Title:بازسازی خلیج چساپیک

۲۰۱۱-۱۱-۰۲ ارائه دهندگان: آنتونی مور، جان کارلوک و جفری کوربین این وب‌کست فقط برای مشاهده در دسترس است، برای اعتبارات AICP CM قابل استفاده نیست. برنامه بازسازی خلیج چساپیک از اواسط دهه ۱۹۸۰ وجود داشته است. این یک تلاش مشترک بین ایالت های مریلند، پنسیلوانیا، و ویرجینیا و ناحیه کلمبیا به علاوه آژانس حفاظت از محیط زیست ایالات متحده (EPA) بوده است. ایالت های نیویورک و ویرجینیای غربی نیز به میزان محدودتری درگیر هستند. بر اساس یک دستور موافقت فدرال اخیر، EPA نقش قوی تری نسبت به گذشته ایفا کرده است. اولین وبینار مربوط به این برنامه در اواخر ماه مه بر برنامه‌های مریلند با اعضای میزگرد از وزارت برنامه‌ریزی مریلند و شورای دولت‌های واشنگتن متروپولیتن متمرکز بود. مدیر موقت دفتر خلیج چساپیک EPA نیز یکی از اعضای پانل بود. وبینار آتی در برنامه خلیج چساپیک بر تلاش ها در ویرجینیا متمرکز خواهد بود. ایالت ویرجینیا نه تنها دارای جبهه بسیار قابل توجهی در خلیج چساپیک است، بلکه بسیاری از ایالت، از جمله مناطق دور از خلیج، دارای حوضه هایی است که به خلیج چساپیک می ریزند. سخنرانان پانل از ویرجینیا شامل آنتونی مور، دستیار وزیر دپارتمان منابع طبیعی ویرجینیا، جایی که او مسئول بازسازی خلیج چساپیک است، و جان کارلوک، معاون مدیر کمیسیون منطقه برنامه ریزی جاده هامپتون خواهد بود. بدنه دوم منطقه بزرگتر ساحل نورفولک-ویرجینیا را پوشش می دهد. سومین سخنران جفری کوربین، مشاور ویژه مدیر EPA جکسون برای خلیج چساپیک و رودخانه آناکوستیا خواهد بود. این وبینار توسط بخش برنامه ریزی منطقه ای و بین دولتی حمایت می شود.

قسمتي از متن فيلم: Hello my name is Brittany Kavinsky and I just want to welcome everyone it is now 1 p.m. so we will begin our presentation shortly today on November second we will have our presentation on Chesapeake Bay restoration given by jeffrey corbin anthony moore and John carlock for help during today’s webcast please feel free

To type your questions in the chat box found in the webinar tool bar to the right of your screen or call one eight hundred 263 6317 for content questions please feel free to type those in the questions box and we will be able to answer those at the end of the

Presentation during the question-and-answer session here is a list of the sponsoring chapters divisions and universities I would like to thank all the participating chapters divisions and universities for making these webcasts possible as you can see we have quite a few webcast coming up in the next few months to register for

These upcoming webcasts please visit www webcast and register for your webcast of choice we are now offering distance education webcasts to help you get your ethics and law credits before the end of the year these webcasts are available to view at ww utah APA org slash webcast archive to log your distance education

Cm credits go to ww lng org slash CM select activities by provider select APA Ohio Chapter then select distance education and select your webcast of choice you can now follow us on twitter at planning webcast or like us on Facebook planning webcast series to receive up-to-date information on the

Planning webcast series sponsored by chapters divisions and universities to log your team credits for attending today’s webcast please go to ww plng org CMS select today’s date November second and then select today’s webcast Chesapeake Bay restoration this webcast is available for one and a half cm credits we are recording today’s webcast

And it will be available along with a six slide per page PDF of the presentation at ww utah APA org of cast a shark I’ve at this time I would like to introduce Jennifer Kali who will introduce our speakers for today Geoffrey Corbin anthony moore and john carlock great thank you very much

Brittany my name is Jennifer Cowley and I serve as the webcast coordinator for the APA chapters divisions university’s webcast series and today our sponsor of this webcast is the APA regional and intergovernmental Planning Division I served as one of their members and as a representative on today’s webcast Bob

Leiter is the division chair and i’m here to help introduce our speakers and we will be having another division webinar on the Chesapeake Bay restoration problem project that’s going to be focused on Virginia but also with a federal overview and so we’re expecting that that’s going to be coming

In late May so you could pay attention for pay attention in the new year for that to come forward so we have three great seekers with us today mr. Moore is presently the assistant secretary of the virginia department of natural resources for Chesapeake Bay restoration under Governor McDonnell he also served as the

Assistant secretary of the department in the late 90s and then from 2002 2002 is the director of policy for the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality for 2003-2008 mister Moore was a senior policy advisor in the US EPA office of water where he developed market based programs to protect and restore our

Environment he also directed that offices legislative programs before he went to work for the state and federal government he was a chemist with Dominion power and he’s a graduate of Virginia Military Institute mr. carlock is the deputy executive director of the Hampton Roads planning district Commission which serves the greater

North norfolk virginia beach newport news area as such he manages the Commission’s water resources regional planning economics housing Emergency Management and community affairs and public information programs he was also an employee of the Commission’s predecessor organization the southeastern Virginia planning district Commission mr. carlac who served as the chairman of the Virginia recycling

Markets development council and in Thor was appointed to the Virginia water resources research Senate statewide advisory board he served as an adjunct professor of geography at Old Dominion University he has a master’s degree in city and regional planning from Southern Illinois University finally mr. Corben is a senior advisor to EPA Administrator

Lisa Jackson for the Chesapeake Bay in the Anacostia River as such he serves as the chief liaison among the office of the EPA Administrator federal state and local government partners and community and nonprofit stakeholders he’s also served as senior advisor to the EPA region three administrator from 2006

۲۰۰۹ mr. Corbin served as the assistant secretary for the virginia department of natural resources under governor Kaine he also spent nearly ten years as the Virginia deputy director and senior scientist for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation he has a master’s degree in oceanography from the University of

Rhode Island and mr. Corbin is going to kick off our presentation today so please everyone will look forward to the presentation alright well thank this is Jeff Corbin thank you for that you did and I’m going to start by kind of giving you a 30,000 foot fly over

Here of the Bay restoration efforts kind of past present future and obviously they’ll have a little bit of a federal tint to it since i’m currently with the united states environmental protection agency but as they said my by l I’ve been with the Commonwealth of Virginia working on Bay restoration issues and

Have also been on a non-profit environmental side so hopefully I’ve sat at the table a lot of different positions on this effort so hopefully that a diversity will bring a little bit of a unique perspective to this so let me go ahead and and jump right in I

Think it’s this button right alrighty just some real quick for those of you who are not familiar with the Chesapeake Bay region it is the biggest estuary North America I believe it’s a third largest in the world 64,000 square mile watershed extremely abundant diversity of fish wildlife implants huge economic

