Lloyd Leaving DEP For Real Estate Post At Church

City Environmental Protection Commissioner Emily Lloyd announced her resignation Oct. 8 to take an executive post with Trinity Church.

EMILY LLOYD: 'Made tremendous progress.'

"I am grateful to have worked for a Mayor [who] placed environmental stewardship at the top of his agenda and grateful to the Mayor for the opportunity to lead this extraordinary department that touches the lives of New Yorkers every day," Ms. Lloyd said in a statement. "During my nearly four years as Commissioner, we made tremendous progress in implementing Mayor Bloomberg's ambitious environmental agenda."

He Returns the Praise

In a concurrent statement, the Mayor said that "New York City is losing an effective and passionate public servant." He said that her greatest successes at the Department of Environmental Protection had been "making major progress on the Third Water Tunnel by completing the tunneling for the project; improving environmental capital project management; and modernizing DEP's customer service bureau."

Ms. Lloyd, who will leave her job Oct. 31, is becoming Chief Operating Officer at Trinity Church's real estate operation. She formerly served as Commissioner of the Department of Sanitation from 1992 to 1994 under Mayors Dinkins and Giuliani.

The Mayor mentioned New York's "status as one of only five cities in the country with such high-quality drinking water that the majority of its water supply does not require filtration — saving the city billions of dollars." He credited this achievement to Ms. Lloyd's oversight of the DEP's watershed protection.

But the DEP's effort to build a vast water filtration plant under Van Cortlandt Park in The Bronx has been a controversial issue for the department recently. The project is estimated to cost nearly $3 billion, up from the original figure of $660 million when it was announced in 1998.

When contacted, DEP officials declined to speak further on the reasons for Ms. Lloyd's departure. Her new position at Trinity Church will be similar to the work she did at Columbia University, where she was executive vice president for administration in between her two terms of service for the city.