Chesapeake Bay Drainage in White

Hearings in the Senate and House this week focused on DEP’s Chesapeake Bay Tributary Strategy designed to meet the 2000 Chesapeake Bay Agreement to reduce nutrients and sediments coming from Pennsylvania to the Bay.

In the Senate, the Environmental Resources and Energy Committee, chaired by Senators Mary Jo White (R-Venango) and Ray Musto (D-Luzerne) and the Agriculture Committee chaired by Sen. Mike Waugh (R-York) and Sen. Michael O’Pake (D-Berks) held a hearing Tuesday. The House Environmental Resources and Energy Committee chaired by Rep. Bill Adolph (R-Delaware) and Rep. Bud George (D-Clearfield) held a hearing Wednesday.

At the hearings, the Department of Environmental Protection and the Pennsylvania Environmental Council each announced the latest steps in creating a nutrient credit trading program that all sides agree is a key to cost-effective implementation of the Bay Strategy.

As a result of the 2000 Chesapeake Bay Agreements, Pennsylvania is faced with reducing nutrient loads by 38 million pounds between now and 2010 and sediment loads by 116,000 tons. The Bay Strategy provides a menu of programs to achieve those goals.

Representatives of the PA Municipal Authorities Association, the agriculture community, builders, and conservation districts expressed concern at the rapid implementation of the Bay Strategy by DEP without what they considered to be adequate involvement in its creation. They did acknowledge that very recent meetings with DEP were productive.

These groups also raised questions about where the resources would come from to finance what DEP’s Strategy estimates to be a $8.2 billion price tag for implementing all the nutrient and sediment reduction programs in the Strategy by wastewater treatment plants, farmers, land developers and county conservation districts.

They also said key programs, like the nutrient credit trading program that would allow wastewater plants to meet their nutrient reduction goals by paying for the installation of cost-effective best management practices on farms, were not yet up and running in final form, even though decisions have to be made in the near future about how facilities are to meet the new requirements.

Saying the Tributary Strategy was not a “menu of mandates,” DEP Secretary Kathleen McGinty announced DEP will publish an interim final policy and appendix outlining the structure and operation of the nutrient credit trading program in the October 1 PA Bulletin to provide an outline of how the system will work. (Secretary’s Testimony)

Secretary McGinty also said DEP was working to make financial resources available to help with implementing the Strategy and trying to work more closely with stakeholders involved in meeting Pennsylvania’s Chesapeake Bay commitments.

The Pennsylvania Environmental Council announced the results of their first “reverse auction” of nutrient reduction projects in the Conestoga River, Lancaster County as part of the effort to develop a trading program that will help reduce the cost of implementing the Bay Strategy.

Under this initiative, the first seven projects were funded that will reduce nutrients by over 4,300 pounds and sediment by 4,580 tons over the life of the best management practices installed on participating farms.

Noting the cost of reducing a pound of nutrients from a wastewater plant may be as high as $90 per pound, Andrew McElwaine, President & CEO of PEC, said 4,200 pounds of the 4,300 pounds of phosphorus removed cost less than $13 per pound in the auction.

McElwaine said the auction was made possible by many partners, like the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service, Lancaster County Conservation District and NutrientNet, an online tool for analyzing the nutrient and sediment reduction value of projects on specific farms, it helped customize with the World Resources Institute. NutrientNet is key to assigning value to nutrient credits in a trading system.

A number of witnesses noted the need to document the impact that streambank erosion and “legacy sediments” – sediments left over from hundreds of old mill dams—are having on nutrient and sediment loadings to the Bay.

Mark Gutshall, from LandStudies, Inc. of Lancaster County, said research by Franklin and Marshall College, the University of Louisville and their own watershed assessments have documented that 50 to 80 percent of sediment comes from eroding streambanks, not overland flows across farm fields or forests as previously thought. Sediment and nutrients from this source are being significantly under estimated in the models used for assessing watersheds.

Gutshall noted the success they’ve had with a technique known as floodplain restoration in eliminating streambank erosion and controlling stormwater and flooding. PEC, LandStudies, DEP and Pfizer worked on a project to restore the floodplain to 750 feet of New Street Ecological Park in Lititz that resulted in the first nutrient trade in Pennsylvania.

Matthew Ehrhart of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation supported the Tributary Strategy, and said key provisions, like the credit trading program “are poised to be a national leader,” but the details still need to be worked out and resources have not been identified to implement the Strategy on the ground.

CBF also supported the “Farmers First Agenda” proposed by Senators Waugh and Wenger (R-Lancaster) that would preserve farmland and put programs in place to preserve farmers as well as the land they farm. (See separate Digest story on new Vital Signs report on health of farming in the Chesapeake Bay drainage area.)

CBF noted Pennsylvania needs to get more of a share of the 2007 Federal Farm Bill funding for conservation practices and is working with a variety of groups to achieve that goal.

No specific next steps were announced by the Committees although members said they would continue to monitor DEP’s implementation of the Strategy closely.

Others presenting testimony at the hearings included: the Department of Agriculture, Chesapeake Bay Commission, PennAg Industries Association and the Ag Coalition.

9/23/2005