Engine for the for the states in the Chesapeake Bay region in fact we’re getting ready to do an update on what the benefits cost benefits will be from from a fully restored Chesapeake Bay a lot of people live in the watershed this is one of the problems it makes the

Restoration effort challenging currently about 17 million and i believe the projection is by 2030 to have almost 20 million people living the bay watershed six states or at least parts of six states and the District of Columbia are in the watershed about 1,800 local governments and really what makes it

Challenging is I’m going to show you a chart here in the minute of what we do on the land has a really big impact on what happens to water quality and this is a chart that shows it if you take the ratio of the amount of water in a water

Body so for example the bay or the Gulf of Finland like you see here on the chart and you take that ratio to the amount of land that drains into it you end up with a ratio you can see they’re fairly small on this chart and that’s

Because if you had the Chesapeake Bay the ratio is about 14 1 it’s the largest the largest ratio of watersheds volume of any coastal water on the planet and that makes it extremely challenging because what it means that the impacts that we have on the water had

A really huge impact on what happens on water quality more so than any other coastal water body on the planet so if this is one of the challenges that we face it’s because dabei although it looks big on a map is very shallow and it has an extremely large watershed that

Drains into it now I’m going to talk mostly today about water quality in about the TMDL the total maximum daily load that we’re currently working to implement with the states but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that President Obama back in May of 2009 issued an executive order on the

Chesapeake Bay it established a federal leadership committee EPA Lisa Jackson shares that leadership committee and we have developed a strategy and we will develop annual plans and annual progress reports and you can see the first version of that that’s out on the web and this if you look on the right there

These are a lot of the different issues that the states and the and the federal government agencies will be working together on over the next decade or more I am going to focus today just on one of these water quality so I always like to start by reminding people while we’re

Doing this even though we’ve made significant progress restoring the Chesapeake Bay we still have very significant water quality impacts we have low dissolved oxygen levels which manifest themselves as fish kills we have very extensive algae blooms this is down in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia from just this past summer and

We have a very high sediment loads very very murky very cloudy water and those are the three pollutants those are the three impairments that we are trying to address in the Bay restoration with respect to water quality dissolved oxygen levels clarity and chlorophyll chlorophyll-a which is a surrogate for

Algae levels this is simply I put this in here simply another shot to show you what happens when we get a lot of rain and the sediment that washes off all the different land uses in the watershed this is from this past summer when we had the back-to-back tropical storm and

Hurricane that came through the region and although this is a rather dramatic rain event at any time we get a significant rainfall event in the bay region you can get this similar sort of satellite photo of sediment running off so again we have significant issues with runoff from non-point sources

A little bit about the partnership and this truly is a partnership and we’ve been using for more than three decades in the Chesapeake Bay region we actually have a specific budget where the the Ephs to program office is actually established in the Clean Water Act and

Early on I’m going to go over a bit more specifics here about the agreements that have been signed but early on Maryland Virginia Pennsylvania District of Columbia and then the Chesapeake Bay Commission which is a tri state legislative body they were the original signatories to this agreement but early

On in 2000 2002 we’ve now signed an MoU with the headwater States Delaware New York and West Virginia so that all states and the district are now full partners of the Chesapeake um watershed program I’m not going to walk you through this chart I just want to show

You that we do have a structure so i might say we are over structured but we have a very detailed structure that we operate with the program so issues that we address and the solutions that we come up with work their way through a process that begins with work groups at

The staff level that include federal agencies state agencies and outside partners and then it works its way up through the process all the way to the top level that we call the Executive Council and that is currently chaired by my Lisa Jackson the administrator of EPA

So a little bit of history with a Virginia tinge to it here the first agreement that the base state sign was back in nineteen eighty-three very simple one-page acknowledging that there was a problem there was about a decade worth of science that led up to this agreement but it was very simple saying

That we need to come together we need to work together in 87 that agreement one further and that’s where we started realizing that we needed to really reduce nitrogen phosphorus and sediment entering our rivers in 92 we realized that really where a lot of the reductions had to come from were up into

The watershed up into the headwaters of the tributaries and that’s when states started developing what we call tributary strategies Virginia adopted a developed and adopted a number of those the first one is for the Shenandoah on potomac back in 96 and then in the late 90s it was a number of lawsuits that

Were challenging the states and federal government over what they claimed is failure to implement the TMDL program they were court settlements two came out of that that largely set up schedules for developing TMDL s which are clean up plans for impaired waters which included the Chesapeake Bay and the tidal waters

Because as you see in 1999 the entire Bay and the title portions of the major rivers were listed on Virginia’s through a 3d list or the impaired waters list there were more tributary strategies for individual rivers developed in 99 and 2000 the last big partnership agreement

Was in two thousand often referred to as the Chesapeake 2000 agreement and there’s over 100 commitments and act in that agreement just one of them had to do with water quality and that was we would actually reduce we go beyond what we had set for pollution reductions earlier it would actually achieve enough

Pollution reductions to delist these waters and get them off to the impaired waters list and if we didn’t then we would have to go down this approach and start developing a Chesapeake Bay TMDL in 2005 Virginia developed another statewide tributary strategy and then there was a law passed in Virginia no.6

That required annual cleanup plans and those were developed from 06 3 09 and now where we are through for a number of reasons because of the 2,000 agreement because of court challenges and because of the Clean Water Act we are now in a situation where we have to develop a Bay

TMDL and that’s because we simply although we’ve made progress we have not made enough to delist these waters from the 303 impaired waters list so what is this thing what is it TMDL it stands for total maximum daily load very simple you set the amount the allowable amount of

Pollution that can go into an impaired water which for this TMDL is the entire Bay and the trip title tributaries you divided up among the states you give each state their allocations for nitrogen phosphorus and sediment the states then have the ability to divide that up among the various pollution

Sources you develop your plans and you implements your plans so why is this any different if we’ve been trying to restore the bay for 30 years why is it TMDL different and it’s mainly different because the TMDL has a significant amount of accountability built into this process we have to have assurance what

We call reasonable assurance that the states can actually implement what they say that they’re going to do in their play to achieve these pollution reduction allocations it’s a stepwise progress and I’ll talk more about this we’re going to be measuring this in two year junks but we’re calling to your milestones 2017 is

The halfway point we’ve set a goal to get sixty percent of all the practices needed in place by 2017 and we get all the practices in place by 2025 and although this data is solidified in the TMDL and in other documents the state was actually set by the bay partners

Through the executive council that top level of the program that i mentioned earlier it’s going to be an extremely transparent program it has been so far and it’s going to become even more so and then the last bullet i have here in red is because this is the one that

Tends to draw most of the attendance and is that if we do fall behind if we don’t stay on track to achieve these pollution reduction measures that we need then we will contemplate some sort of federal action and there’s a handful of things that we could do under existing Clean

Water Act Authority and I will go over those in a minute and I always remind people that although the TMDL is a different process than we’ve used in the past the pollution levels that we’re shooting for are very close if not the same levels that we’ve been shooting for

