Bay Pollution Diet Could Have Dire Effect on Triangle Budgets

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Last week, the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission shared a cost estimate for the proposed ‘pollution diet’ for the Chesapeake Bay, which could cost the Triangle a combined $85 million each year.

All three Triangle localities have had to slash their budgets during the recession years, and tax revenues have yet to bounce back to pre-recession levels. While representatives of the three governments are hesitant to comment too much on the preliminary figures, they agree that finding the funds would be a challenge.

James City County Administrator Robert Middaugh says the numbers might be a bit on the high side, but “Even if the margin of error is quite large, the anticipated expense to localities remains very significant.”

The projected cost for the county represents about a 25 percent increase in the total general fund budget, according to Middaugh, and he doesn’t expect any funding help from the state or federal level.

He wouldn’t comment on the possible sources of funding for such a hefty sum, but the county is currently awaiting voter response on a November 2 bond referendum to allow the county to borrow up to $30 million over the next several years to pay for sorely needed stormwater projects, some of which will help the county comply with current federal and state regulations.

Assistant Williamsburg City Manager Jodi Miller wasn’t ready to offer too much comment on the issue either, but she did say the city is working on understanding the implications of the EPA’s plan for the Bay and that the city will “contact our state and federal legislative delegation to share the city's significant concerns.”

York County is also spending time looking at the EPA plan’s impact more closely and coordinating regionally on its response, according to County Administrator James McReynolds. While he also prefers not to comment on the plan and related funding until supervisors have approved the county’s comments, McReynolds did say that there wasn’t an extra $42 million to spare in the county’s budget. That figure would represent about a third of the county’s current budget of just over $125 million.

“It is a big number,” McReynolds said. While supervisors would make decisions on how to fund such an amount should the need arise, he said the first two places they might look could be a stormwater fee, which the county has never before charged, or a change in the real estate tax rate.

Environmentalists now face the added challenge that new regulations to clean the Bay might break the bank in various localities. The Sierra Club of Virginia has already targeted Governor Bob McDonnell’s state watershed plan as too weak to work. “It lacks sufficient regulation, provides no new mechanism or funding proposals for the bay and does not even acknowledge the need to clean Virginia’s waterways,” according to a Virginia Sierra Club report. “Instead, the McDonnell administration strikes a defiant tone implying that it is the federal government’s responsibility to protect our water.”

Assistant Virginia Chapter Director J.R. Tolbert says the organization “is still trying to figure out how [the HRPDC] have decided where these numbers come from, but we believe cost is an issue, both from action and inaction.”

Tolbert suggests the state look for “the most cost-effective things to do to clean the Bay,” and that some actions get “more bang for the buck.”

“Twenty-five years of inaction have cost the Bay even more,” he says, because dirty water affects more than the fishing industry; it affects tourism and home values.

Maximizing agricultural best management practices and investment in wastewater treatment facilities are two key ideas that Tolbert says would be actions to reduce the highest amounts of pollution in the Bay, and he suggests the costs could be spread evenly across the state so no one area bears more cost burden than another.

The Sierra Club will release their detailed list of suggestions for how the state should tackle the EPA’s plan by the end of this week.

The HRPDC suggests a compromise that would be more “reasonable and cost-effective,” which includes treating stormwater in only 19 percent of urban land (versus up to 50 percent), making sure most of the nutrient reductions are made in the agricultural sector versus through wastewater treatment changes and making the cost burden more equitable.

The group also suggests areas should have the flexibility to trade nutrient credits to reach the goals economically.

According to the HRPDC report, even in the best-case scenario in which the state’s cleanup plan and the EPA’s agree and only 19 percent of the urban land in the area needs to be treated, stormwater budgets in the Hampton Roads area would still double or triple.

In the worst-case scenario, in which stormwater reductions are based on treatment of 50 percent of all urban land, the report estimates stormwater budgets would be 10 times higher and capital costs would reach $679 million each year in Hampton Roads.

The group plans to submit its comments on the EPA’s ‘pollution diet’ plan by the November 8 deadline. The administrative heads of each Triangle locality and one representative from the board of supervisors or city council serve as HRPDC commissioners.

See the full slide presentation from the HRPDC here and read a memo on how the conclusions were reached here.