Once again, jobs were the hot topic at the Croton Facility Monitoring Committee meeting last week held across the street from the gaping hole that will one day house the Croton Water Filtration Plant.

And once again, committee members and local residents were disappointed with the number of jobs going to Bronx residents. Ever since the city began digging, the level of Bronxites employed for the job has hovered around 25 percent, not once jumping above 30 percent.

Officials from the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), the city agency running the project, said at the meeting that the number of Bronx jobs will remain steady until at least January 2007. Then, they said, construction of the actual facility will begin and the numbers may change, but maybe not for the better. There is a possibility that the percentage of Bronxites employed for the job might actually fall below previous levels, officials indicated, because of the skills that are required.

At the meeting, committee chair Greg Faulkner said the current levels are “unacceptable,” but acknowledged that he believed the DEP was putting in a good faith effort.

Lyn Pyle, a former representative on the committee from Community Board 7, who attended the meeting, said she was “disappointed” on several fronts following what she described as the “intense” meeting. Mostly, she’s disappointed with the lack of plan to add more local jobs to the tally.

Pyle and Faulkner say the city promised to put Bronxites to work in exchange for allowing the DEP to site the filtration plant on parkland surrounded by residents and not at an industrial site in Westchester County.

With the next, much larger, facility construction contract being awarded in September, Faulkner wants assurance that the new contractor will hire more Bronx residents. He wants the contractor to come to a committee meeting in October with a plan to hire a “significant” number of Bronxites. The current level of 25 percent will not cut it, he said.

Faulkner said he thinks the DEP will make every effort to make it happen. “I’m optimistic until I have a reason not to be,” he said.

The October deadline should be plenty of time to come up with a local hiring plan, Faulkner said.

“This [meeting in October] will tell us whether this is a serious process or just window dressing,” Faulkner said. “If we’re given a line or they don’t come, then it means they don’t take us seriously.

“We [the Bronx] have one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the city. And here we have this great public works project that seriously affects our community, but we’re not getting any of the benefits.”

If the committee’s demands for more Bronx jobs aren’t being satisfied by October, Faulkner said he’s prepared to become more aggressive in voicing the community’s displeasure about the project.