For many many years this slide is actually a little bit outdated but if you look in 1985 this is just for nitrogen there was a 341 million pounds of nitrogen going into the bay watershed every year you know 9 we’ve gotten that down to below 250 are 2010 numbers are

About to come out I think they’re going to be about 6 million pounds lower so we continue to make progress the tributary strategies that we’ve been developing that showed you in the earlier slides would have gotten as to 190 and the allocation that the states have been

Given under the TMDL and again I apologize this is an old slide but the allocation for the TMDL is right around 190 so the TMDL is definitely a different process but again the numbers that were shooting for as far as restore bay are pretty much the same one who’s

Been shooting for for a few decades now so there’s four parts to this the TMDL is actually the second one there on the chart the first one are the state’s watershed implementation plans they get to develop how these actions are going to be implemented on the ground to achieve the allocations that

Given through the TMDL those plans fed into the TMDL they broke these allocations down into much smaller sectors and into individual waste load allocations for permits that fed into the TMDL that we published last december december 29th of 2010 the third part of the two-year milestones which i’ll talk

A little bit more about in a minute and that’s how we make sure that we stay on track and then the fourth power is just as I mentioned a minute ago these potential federal actions that we could take if insufficient progress is made so really quickly about each one of these

For the watershed implementation plans or what I refer to that that is how we divide up the pollution pie and it’s almost Thanksgiving so I elevated pumpkin pie for the for the selected slice today but the science and I’ll tell everybody on this this call a week

There’s not literally a week does not go by we’re at our Chesapeake Bay Program office in Annapolis that we don’t have some group from somewhere in the nation or even the world the last month we’ve had China and Australia in looking at how we’re doing this and looking at all

The information that we have and trying to figure out whether or not this is the approach that they should use to try and clean up their water bodies so we have an amazing amount of science and monitoring and modeling that is really the envy of other Bay restoration

Programs so the science tells you how big the pie is the watershed implementation plans or where the states get to divide up with those slices of the pie are going to look like those plans also include the strategies this is not just a numbers game the watershed implementation plans have to include the

Strategies as to how they’re actually going to achieve the reductions that are in their plan so each state developed one even the headwater states Delaware New York and West Virginia developed them so all six states and DC developed their watershed implementation plans we went through a few versions of those and

Those are what fed into the TMDL that was issued last December where we are now is the plans if the state’s developed we called phase one they were kind of focused on the state level the major river basin level what they’re doing now is they’re working with

Localities and I think this is what what John car locks be talking about today is we’re reaching out to the localities to local governments to counties to cities to planning district Commission’s to soil and water conservation districts so that they understand what their portion of the responsibility is going to be in

Order for Virginia to reach their to implement enough actions actually achieve their team yellow allocations so what attend what the phase two whip should tell you is who are your local partners who you working with are they aware of these strategies do they know what their role is going to be to

Implement these strategies how is each jurisdiction working with its partners what are the strategies that you’re going to use at the local level to actually facilitate increased levels of implementation so how are you actually going to go from the level you right now to implementing significant enough practices to achieve your TMDL

Allocations and I’ll tell you a little bit about the time frame of when these phase 2’s are going to be developed in a minute the third thing I showed you in the earlier slide with the two-year milestones and this is a bit of a noisy slide but it’s basically just to let you

Know that it lets us use a theoretical example suppose we’ve got its 2011 we’ve got till 2025 we’ve got 14 years suppose Virginia has a 14 million pound nitrogen reduction to achieve they don’t necessarily need to achieve a million pounds every year some states might start getting significant reductions

Right up front they might think that they get all the programs they need and they’re simply going to crank up implementation either through more people or more money or whatever it takes some states might choose an approach that they need to that the new regulations are they need new statutory

Authority or they need to revise their budgets so maybe they don’t get as much reductions in the first couple years but the red line shows you that they would get significant more reductions in the out-years but again the point is we’re at 2011 on the left we need to get sixty

Percent of the practices on the ground by 2017 and we need to get them all on the ground by 2025 and there’s a number of different paths that you can take to get there we will be tracking this if you go to the EPA’s Chesapeake Bay Program website and I’m sorry I didn’t

Put it up here but it’s Chesapeake Bay dotnet one word Chesapeake Bay net if you go there I think it’s right on the front page you can get to a tool that we call Chesapeake stat and the kind of the wizard behind the curtain of Chesapeake stat is

This Bates past tools for tracking an account tracking an accounting system I believe and that is where users including the states including federal governments including anybody who wants to use this tool can look and see what kind of progress we’re making and why we’re having problems if we’re not

Hitting our targets we plan to further develop this tool and actually use it as a management tool as we go forward so at the staff level and at the policymaker level will be looking at this and seeing where we’re achieving reductions and where we’re not cheating adepts

Productions why are we not and this will be one of the tools that we use to see how we adaptively manage this process as we move forward the last one I had was in the slide earlier with federal actions it is my sincere hope that we

Don’t have to use any of these federal actions against States I can tell you right now that in the last few years all the states have significantly increase their implementation levels and we’ll be finding out if that sustained level is enough to get them to where they need to

Be by 2025 but I can tell you that all the states from looking their initial watershed of limitation plans have taken this process very seriously but if we do fall behind what are some of the things we can do these are existing Clean Water Act authorities we can expand coverage

Of npdes national pollution discharge elimination system permits those are federal permits many of them issued by the states we can increase oversight of those permits we can require additional pollution reductions from permitted sources and this is one of the issues that is very unique to a TMDL if we do

Not get reductions from the non-permitted sources we will probably have to go back and get additional reductions from the permitted sources that’s why it was very important when we review states plans to see if we had assurance that they could achieve significant nonpoint source reductions from the non-permitted sector we could

Increase federal enforcement obviously EPA has a significant enforcement authority under the Clean Water Act we could prohibit new or expanded discharges again a TMDL is a pollution cap you have to get down to that level and you have to stay under that level if we don’t stand on the cap we could

Consider prohibiting or expanding or prohibiting newer expanded discharges under the various permitting programs we can move money around I don’t think taking money away from the state that is having trouble meeting their allocations is going to help much but we can certainly move the various grant monies around to

Areas that are producing the best results we could revise water quality standards that’s something we can always do through the TMDL or through the standard training review process and then the eighth one is just to catch all whatever other federal actions as needed so again these are these are all

Existing authorities this is not an expansion of anything that we that we plan to use with the TMDL these are always tools that we’ve had and we can use them as appropriate if we need to adjust this process along the way just very quickly some dates I’ve talked about milestones I’ve talked about

Watershed implementation plans the states right now the first date you see in red is November first they are actually giving us what we call input decks which are their spreadsheets that include all the practices if they want to put on the ground in the next two years they are developing their first to

Your milestones we are running those through our modeling tools to see what kind of reductions they will get and they will finalize that by early January at the same time they’re working on their phase 2 watershed implementation plans we will see a draft in mid-december we will have considerable

