W.Va. rewrites plans to clean up Chesapeake Bay

MORGANTOWN (AP) - Farmers in eastern West Virginia have been working for decades to clean up rivers and streams in the Chesapeake Bay watershed - not only for the greater good, but for their own. "You can't raise livestock or keep animals without a good water source. That's one of the essential nutrients for any of us, for life," said Hardy County Extension Agent Dave Workman, who works with farmers in the heart of the state's poultry industry. "So nobody's going to really intentionally mess up their water," he said. "But, as with everything, you can always improve a little bit more." And that's what a coalition of state agencies is now requesting - a little bit more. The latest version of the state's Chesapeake Bay Watershed Improvement Plan calls on farmers to increase cover-crop plantings nearly 70 percent and dramatically expand stream restoration efforts to include 8,400 acres by 2025. Bay cleanup has been a particularly important issue for farmers because fertilizer and manure contain nutrients like nitrogen, which can wash from West Virginia's rivers and streams into the bay and contaminate the water. High levels of those nutrients can make the water toxic to aquatic life. The Department of Environmental Protection wants to hear from land owners and others who would be affected by those and other changes laid out in the latest draft of a plan going to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Workman said farmers in the South Branch Valley aren't likely to object. They see themselves as partners with the government agencies, not adversaries. Voluntary changes they've already made have left water far cleaner than it was 20 or 30 years ago, he said. Plus, they've had input on the plan now being considered. In 2009, the federal government ordered six watershed states and the District of Columbia to develop Watershed Implementation Plans, setting specific target reductions for nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment runoff from West Virginia. The EPA wants current nutrient levels cut 60 percent by 2017, and it wants measures in place to meet other targets by 2025. West Virginia submitted a plan two years ago, then redrafted it to include many changes for agriculture. In the latest version, EPA assigns 75 percent of the pollution from West Virginia's animal feeding operations to a part of the plan reserved for regulated pollution sources. Alana Hartman, Potomac Basin coordinator for the state environmental agency, said that signals a shift and warns farmers that these operations could be subjected to state or federal permitting to protect water quality. Although EPA has always had the authority to invoke the federal Clean Water Act and require permits for pollution sources, Hartman said it's rarely done so for farms in West Virginia. "By putting it in writing," she said, "it just makes everyone more aware of it." Other goals in the plan include: -Putting 90,000 acres in eight counties into nutrient management plans to control nitrogen, phosphorous and sediment runoff by 2025, an increase of 15,000 acres. That change also expands the target area from just Berkeley and Jefferson counties to the others in the watershed: Pendleton, Grant, Mineral, Hardy, Hampshire and Morgan. -Fencing off 5,200 acres by 2025 to reduce animals' access to streams. -Retiring 5,018 acres from agricultural use. -Expanding forest buffer areas by 1,570 acres. The plan originally envisioned shipping 40,000 tons of poultry litter out of the watershed counties and into counties that could use it as fertilizer, but that figure was cut to 12,000 tons. After talking with farmers and running computer models, the team realized "litter transfer would be really, really expensive, and we wouldn't get much impact," Hartman said. Instead, the plan focuses on other options that are more palatable to farmers. When all the strategies are put into the same model, Hartman said, West Virginia still meets the EPA's goals. Many changes West Virginia has already made have not yet been counted toward EPA's mandate, she said, so the state is now working to document all of those. The DEP is accepting public comment on the plan until Feb. 20. --- Online: W.Va. Chesapeake Bay Program: www.wvca.us/bay/

