WATERFORD — Waterford Supervisor John Lawler is unhappy with a federal plan to connect the towns of Waterford and Halfmoon with Troy water during the planned dredging of the Hudson River, and he predicted the issue will end up in court.

Both Waterford and Halfmoon take their water from the Hudson River. Lawler wants the water from Troy turned on as soon as dredging begins, but officials for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said they will only allow the water to flow if the towns’ water supply is threatened by PCBs that are stirred up by dredging.

For the past two years, the towns have been asking the federal government for an alternate water source in the event toxic PCBs are resuspended in the river during next year’s river dredging project.

The EPA is having a pipeline designed that would go under the Hudson and bring Troy water to the two towns.

“I still reject the solution they are moving forward with,” Lawler said about the EPA proposal.

David King, director of the EPA’s Hudson River Field Office, said his agency promised the two towns that they would have safe drinking water during the cleanup project, which is scheduled to start in spring 2009.

“We agreed to go the extra mile,” King said. The pipeline, estimated to cost between $5 million and $7 million, would not cost the towns anything.

But King said the only way Troy water would flow in the pipeline is when the normal Waterford and Halfmoon water supplies are threatened by PCB contamination.

“We can’t pay for [Troy] water for the full time of dredging,” King said. The first phase of dredging is expected to take one season but the second, larger phase, could take five or six years.

“We want the communities to be on board with us,” King said.

Lawler said he thinks the issue will end up in court.

“We don’t know what other contaminants they will dredge up,” Lawler said in a telephone interview.

Lawler also questioned the ability of the EPA to test the river water during dredging.

“They promised to give us safe water,” he said. “This solution does not give us safe water.”

Waterford and Halfmoon would like to use Troy water during the entire dredging project. “It’s morally repugnant to ask people to drink [Hudson River] water during the largest environmental dredging project [in the country],” Lawler said.

King said it would take between two and four days for resuspended PCBs to get from the upriver location where most dredging will be done and reach the water intakes of Halfmoon and Waterford.

King said the dredging project has been designed to have little or no resuspension. He said it will be easy to test river water for resuspension of contamination well before it reached the towns’ water intakes.

If such resuspension occurred, the dredging would be temporarily shut down and a valve would be switched so the town would have water from Troy.

The EPA is also offering to pay the difference between the cost of the more expensive Troy water and what it costs the towns to produce their own water.

A meeting between the towns and the EPA to discuss the water pipeline had been scheduled for March 18, but this has been postponed until sometime in April.

Lawler said he wants to wait until the weather is good enough so that the entire community can attend.

Lawler also charged that the EPA has not done baseline health studies to see if people in the two towns currently have PCBs in their systems.

“This is the EPA at its worst,” he said. “We are going to sue them and they know we are going to sue them,” Lawler said.

Mark Behan, a spokesman for General Electric, said the water negotiations are between the EPA and the two towns. “We are working very closely with the EPA to address this,” Behan said of the water supply issue.

He said protecting the public water supplies in Halfmoon and Waterford is a “priority issue” for both GE and the EPA.

“We look forward to a satisfactory agreement,” Behan said.

GE capacitor plants in Hudson Falls and Fort Edward discharged an estimated 1.3 million pounds of PCBs into the Hudson for a 30-year period ending in 1977, when the government banned the practice. PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) are described by the EPA as probable carcinogens that also cause other health problems in humans and wildlife.

The EPA has ordered GE to pay for the $700 million PCB cleanup of the upper Hudson between Fort Edward and Troy.