Conversations with the states and back and forth and then we will have final phase 2 watershed implementation plans at the end of March and then after that we implement those plans you know up until now it’s largely been planning and modeling and moving numbers around and

Doing model runs at that point it’s time to start implementing the plans or increase implementation of the plans until we get to 2017 this is where phase three will kick in we have agreed to do a comprehensive assessment in 2017 we will have more data we will have better

Modeling tools we will have a lot more of everything and it’s going to be time to take a step back and evaluate what our progress was and then actually develop a third plan that would put much more detail into what the jurisdictions and local governments are going to

Achieve in a last leg of this from 20 17 to 20 25 so we will essentially do this process again leading up to 2017 and that is all I have from upward from the presentation you you you I good afternoon this is anthony moore and i am the assistant secretary for

Chesapeake Bay restoration for the Commonwealth of Virginia thanks for the opportunity of letting me participate in this American Planning Association webinar if my background just read my bio book earlier but I just want to let people know that i spent about 15 years and a power station as a chemist a part

Of those duties or to evaluate water and air discharges to make sure that they were below our permit requirements spent a couple of years and Secretary of Natural Resources office as the assistant secretary and then policy director for DQ where I worked really closely with Chesapeake Bay issues as a

Senior policy advisor at EPA I work closely with region 3 and the EPA and the Chesapeake back EPA region 3 and the Chesapeake Bay Program on Chesapeake Bay issues I’d said I’d like to start off and I think this is the same slide that Jeff showed the numbers I think are the

Same but the point you want i want to make and the same point that Jeff made is that Chesapeake Bay Program has been very successful we think that the program has been working well through the years and as you see on the charts here from 1985 to 2009 the nutrient

Loads and they have been reduced approximately thirty percent now much of these reductions have come through better management and new technologies and upgrades to wastewater treatment plants but you can also see that other sectors such as agriculture have made significant reductions I think agriculture reduced about thirty percent

In those same years so this has been a very successful program we’ve probably picked most of the low-hanging fruit so the reductions that we need to make in the future or certainly be more costly the tributary strategies were approved in 2005 and it’s f mentioned that would have taken us just about the

Same level of reductions as the TMDL so the program was well on its way to making the bay cleanup goals before this TMDL was implemented the additional reductions from the tributary strategies to the TMDL are very minimal bay wyd in virginia phosphorus loads in chesapeake bay have decreased about thirty-seven

Percent from nineteen eighty five to two thousand and the difference in reductions from the tributary strategies to the TMDL were only about 1.3 million pounds per year so it’s not all doom and gloom but the Chesapeake Bay is being restored fishery populations are improving and we are making progress in

Other areas to continue our restoration goals Jeff mentioned future dates and again for this year 2011 2012 we were expecting revisions to the Chesapeake Bay model for some deficiencies that were realized in last year that was due to be completed by june thirtieth unfortunately that was completed only

About 30 days late so we had those upgrades to the model which i’ll talk a little bit about later the this year the states also have to develop their face to lips the Phase two plans are expected to be developed with actions that are proposed of a smaller local scale and

They have to be submitted to EPA by December the 15th EPA takes about a month a little bit less than a month to review those phase two whips they have made comments on them and then we the states or jurisdictions have to submit their final phase two whips by March the

۳۰th for 2017 again sixty percent of plans must be in place we look at progress of our plans and make adjustments and look at model performance and make adjustments there and then we would submit another phase 3 weapon 2017 by 2025 a hundred percent of our program needs to be in place I’ll

Just go through a couple things that Virginia has proposed the Commonwealth has developed as phase one whip which was approved by EPA in december of last year and included in their Chesapeake Bay TMDL the plan allows flexibility and implementation to ensure cost effective practices are given priorities the whip

Includes programs that were already in place and programs that could be expanded and we’ll also look at some new programs so this whip is not a totally new program some of the future proposals that we will make in Virginia and some of these proposals may take legislative

Action we think that we will meet our goals for wastewater through the watershed general permit that establishes caps of these watersheds for all the significant discharges now this allows wastewater treatment plants if they have this if they have correct that they can generate credits by doing more

Than they have to do and for those wastewater treatment plants that quite can’t quite meet their goals they’re allowed to buy credits to help them to meet their goals and some water treatment plants are doing this by having upgrades or making upgrades they aren’t at capacity yet so some of those

Wastewater treatment plants would have credits that they can buy and sell we also proposed to reduce nitrogen loads to the james river by about 2.6 million pounds and phosphorous lows by 200,000 pounds that’s strictly in the James River base and we think that upgrading to significant wastewater treatment plants and the James River

Will help us to meet their goals we will propose that new facilities under a thousand gallons per minute will from day have to offset their entire nutrient loads we also proposed that for the discharges that expand from a thousand gallons per day to 40,000 gallons per day we’ll also have to offset their

Entire nutrient loads so by the end of this plan all new facilities will have to offset their entire nutrient load the plan proposes stormwater retrofits on an existing developed land to reduce nitrogen phosphorus and sediment that when we say retrofits that’s always a term that it’s like scratching your

Nails on a chalkboard we’re not requiring localities to dig up concrete that’s not the only way that they can meet their goals so we want to give the localities the flexibility to find the best way to make those reductions and not necessarily dig up concrete we also are looking at extensions extensive

Implementation of resource management plans though these are farm specific plans that can use nutrient management plans livestock exclusion stream buffers and soil conservation but there would be a form specific plan so we would have planners that would go out into help farms to figure out exactly what they

Need to do to meet their reduction goals would establish these resource management plans well Virginia has been very busy with this year with different projects within this watershed implementation plan program of course we’re working on our phase 2 watershed implementation plan we have a stake holds advisory group that we’re working

With also we’re working with apply district commissions and local governments to help us to develop this plan we are looking at expanding our current nutrient credit exchange program currently the program looks at point source exchange and in a very few instances and allows agriculture and stormwater to exchange credits we would

Like to expand that program so that agricultural stormwater and on-site septic can participate fully in the plan and buy and sell credits we are currently conducting a study that study should be completed before the end of this year and present it to the General Assembly the General Assembly would act

On that next year we would hope we’re conducting a chlorophyll study on the James River we feel that there’s new science of chlorophyll and we are concerned with the way that our standard is applied Virginia is unique that we’re one of the few places that has actually

Has a chlorophyll number as criteria so we will study the chlorophyll standard so it reflects the best science and regulatory approaches will continue our nutrient reduction plans and activities on all the other watersheds and under James River and we will take about three to five years to conclude this study and

Make adjustments to that criteria as needed we’re also looking at a step or developing our two year milestone sell these will be the activities that Virginia plans to complete within the 1213 years we also have legislation that was passed that restricts the amount of phosphorous that can be placed into do

It yourself lawn maintenance fertilizer and after December of 2012 we feel that this will help us to meet our goals currently at Scott’s has told they will have a phosphorous free fertilizer by 2012 so this will help us to meet the goals and we’re also studying to see f slow release nitrogen

