Buying Land in Greene County, New York

Why Greene County has a watershed layer other upstate counties don't

New York City draws a substantial share of its drinking water supply from a network of reservoirs in the Catskill and Delaware watersheds, and to protect that supply, the city's Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) administers its own Watershed Rules and Regulations across five counties whose land drains into those reservoirs: Delaware, Greene, Schoharie, Sullivan, and Ulster. This is a genuinely distinctive layer that most New York counties -- including most others in this project's coverage -- simply don't have to deal with, and it exists independently of, and in addition to, standard county-level land-use and septic review.

Greene County's own watershed territory lies in its western towns, roughly along the upper Schoharie Creek drainage that feeds the Schoharie Reservoir (the reservoir itself sits just across the county line in Schoharie County, but its watershed basin reaches into western Greene County). Windham and Prattsville are confirmed, by county-level reporting on NYC-funded wastewater infrastructure upgrades under the 1997 NYC Watershed Memorandum of Agreement, to be Greene County towns within this watershed relationship. Neighboring towns in the same upper-Schoharie-Creek drainage -- Ashland, Jewett, Hunter, and Lexington -- plausibly share similar watershed status given their geography, but this page has not independently confirmed a complete, parcel-level watershed boundary for every Greene County town, and treats that as a reasonable inference rather than a confirmed fact. The eastern and central parts of the county, including the county seat of Catskill itself along the Hudson River, are not part of this watershed drainage.

What the NYC watershed overlay means for septic and development

For a parcel confirmed to be within the delineated NYC watershed, a new or substantially modified septic system requires review and approval from NYC DEP's Bureau of Water Supply in addition to the standard county health department review under NYS DOH Appendix 75-A -- DEP's own regulations can impose stricter siting, design, and setback requirements than the statewide Appendix 75-A baseline alone. This isn't a rubber-stamp add-on step: it's a genuinely separate approval process with its own application and technical review, and it has drawn real local political friction -- the Greene County Legislature passed a resolution in 2022 supporting a push (originating with Delaware County) to limit the city's ability to acquire additional private land or place broad conservation easements on stream corridors within these watershed counties, reflecting ongoing local concern about how much of the tax base and land-use control NYC's watershed program can absorb over time.

Given how genuinely distinctive and consequential this layer is for anyone evaluating a western Greene County parcel with a septic-dependent building plan, this page develops the DEP watershed septic process in a dedicated standalone rather than only summarizing it here -- see our Greene County septic-systems page for the fuller process description.

The rest of the county: standard zoning, no APA layer

Outside the watershed drainage, Greene County works the way most non-Adirondack upstate New York counties do: town government handles zoning and building permits, and the county Legislature (a 14-member body) and its departments handle planning coordination, septic permitting under the standard Appendix 75-A baseline, and property records. Greene County also borders the Catskill Park along its western edge, but -- unlike the Adirondack Park to the north -- the Catskill Park has no equivalent state agency (comparable to the Adirondack Park Agency) directly regulating private land use; local town zoning remains the operative authority even for parcels near or within the Catskill Park boundary.