Final Day to Comment on Bay Cleanup Plan is Monday

Sunday, November 07, 2010

Monday is the final day to comment on the Chesapeake Bay’s proposed “pollution diet,” which has recently become a local issue as environmental groups support cleaning the waterway and other groups say it will be too expensive.

The Environmental Protection Agency recently released a draft of its Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) plan, which sets hard limits on how much nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment will be allowed in the Chesapeake Bay. These pollutants come from four major sources: wastewater, urban stormwater, agriculture and air deposition. Each Bay state has also recently offered their latest cleanup plans, which the EPA is reviewing. The EPA’s plan was prompted by insufficient restoration progress over the last several decades, and is required under federal law.

Since the EPA’s “pollution diet” has been released, the Hampton Roads Planning Commission District, a regional organization representing the area’s 16 local governments, shared a cost estimate for the EPA’s proposal that puts the Historic Triangle’s combined annual bill at $85 million each year (read a previous WYDaily story on the HRPDC estimate.) The group has expressed their concerns in writing during the current comment period on the EPA’s plan.

Meanwhile, environmental groups have been working to allay people’s fears and support the proposed restrictions. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF) released results of a poll of 500 Virginia voters, a strong majority of whom want a clean Bay and think it can be done while still maintaining a healthy economy (read a previous WYDaily story on the poll).

The CBF has been taking the state to task on its pollution reduction plan, calling it “stunningly deficient on how the Commonwealth will implement many of these proposals.” The organization stridently supports the EPA’s new plan, saying it hasn’t done enough over the past 30 years to enforce the Clean Water Act and the new TDML plan is a step in the right direction.

The EPA wants the states’ plans to address the majority of the pollution controls, but so far the group feels the states have not done so. According to EPA Regional Administrator Shawn M. Garvin, “We are hopeful that the jurisdictions will provide a greater level of assurance in their final plans, so that EPA can reduce the federal measures in the final TMDL. EPA strongly prefers to achieve the necessary pollution reductions through the state plans rather than federal actions because the states have more flexibility and can achieve reductions from a wider range of sources than EPA.”

The EPA’s plan combines defined state commitments to limiting Bay pollutants along with supplemental EPA measures which tighten controls on point sources of pollution such as wastewater treatment plants, large animal agriculture operations and municipal stormwater systems, with the aim to fully restore the Bay by 2025, with 60 percent of the actions completed by 2016.

Read and comment on the plan by Monday, November 8. The final TMDL plan will be established by December 31.