Can be used to help us to meet our goals also in the legislation it requires nutrient management plants on all municipal e own lands and golf courses that use fertilizer so that fertilizer bill and the work that we’re doing the fertilizer will definitely help us to meet our goals I mentioned the resource

Management plans earlier and we have a stakeholders advisory group that’s putting that program together also so now we look at the Chesapeake Bay region in Virginia and we had to determine what was the best way for us to collect information and develop this phase two program as you can see by this diagram

The planning district Commission’s are enveloped in black there are 32 solar water conservation districts that are in gold the segment sheds are listed here and also 96 localities and this doesn’t include numerous towns and other entities that we have to work with so we thought it would be effective for the

Commonwealth to work directly with the planning district Commission to develop our fleet of phase 2 plan after we develop the phase one whip I and staff from the Department of Conservation and Recreation and the Department of Environmental Quality went out to visit the 16 PDC’s that are in the Chesapeake

Bay Area watershed let them know first of all what was in the phase one whip and then to ask them to help us to develop this face to lift and then i’m not sure if john will talk to you a little bit more about that but he’s been

Essential are helping us to develop this plan developing the face to whip the EPA gave us guidance of March 30th that helped us to determine how to develop the space to whip that required us to go out to the district jurisdictions and divide the tmdb Bay TMDL allocations and

To local area targets we were supposed to work with local stakeholders including elected officials and staff and conservation districts watershed associations and citizens to identify specific controls and practices to be implemented by 2017 we’re also supposed to look at specific controls and practices in the first two year milestones that are submitted after

Development of the phase one live so as we were doing this looking at the allocations of dividing these allocations from the state level to the local area we found several anomalies in the model we’re developing these target loads we are working with EPA to resolve some of these anomalies before the two

Year milestones are evaluated and before the phase two whips are evaluated we still continue work with the localities to develop a phase two plan and meet pollution reduction goals without stifling economic development or reducing jobs I mentioned a couple of anomalies this is one of the anomalies

That we saw when we started to divide the allocations down to the local level this chart basically shows that the red indicates areas where nutrient management application rates are higher than corresponding non nutrient management rates and the 2009 progress run so basically this chart is telling us that if we use nutrient management

Plans then pollution rates go up in Virginia there are about forty two counties where this seems to be a problem the green charts the green areas on this chart of the nutrient management plants actually decrease nitrogen so it appears that there is some interaction with the changes in the BMPs that may

Have caused this problem and we’re working with EPA to try to fix some of these problems but also when you look at the changes between the two models 5.3 point 0 was the model that we use to develop a phase one with the new model is five point three point two when you

Look at the difference in percent nitrogen phosphorus and sediment reductions under state wide scale you don’t see a whole lot of difference in nitrogen it’s fifteen percent and the first model and twenty one percent and the second so that’s not much of a difference when you go to the watershed

Basin you see those numbers are still fairly close but they are starting to get further apart when you get to the sub watershed area of you can see many more differences if you look at sediment and the Chickahominy sub-watershed then you see that the old model there was a

Thirty percent reduction and in the new model there’s actually four hundred and eighty-four percent for an eighty-four percent increase so that means they basically meant that goat their goal and have credits to exchange when you get down to the county levels you can see that some of these anomalies are greater

If you look at James City County in the old model they basically had to reduce sediment by twenty percent and with a new model they actually have credits that they can exchange these are some of the anomalies that we receive it is as you see where some of these localities are actually getting

Credits in the new model somewhere around them the state that someone has to make up for those reductions so we’re trying to make sure that we have a common sense approach to developing these face to worship implementation plans at some key points in this phase to process on this TMDL process the TMDL

Is a 15 year process some of these proposals will take a while to take legislative action so this isn’t something that we have to complete in the next one or two years and development of the phase 2 watershed implementation plans again we’ve started our outreach to the PDC’s we’re looking

At what’s on the ground and localities and what pollution sources they are we also look at what what reduction goals they already have in place so we don’t want the localities to have to start all over again if they have reduction plans in place that will help us to meet our

Goals and they will be counted and our worse yet implementation plans if there are additional reductions that have to be made to make out goals and we’ll work with the localities and the stakeholders to find out what bmps will help us to meet those goals then we’re also in the

Process of developing our two-year milestones so again Virginia realizes that the Chesapeake Bay is a national treasure we want to make sure that we continue to work to implement our plan to restore the Chesapeake Bay and we want to make sure that we have a plan

That makes sense that will see actual on the ground water quality progress and not just plan to meet the model go holes so thank you for your attention unlistenable chart you you great well thank you all very much for for your at your speech we have a number

Of questions that come in people can feel free to type their questions into the box if they’ve like Jennifer we got one more alright I’ve got it yeah this is John garlic I’m delighted to participate on this panel as a second or third time I think that Jeff and Anthony

I have had the opportunity to do these kinds of things together and as a member of the division it’s it’s really neat to see this program moving forward the Hampton Roads planning district Commission is at the very southeastern Virginia or southeast corner of Virginia worked the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay

We are the headwaters of the album all pamlico estuarine systems we we get to play in both major bodies of water on the East Coast we have 16 cities and counties and additional 11 towns within the region we are very fortunate that we have one regional wastewater agency that

Treats the sewage from the bulk of the region we have rural communities urban communities and our effort has been focused primarily on dealing with urban nutrient reductions we’re one of 21 PDC’s in Virginia there are 16 of us that are working to some degree or another together to deal with the TMDL

Effort one of the issues that we had to deal with early on was the fact that the the numbers are allocated from the bay model through the state down to the localities on those numbers were allocated by local government within each of our localities we have state lands we have federal lands and

Agriculture as well as waste water agencies all of whom have a responsibility in cleanup effort and we have had to deal with trying to apportion the loads by locality down to those other sources as a region Hampton Roads has been involved in water quality and in the bay and our

Local waters full 40 some years going back to the 1970s with the hairy live water quality management planning program with EPA in the state we took the first region of look at nonpoint source pollution actually going out sampling we did the first region to look at how you make these trade-offs between

Point and non-point sources I guess if we have been smarter back then we would have solved the problem than wouldn’t be here today through the 80s and 90s we’ve maintained our involvement very active through the 90s ahead of the curve if you will developing a tributary strategy program trying to work with the

Localities to identify nutrient reduction strategies so that makes sense and could be implemented locally we also developed a regional stormwater program where the PDC works very closely with 12 localities that have storm water permits helping them with education providing technical support working with our friends at the state and federal level

On permit related issues we were actively involved with the state and the feds in in developing Chesapeake Bay agreement and making sure that our local law local perspective was included in that we had staff participating on a number of a program committees at the same time looking within the region that

Implementation plans for TM dls largely dealing with bacterial loads recreation waters and had shellfish contamination it has a region developed a cooperative sanitary sewer overflow consent order with with the state and with EPA that involves 14 localities and our regional wastewater agency over the last couple of years we have maintained our regional

