By Paul Swartz, Executive Director, Susquehanna River Basin Commission

Over the years, I have come to appreciate the phrase, “Stay in your lane.” At the street level, I think it generally means sticking to what you know and letting others do the same.

When a regulatory agency chooses to stray out of its lane of expertise and mission, it can have profound programmatic and legal consequences. Most important, however, I believe it does the public a disservice.

SRBC recently launched a multi-year effort to study the cumulative impact of consumptive water uses and water availability for the Susquehanna basin. Despite some calls for us to make it an expansive environmental assessment, we are being responsible water managers by focusing in our areas of responsibility and scientific and technical expertise.

This water quantity study, called the Cumulative Water Use and Availability Study, will take into account regulated and unregulated consumptive water uses in the entire 27,510 square mile Susquehanna basin and determine their impact on the water resources of the basin.

That includes water withdrawn and used for power generation, public water supplies and other domestic uses, natural gas development, agriculture, manufacturing, recreation, institutions such as schools and hospitals, and numerous other uses.

Specifically, SRBC will compile existing and projected water use data, quantify consumptive water use for all sectors at a watershed scale and catalog water availability by watersheds. SRBC will also develop an interactive tool to automate the process of assessing water use availability versus cumulative consumptive water use at the project and watershed scales.

Initially, the tool will be used to inform water resource planning and management decisions. Then, a web-based, user-friendly version will be developed and made available for the public.

Anyone interested in learning more about the study can visit our website or call SRBC at 717-238-0423 to request printed information. As new information and products become available, SRBC will update the webpage.

Given significant interest in this study, SRBC built in a stakeholders’ process as well as ongoing public information components to ensure we keep basin citizens informed. We held the first stakeholders’ meeting at the end of April to explain the purposes and components of the study, answer questions and outline how stakeholders will be involved at key steps until the study is finished

Our stakeholders comprise a wide-range of interests from New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland, including water suppliers, environmental and conservation groups, planning, conservation and environmental protection and fisheries agencies, business and industry, agriculture, related trade associations, representatives of towns and cities and citizen-interest groups.

While we will continue to remind people that SRBC has an important regulatory function focused on water quantity, certainly, when we review water quantity applications, SRBC always considers potential impacts to water quality and aquatic habitat.

In fact, when such monitoring data do not exist for a waterway or small watershed, SRBC sends its team of aquatic resource scientists to collect that missing information before we consider an application. We call this monitoring data collection process our Aquatic Resource Survey (ARS) program. I invite you to learn how SRBC conducts these vitally important surveys and applies the findings into the regulatory program.

Please go to the SRBC website and view the ARS video.

As a water management agency, we work to assure the long-term balance between healthy ecosystems and economic vitality.

Given that water supply for human uses can affect aquatic ecosystems if not returned to streams undiminished in quantity, it is important for SRBC to quantify the potential impacts of these consumptive water uses on the basin’s water resources and aquatic life – not only individually but also cumulatively.

That is the overarching purpose of the cumulative water use and availability study we have launched. SRBC will do its part to push out information and to keep the public informed and involved through the stakeholders process.

NewsClip: SRBC Defends Role In Overseeing Water Quantity

5/13/2013