Yonkers Raceway will pay $9 million in penalties and costs to settle an investigation into the dumping of raw sewage into the Bronx River, state officials said Thursday.
Under the agreement announced by Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and the Department of Environmental Conservation, the harness track will pay a $2 million fine, stop all discharges of human waste into the river and pay $6 million for projects to reduce pollution from storm runoff. Another $1 million will go to a local environmental education center.
An investigation found the raceway has for years flushed human waste from several buildings into a storm sewer that feeds into the river instead of the city's municipal sanitary sewer. Investigators also found that horse manure was routinely flushed into storm sewers when workers cleaned stalls.
Testing done where the storm sewers empty into the river showed E-coli levels reaching from 110,000 to 500,000 bacteria per 100 milliliters of water. The normal range is 100 to 1,000, Spitzer spokesman Marc Violette said.
The agreement is part of recent efforts by the attorney general's office to stop pollution into the Bronx River.
Previous settlements have been reached with the Bronx Zoo and the New York Botanical Gardens. In 2004, Spitzer's office obtained a court order requiring the city of Yonkers to stop polluting the river with sewage.
The raceway reopened with much fanfare Wednesday following a 15-month, $240 million renovation that features 1,800 video lottery terminals.
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