Process sending local government staff and MPC staff to the various state committees monitoring those efforts and making sure that our elected officials were aware of what was coming at the same time we were trying to look at the impacts of of the TMDL and watershed implementation plan on our localities

Some scary numbers came out of that Jeff talked about the EPA backstops if we don’t get to where we need to be by 2025 our first look at what would be required from the stormwater standpoint was nine point seven nine point eight billion dollars of this 14-year period of time

That our localities would have to spend Anthony on a number of occasions as characterized the approaches adaptive management fortunately that’s the case of the numbers came down dramatically by the time Virginia finished the Thetas one watershed implementation plan we had some of the things that the General

Assembly did in in 2011 and we see the numbers coming down further we think as we find the land use numbers and the loads by localities that the local government cost is likely to come down further but still substantial amounts of money and this has certainly gotten the

Attention of the local elected officials Anthony talked about the PDC’s and our role in this I won’t belabor what’s on this slide but going back to the spring of last year the state indicated that they would like the PDC’s to help them and work through the process with

Localities are bored following a meeting in March and that’s and subsequent discussions committed to doing that we have created a regional steering committee that involves the local governments the Department of Defense who is a major landholder in Hampton Roads our state Department of Transportation soil and water conservation districts of the state

Agencies Hampton Roads Sanitation District that’s our region a wastewater agency and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science to provide some some grounding in science as we move forward forward with this this committee is a forum to to look at what the localities are responsible for coordinate with

Excuse me the state and EPA to expand opportunities for credit within the model a number of what local governments see as appropriate practices are presently accounted for in the model when we’re trying to make sure that the amount of money that localities are spending on those things do in fact give

Them credit and reductions and then finally to define regional leads for additional resources legislative authority funding policies and so forth Virginia is what’s called a Dillon rural state through the planners out there I suspect most of us know what that is but local governments can only do what the

State enables them to do back in that early nutrient reduction effort from 12 or 13 years ago our localities to find fertilizer management reduction of nitrogen and phosphorus is an appropriate vehicle for for meeting the nutrient reduction targets localities under Virginia law we’re not allowed to impose those kinds of restrictions and

It’s taken us a substantial period of time to get legislative authority and in this case the state has taken it over to restrict the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus in in fertilizers the second piece of our effort is a it’s the local tier each of the localities has established

Some sort of a excuse me multi department team that involves the chief administrative officer or his number two and the heads or senior staff from a number of different agencies to work together to try and identify what can be done by the locality to find what needs

To be done by other permittees and agriculture within the locality and to review the accuracy of the information that’s in the model what did I do can everybody see that slide yes we can see your slide okay I the localities are collecting and evaluating their data

Trying to identify what what they can do in the short period as well as 2017 and Beyond and trying to find support financial in particular to move that move that program forward obviously there are things that local governments are responsible for they’re using these as as criterion objectives and

Evaluating what they may propose at some point to the state cost effectiveness can we implement it can we get substantial education and outreach from these kinds of things and how do the how do these activities fit within typical local government objectives like urban renewal protection of drinking water and economic development

I’m not moving standard joke at the PDC that if there’s going to be technological problems John will discover them so I apologize for the technology issue here there have been a couple of recent developments from the state in epa in terms of Correspondence and looking at some of the issues the

Model issues that Anthony was talking about it’s a question of whether the model actually gives us data and results that are appropriate at the local level or whether it works best at the HEPA basin and larger level based on a correspondence which indicates that the model is probably not appropriate for

For use at the local level the localities and hampton roads and the pgce are evaluating a bit as to how we go about doing this in the absence of numbers which in some respects may make our lives easier we can focus on strategies but we’re probably going to

Have to do anyway sewer upgrades to reduce waste water overflows plant more trees connect homes to sewers in areas that are presently covered by septic tags a very big concern to the Hampton Roads localities has been the the fact that the TMDL and the numbers in it are

Likely to be enforced through municipal separate storm sewer system permits all of our localities are going to get new permits in the next one to four years our understanding of the rules and regulations are that the permits must be consistent with the TMDL and a serious concern that numbers from

From the model will be used to evaluate whether localities are complying with that permit or not we have in the past indicated EPA n to the state that we would like to see the numbers come out and a more performance based approach work for the permits we’re working with

The localities to try to make sure that they are ready for those permits when when it’s time to for them to be renewed and in trying to work with the state to get some more guidance on on how we should move forward in light of this new

Exchange on on the model I think the slides have now caught up with where we are we talked a little bit about what we are trying to do with the present time one thing that we want to make sure is localities have a good solid base of

Their land use and the BMPs on the ground so that come 2017 when EPA reruns the model and evaluates our progress that we have got the best information in that model that that we possibly can there are still still issues and concerns that are we’re all trying to

Deal with that’s not going Anthony talked about the the comparison of the model results between the old model and the new women’s those localities that suddenly find themselves that they’ve gone way beyond what they had to do there’s probably a certain temptation out there to declare victory and go home

At this point the news media in jenya has captured these numbers and has made a big deal of the fact that the numbers have changed dramatically and obviously the elected officials have to consider that may hear about it as as we move forward major concerns continue to be the relationship between the waste

Load allocations and the TMDL and the permits that are about to come forward as well as the concern on the part of elected officials that it implementation of these practices all of the work that will be done will in fact result in water quality improvements I think out

The particular problem our end of the the watershed simply because the modeling does not indicate that the discharges FA from Hampton Roads have a substantial impact on on the water quality in the central part of the day I was very happy to hear Jeff talk a few

Minutes ago about the fact that EPA is starting to to relook at what the benefits are from a pay cleaned up and restore day I think that will be helpful to all of us as we move this forward one of the difficulties that I’ve faced for

۱۵ years i’m not sure that we have have one to date the day yet is what does this all mean to planners they sit in meetings and we’re discussion of wastewater and engineering issues in virginia we’ve had something on the books for 20 years called the chesapeake

Bay preservation acted i think a lot of people saw that as as fixing our problem that act dealt with new development it didn’t do a whole lot for the restoration and in fixing the problems that we spent 400 years creating what if word of planners fit into all this there

Is considerable literature if EPA about using green infrastructure and smart growth as as bmps if you will I think those are areas the planners can step in and and help our counterparts in the engineering community you deal with these issues I think we have to do what

Planners do best and that’s to bring together the disparate disciplines and and try to craft solutions to look for everybody the interdisciplinary and obviously state federal and local energy asst diction ille kinds of things back in my teaching days I used to characterize 1970 versus 1990 as a a

Time when we went from real easy solutions technology engineering we had a lot of money at the time now we’ve got as we try to restore the bay land use policy kinds of issues and and no money to to deal with those things so that concludes my comments I think this last

Slide provides contact information for all of the folks on the panel as well as for lecien occur from the division who has been the brains behind getting us all together so I think we’re done at this point Jennifer wonderful so we’ll go ahead and accept questions from the audience so one of

The questions was about whether or not shellfish numbers are increasing so have you seen any positive outcomes at this point we have seen crab populations increasing in the Virginia area so I think that’s been very beneficial Jeff do you want to yeah I mean I’m Michelle

