of Rochester providing water to the whole city, the city and the county split the job up. The city also provides water to the southeastern suburbs. But the new plant means that the county doesn't necessarily need the city's water anymore. Thecity could be bullied into giving up its system, critics say, which would provide the Water Authority with even more potential capacity and customers and take water sales revenues away from the city.

But the potential for the plant to fuel sprawl is critics' biggest concern. It will give the authority the capability to make more water available fartherfrom Rochester, which will almost certainly lead to increased development.

While the DEC approved a plant that can handle up to 50 million gallons of water a day, it only increased the authority's overall intake by 10 million gallons a day. That means that, between the Webster and Shoremont plants, the authority can withdraw 155 million gallons a day, up from the 145 million gallons a day prior to the application. That increase is less than the additional 35 to 50 million gallons a day the authority wanted

"I'm glad that the state authorized about a quarter of what the county was originally proposing," Pritchard says. "I hope that will limit the fueling of greater development eastward."

Whether the new plantpromotes sprawl is not the authority's problem, officials there say. That's better addressed by local land use planning, they say.

The problem, Pritchard says, is that there's no regional planning body to keep development in check. There's nothing to stop developers from following the pipes out to neighboring counties.

Growth can increase the need for water, but wider availability of water can also spur development. Both happened in Webster. By the time the town tied into the Water Authority system, it was already growing, says Supervisor Ron Nesbitt. But growth really took off after the town switched suppliers.

"I think it's probably one of the major items why we had the boom," Nesbitt says. "We had subdivisions stopped because you didn't have any more water from the village because they couldn't pump any more."

Town Center and other commercial businesses might not have been built if more water hadn't been available, Nesbitt says.