Second phase of bay plan on tap

Local details added to Phase I January 24, 2012 By John McVey - Journal staff writer MARTINSBURG - The draft of West Virginia's Phase II Watershed Implementation Plan is open for public comment, state Department of Environmental Protection officials announced recently. Called WIP II, it is West Virginia's plan to comply with new pollution limits imposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency through its Chesapeake Bay restoration initiative. Last year, EPA released stringent limits on the amount of nutrients, that is nitrogen and phosphorus, and sediment pollution that can get into the bay through its tributaries. The greater, eight-county Eastern Panhandle is in the Potomac River watershed, and the Potomac is one of the bay's major tributaries. Phase II builds on the first phase of the WIP, which was submitted in September 2010, but WIP II offers specifics about how local jurisdictions will reach the goals outlined in the first phase, explained Matthew Pennington, Region 9 Chesapeake Bay Program coordinator. For example, Pennington said that Phase II lays out how homeowners can cut down on the amount of nutrients that are washed off their lawns into local streams during storms by reducing the amount of fertilizer they use on their yards. He presented an update on the Chesapeake Bay program during Region 9 Planning and Development Council's meeting Monday afternoon. Region 9 encompasses Berkeley, Jefferson and Morgan counties. The Chesapeake Bay restoration initiative has dominated much of Region 9's work plan for the past couple of years. Storm water runoff is one of the areas targeted by EPA to reduce nutrient and sediment pollution. Other areas that have been targeted are waste water treatment plants, land development and agriculture. According to the introduction to WIP II, the entire agriculture section of Phase I has been rewritten. West Virginia's plans to reduce pollution from agricultural operations was one of the sections that was severely criticized by the EPA's review of Phase I. A draft of WIP II is available at www.wvca.us/bay Comments will be accepted through Feb. 20. Comments can be sent to Alana Hartman, WVDEP-DWWM, HC 63 Box 2545, Romney, WV 26757 or to alana.c.hartman@wv.gov. The final draft of WIP II is supposed to be submitted to EPA for review by March 30.

Report links Chesapeake Bay cleanup, jobs

Jan 3 - RICHMOND, Va. (AP) - A report by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation concludes that stormwater and sewage plant upgrades intended to help nurse the environmentally-battered bay back to health would create nearly 250,000 jobs. The report released today is aimed at countering claims that the multi-state, multi-billion restoration directed by the Environmental Protection Agency will be harmful to the economy and result in job losses, the foundation's president said. "That is not borne out by the facts," William C. Baker said in a statement. "Whether the target is EPA or the bay pollution limits, it is essential that the public understand that environmental regulations will create jobs to reduce pollution, and sustain jobs that depend on clean water." The report, called "Debunking the 'Job Killer' Myth," relies on a variety of industry experts such as engineers, reports and other sources to assess the impact of water pollution projects within the six states and the District of Columbia that comprise the bay's 64,000-square-mile watershed. It also reviews job-killing threats dating back to 1976 and Henry Ford II claimed that clean air and fuel efficiency standards would "shut down" Ford Motor Co. to illustrate historic claims that environmental efforts are bad for the economy. The report found instead that sewage and stormwater projects could provide work for 240,000 full-time jobs across the bay region - engineering jobs, construction and other employment for new pollution-control projects. The job projections include the so-called multiplier effect, or jobs created as a result of economic activity because of those upgrades. "Those jobs are going to be concentrated in the large metropolitan areas because that's where the greatest concentration of sewage and stormwater occurs," Baker said. Two key bay states, Virginia and Maryland, plan to invest a total of $3 billion to upgrade sewage treatment plants over more than a decade. That activity alone would create an estimated 60,000 jobs, the report said. It cites as an example a $305 million stormwater pollution control project in Maryland's Montgomery County that will create 3,300 construction and engineering jobs. Critics and some state and local officials have publicly questioned the ultimate costs of cleaning the bay, a task taken up by the EPA after decades of failure by the states to deal with its deteriorating environmental health. The bay's decline has created vast dead zones where no life exists, depleted oyster stocks and harmed other marine life. The overall cost of what has been called the most ambitious U.S. water pollution control project ever undertaken has been estimated in excess of $30 billion through 2025. It would be achieved through a "pollution diet" to reduce farm and urban runoff, which dumps nutrients in the bay, and improvements to systems that flush polluted water into the 200-mile-long bay. A state legislative report in Virginia concluded the job could cost state residents $13.6 billion to $15.7 billion. The report added, however, that the cleanup would also bring economic benefits, aiding industries such as tourism and seafood. Baker said he questions some of those cost claims and said history has shown the true costs are a fraction of "wildly exaggerated" estimates. "When you think of those construction workers building a sewage treatment plant, you certainly can make the argument that they're going out and spending more of that money that their making, and that is then going to create jobs in itself," he said. Besides the district, Maryland and Virginia, the cleanup plan involves New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware and West Virginia. The report concluded, "Despite rhetoric to the contrary, environmental regulations have a documented history of causing no harm to the economy, with job losses often more than balanced by jobs created by environmental cleanup."