By Karl Blankenship, Chesapeake Bay Journal

States in the Chesapeake Bay watershed are urging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to stick with the cooperative strategy they’ve created for reducing the pollution flowing past the Conowingo Dam.

The states say funding is on the horizon to start implementing their $53-million-a-year plan to offset the increasing load of pollution.

More nutrients and sediment have reached the Bay in recent years as the reservoir behind the 94-foot-high structure on the Susquehanna River has largely filled, allowing more pollutants to wash downstream.

The states’ letter, dated March 21, was in response to an EPA review released in January that expressed “no confidence” in the plan because of a lack of state funding to enact it.

The EPA gave the states 60 days to respond and said it could pull the plug on the 4-year-old cooperative effort to address the problem. Instead, the agency could simply require each state to reduce more of its own pollution load to the Bay.

The background

Figuring out how to resolve the Conowingo issue has long bedeviled policymakers.

For decades, the dam — located just 10 miles upstream from the Bay — kept large amounts of nutrients and sediment from reaching the Chesapeake.

But studies since the early 1990s have warned that the reservoir would eventually fill, at which point more nutrients and sediment would flow past the dam and into the Bay.

When the EPA and the states agreed on a new Bay cleanup plan in 2010, it was thought the dam’s reservoir would not be filled until after 2025, when all pollution actions needed to restore Chesapeake water quality are supposed to be in place.

But after the EPA had assigned pollution reduction goals to each state, new research indicated that the reservoir was already failing to trap pollutants, and greater amounts were reaching the Bay.

With each state already struggling to meet its own nutrient reduction goal, the states and the EPA agreed to create a separate cleanup strategy aimed at offsetting the Conowingo impact and to find a way to pay for it.

The EPA awarded a contract to several groups, led by the nonprofit Center for Watershed Protection, to write the strategy.

After exploring options, the plan concluded the most cost-effective approach was to focus on reducing nutrient and sediment loads in the Susquehanna basin, which is mostly in Pennsylvania.

The plan would reduce the nitrogen load by 6 million pounds a year and phosphorus by 260,000 pounds a year.

About 90% of the reductions would come from agriculture and most of the rest from developed lands.

It would cost $53 million a year to implement, largely by funding more runoff controls on farmland, plus roughly $13 million a year for additional technical and administrative support.

When they agreed to create the separate Conowingo plan, the Bay watershed states had hoped that Exelon Corp., which owns the hydroelectric dam, would foot much of the bill as part of its negotiations for a new operating license.

But Maryland and Exelon reached an agreement that does not include significant financing for the plan. Exelon has long maintained that it is not responsible for the nutrients and sediment because they originate upstream, not from the dam itself. (Several environmental groups have filed a suit, though, with the goal of getting the utility to pay more.)

The lack of money from Exelon means the states — which are legally responsible for meeting Bay water quality goals — would have to come up with a way to pay for the plan’s implementation.

The states respond

In their response to the EPA’s review, the states noted that full funding for the plan is not immediately needed.

In 2022–23, their goal is to achieve a 25% nitrogen reduction (or 1.674 million pounds) while programs are put in place to accelerate actions in following years.

And, they said some money is on the horizon. Maryland’s capital budget includes $25 million to support the plan, and the state aims to spend an additional $6 million on a pilot program exploring the feasibility of dredging built-up sediment from behind the dam.

Also, the state is planning to spend almost $13 million from its Exelon settlement over the next three years on related projects, including efforts to stock water-filtering mussels in the river.

In a separate letter, Pennsylvania environment officials said that Gov. Tom Wolf’s proposed budget includes substantial increases for environmental and watershed improvement programs, much of it coming from federal funds related to COVID relief and infrastructure improvements, which could help fund the work.

The joint state letter also called for the federal government to chip in, saying it “is essential that EPA and other federal agencies” also invest money they are receiving from new infrastructure funding programs to implement the Conowingo plan.

If the plan is scrapped

The EPA has indicated that if it believes that the Conowingo plan is not fully funded, it could scrap the plan and order each state to make additional nutrient reductions as part of their own Bay cleanup plans.

That would still meet the overall Chesapeake water quality goals, but it would do so by requiring places with less impact on the Bay to do more — and it would likely cost significantly more than the proposed plan.

The rationale is that all of the states benefited when Conowingo was helping to improve Bay water quality by trapping nutrients and sediments. That, in turn, lessened the pollution reduction goals each state was assigned in the 2010 cleanup plan, formally known as the Bay’s total maximum daily load, or TMDL.

“[Had] the reservoir reached trapping capacity prior to the Bay TMDL being established,” the EPA review stated, “the Bay jurisdictions would have had a greater lift to meet their respective Bay TMDL allocations.”

The EPA has not said when it will make a final decision after reviewing the states’ letter.

[Visit DEP’s Chesapeake Bay Watershed webpage to learn more about cleaning up rivers and streams in Pennsylvania's portion of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed.

[How Clean Is Your Stream?

[Check DEP’s 2022 Water Quality Report to find out how clean streams are near you.]

(Reprinted from the Chesapeake Bay Journal.)

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[Posted: April 12, 2022]

4/18/2022