Fish died um again when i was with the Commonwealth of Virginia this is something that I worked on pretty extensively oysters are our main we have a pretty thriving clam industry as well but oysters are the main shellfish in the bay waters and they’re down to about

۱% of what they were in the eighteen hundreds part of that is due because they were overharvested we tried to bring back the population long time ago by bringing in an invasive invasive intentional foreign species that brought some disease and now that devastates our native species of oysters that however

There is some great new results coming and we’ve been trying a bunch of different technologies to actually kind of genetically select the most healthy oysters in the bay and allow them to reproduce and leave them in the bay so they can get old enough to reproduce and

It’s starting to look like the science is showing that we may be starting to beat this disease thing now even if we are it will still probably be decades before we see significant oyster population back but you know that could really be a game changer because oysters

Are a huge filter they filter about 50 gallons a day for every single oyster and by doing so they remove a lot of nutrients a lot of sediment lot of algae all the things that we’re trying to reduce in the bay so if we could get

Oysters back we’d have a heck of a pollution reduction mechanism in there but it’s going to be a while if we get there at all this is John we’ve had some experience in in Hampton Roads and some of the smaller tributaries with citizen efforts and locality efforts focused on

Those TMDL s for bacteria and we’ve seen particularly in the lynnhaven river in Virginia Beach a a significant increase in oyster population and the really neat thing is and now you can heat Lynnhaven oysters because there are free of contamination okay so Richard wants to know can can

You speak to the pollutant load trading that has occurred to date and how these arrangements are documented or institutionalized Virginia well I think that there are two states now that have trading programs Virginia and Pennsylvania have war quality trading programs Maryland it’s in the process of developing it if they already has

Haven’t developed one in Virginia the current program there was a watershed general permit that was issued in 2005 and this general permit established caps for different watersheds for nitrogen loading so the the witch water treatment plants and those areas are allowed to trade nutrient loads if they are doing

More than they’re required to do they can gain credits and they can trade those credits if there are some wastewater treatment plants that you haven’t quite met their goals then they can buy credits we have been going through an extensive upgrade program since 2005 and some wastewater treatment

Plants have completed their upgrades so they have additional capacity that they are not currently using so at this time they can use that additional capacity as a credit and so that’s basically how it works with wastewater treatment plants we’re looking at expanding that to other sectors like Jeff wants to add this is

Jeffrey plg said in general it’s a very timely question because there are a lot of different state it’s looking at the potential for trading i would say that Virginia has probably been the leader on this I’m not saying that just to be nice because i’m sitting here with virginia colleague

That in 05 is when actually they developed their program and i’m not even certain i’d call it trading it’s it’s technically called an exchange program so they sewage treatment plants and industrial plants can move their allocations between themselves and that’s very cleancut you do that all through permitting it gets a little bit

More fuzzy when you start talking about trading point sources to non-point sources and there’s a couple states that have programs set up to do that including Pennsylvania who actually has had some options to sell some of these credits but none of them have actually been implemented or sold they’ve been

They’ve been purchased but they haven’t actually been used to offset loads because we are in the process of trying to figure out exactly what the person who asked the question was getting at is how do we verify those what is the mechanism for making certain that we achieve those reductions and largely

They will have to be done through a permitting process so a permitted point source if they want to use for example reductions that a farmer has generated somehow those credits would have to be incorporated into that point source permit and it would have to be some inspection requirements and verification

Requirements and said it was timely because a lot of states are developing these programs right now an EPA is currently in the process of evaluating all the state’s programs you okay so the next question is from Brett and what efforts have been made to actively clean the water such as through

Wetland restoration or community cleanup activities I think in a number of areas there have been considerable efforts at at wetland restoration we have a pretty substantial program in hampton roads in the Elizabeth River to clean up sediments restore wetlands along the waterway and we’ve seen some pretty positive results

With fish populations and and reduction in in some of the impacts of cancerous tumors on fish and so forth I think the Anacostia River in in the DC area as a similar effort at and I can’t really speak to that one to any degree well this is Jeff again just in general I

Mean they’re two separate things add up and we have to always remind ourselves and we’ve been talking for an hour about reducing pollution and that the bays impair but there’s some great restoration efforts happening out there and we could spend hours talking about all the great things that local

Organizations are doing one of them are the cleanups a number of different organizations around the bay watershed sponsored bay cleanups and river cleanup sand creek cleanups it has a huge impact on the local water quality a lot of that is trash removal extremely important to the health of local streams but it’s

Really not a component of this TMDL it’s not a nitrogen phosphorous sediment sort of action that you’re taking on the wetland side you know there are permitted restoration of wetlands and there are voluntary restorations and there’s a lot of that happening unfortunately you know when you look at

The pluses and minuses we still tend to lose more wetlands than we’re restoring but there’s a lot of efforts underway to get to a point where we are at a no net loss goal of losing no further wetlands and a lot of that is happening is John was saying at the local level

You okay and so Stewart wants to know what is EPA doing to expand backstop options to sources beyond urban NPDES permits well at EPA we’ve got the authority that we’ve been given to us by Congress so if we want to expand our authority that’s got to be done through an act of

Congress right now there are not any attempts to expand that the list that I showed you earlier was our existing authorities under existing clean water act through statutes and through regulations now that said there are you know rulemakings that are in the progress for for urban stormwater for

What we call ms for localities and there are some things on the table you know looking at whether or not different thresholds for the size of localities for permitting and a number of different things but that’s not directly tied to the TMDL it’s a national rulemaking to

Address the fact that every year when you look at States impaired waters list we have more and more waters that are being listed as impaired from urban runoff so that’s a national rulemaking that’s just kind of in the early stage it’s a little too early to talk about

What that rule making my do but otherwise been that where we’re operating under the existing authorities that we have in the Clean Water Act okay we have a couple of related questions so Peter wants to know whether or not you agree that population growth in lane development patterns are critical issue

To be addressed to achieve and maintain TMDL limits and then a bit on the flip side nicholas wants to know whether that has increased development costs in order to comply with the plan you this is John that’s one of those difficult questions to to fully answer I

Think clearly if if we develop with how some of the management tools and and we do what i would call dumb development it’s going to make it more difficult as time goes forward to to meet the TMDL limit we’ll probably dumb development we’re going to make things worse I think

There are tools and if we use those tools properly we can certainly maintain where we are and then we’re looking at the retrofit issue of how we fix the things that we’ve already created as it made things more expensive any developer will tell you yes it has any local

Government official who’s who’s trying to build roads schools any kind of public complex will tell you yeah it does cost more money to properly manage stormwater to properly landscape the facilities and and then certainly to maintain and operate as we go forward ok and so related to that what is EPA

Doing with HUD and do t to coordinate TMDL with smart growth development that’s it it’s a great question the federal partners are at the table and now that we have this executive order that the president issue they’re even more firmly at the table into this decision just going back one second to

This issue of population it is absolutely a challenge I mean you can’t dodge the fact that it’s he MDL is a cap you have to stay underneath that cap and obviously it gets harder and harder to stay under that captain more and more people that you have so that is a key

Component that is often overlooked in the TMDL that we have a challenge getting down to the cap and then we have an extreme challenge staying under that cap and that’s where this whole issue a few questions ago that we talked about was trading you know trading is a tuille

You often thought of as to how do you get to your cap offsets is the word that’s used is how do you stay under your cap and that’s a critical component that we are looking at right now in states are developing these offset programs vdot and hood you know there at

The table a big portion of there’s a lot of roads in the Bay watershed and a big portion of the runoff is coming from primary and secondary roads and they understand that and we are dealing we’re working very closely with them right now there’s probably going to be some additional requirements for

Transportation projects in the new stormwater rule that’s going to be coming out because it is a pretty significant source of runoff especially obviously in the highly developed areas okay so a related question to that is can you speak a little more about nutrient trading and the possibility of trades between the agricultural and

Industry this is anthony we are virginia’s looking at expanding our training program and right now we’re in the process of doing a study of how to best meet that those goals so we’re working with stakeholders and wastewater industry and agricultural and urban stormwater industries to try to put

Together a plan that would help us to meet our test mcveigh reduction goals as well as give the localities the flexibility to choose what types of pollution reduction programs that they can use to meet their goals so we’re hoping that by the end of December that

We will have a plan that we can present to the General Assembly if anyone wants to stay involved or keep keep up with that process that we can make sure that we provide you with additional information on how we are planning to meet the how we’re progressing on making

That study and completing that study but it were currently in the process of going through exactly what this question asked okay and Nicholas wants to know has the general population embrace the efforts or is it just seeing as more regulation so what’s the public response then mixed I would say it’s always a

Challenge to get 17 million people involved in this process I can say the one thing about the phase two process where we were states are actually reaching out to local governments and getting them about involved is there is a whole lot more people now following this process I always jokingly tell

People that you know the good news is is that we have pretty much everybody paying attention out and bad news is that we pretty much have everybody paying attention now and that’s bringing a lot of issues to the table and you know I say it’s mixed I wouldn’t say I

Say this to a lot of people in presentations I have never heard anybody not a citizen not a planner not a politician now the sewage treatment plant operators say that we shouldn’t be doing this now that doesn’t mean they don’t have issues as to how we’re doing it or how we’re allocating

The pollution loads but nobody has said that we shouldn’t be restoring local water quality and the quality of the rivers and streams in the Chesapeake Bay and that gives me great hope that we can work through a lot of these issues we can always have more people involved and

I mentioned in the Tim in my presentation what is different about this and transparency is going to be key and I think we’re going to see nothing but an upward trend of more and more of the general population getting involved in these discussions as we move forward

All right so a perspective developed in the Shenandoah Valley was that in order to take care of the water every land owner and manager in the watershed had to manage all property for protection of water quality any comments on that that’s from tom I was just say in

General I don’t know if if Anthony wants had a Virginia twist to it but you know in it’s definitely a challenge as far away as the Shenandoah Valley is it’s you know this is all about land use this is all about what is the land use and

What is the pollution coming off the land and even though farm land is a preferred use and we would much rather see as much farmland stay in production as we can in the bay watershed it has to be properly managed in a lot of that there’s a lot of conservation practices

Going on the ground and farmland right now there’s a lot of federal and state money being devoted to that but it has to go further i think when i was still with the commonwealth and i think that the goal that we said we had to reach is

That 90 something percent of all the acres of farmland in virginia not just in the valley had to have a suite of three or four or five conservation practices put on them we’re not there yet we can get there I think there’s a willingness to the farmers to do that

But it’s going to be a challenge and obviously it’s going to take some additional resources to make that happen and this is anthony okay we have one last question okay sorry well that’s okay well i would just wanted to say to key to our plan is flexibility we want

To give people the tools to meet their goals and we want to set realistic goals and we think by doing that that we can make this plan economically feasible and also meet the goals of the bay program so flexibility is a big thing that we’re trying to include in this worship

Implementation plan great we have one last question this is from Barbara so a recent article in the Richmond times-dispatch quotes the EPA as saying that Virginia has been too reliant on the model in the WIP to process moving forward is the state considering another approach next so what is it I like Jeff

Mme start i think that quote was from this Jeff Corbin guy so I’ll go ahead what our focus has been is that the model and I think even Anthony agreed in his presentation the model works very very good at the state level works very very good at the river basin level and

That’s how we allocate 3pa the allocations to the states and the states through their planning process break it up into finer allocations and what well my quote was getting at is that you know we know that heck even if we took the model away and went back to three

Versions of the model ago you know we were developing clean up strategies and Virginia in the other states and we knew what we needed to do we were putting together plans we knew that we had to upgrade sewage treatment plants we knew we had to get more practices in urban

Areas we had to get more conservation practices on farmland so it’s just been a bit frustrating that the better that the model gets the more we focus on exactly what we have to do and where we need to do them and we pretty much know

What we need to do and and I don’t I don’t mean to to say that the localities and states should not be raising these issues we need to make that model as good as we can but the model was never developed to say okay county a here is

What your load is the model was designed to figure out what the loading allocation for each major river is and then using your implementation process you figure out what practices going to put on the ground so somehow we need to get past this point where we’re focusing on the model we start focusing

On implementation and this is anthony on the Virginia perspective and I agree with most of what Jeff said I mean the model is a tool and it should be used as a tool but the way EPA is using it I EPA uses that model to grade worship implementation plans they use it to

Grade our two-year milestones so if we’re looking at putting together a plan and using flawed numbers then that plan is not going to work out in the end so we would like to see EPA take some time out and look at some of these model issues we’ve had several meetings over

These model issues and I think we’ve gotten to the point where EPA understands what these issues are but trying to get them fixed in a timely manner so they can accurately evaluate our program and accurately evaluate how we’re progressing in our program would be extremely helpful and I think it

Would make this whole bait process a lot easier on the localities on the states and on EPA this is John just one more comment on that I agree with my two colleagues the numbers become particularly important at the local level to the extent that the TMDL includes numbers and the way I think

Everybody understands the storm water and the wastewater permit program is whatever the numbers are in a TMDL those waste load allocations become the numbers that end up in permits and govern the compliance objective for compliance obligation of local governments and that is the area that I think Hampton Roads and it’s localities

And I suspect my counterparts throughout the the watershed have been particularly concerned and hung up about the numbers and why we have urged to stay in the federal government both to i use the numbers as an indicator but not use them as permit requirements

We are now out of time but I want to thank everybody for joining us today and thank our speakers for this great overview of the Chesapeake Bay restoration program as a reminder we will provide the slides and the audio and video from today’s session this will

Be up later in the week on the Utah a hyphen APA website and we thank you all for joining us have a great day the organizer

ID: bEbtmdSVBc8
Time: 1343348883
Date: 2012-07-27 04:58:03
Duration: 01:29:00

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