County meets Bay cleanup head-on
By DAVID THOMPSON - dthompson@sungazette.comThe initiative to clean up the Chesapeake Bay may be a bitter pill for many communities facing the huge expense of cleaning up the bay’s watershed, but the Lycoming County commissioners are trying to make that pill as easy to swallow as possible.
On Thursday the commissioners hosted a workshop at the Old Lycoming Township fire hall to begin working on a comprehensive strategy to meet head-on the challenge of the bay cleanup.
More than 100 stakeholders — municipal, county and state officials, agriculture and conservation representatives and local citizens — met to discuss how to meet federal and state regulations requiring the reduction of nitrogen, phosphorous and sediment from being deposited into the Susquehanna River.
“The challenge for us is to develop or craft the most effective implementation strategy possible in cooperation with all stakeholders,” Commissioner Rebecca A. Burke said.
The workshop was moderated by Dennis W. Auker, a principal with consulting firm Delta Development Group of Mechanicsburg.
The workshop‘s purpose was to gather information to find the lowest-cost solutions to bring the county into compliance with regulations, Auker said.
The groups affected by the regulations are diverse and include municipal sewer authorities, municipal officials, sewer rate payers, the agriculture community, business and industry, conservation organizations and planning and economic development organizations, he said.
The group received a historical overview from John Hines, executive director of the state Department of Environmental Protection’s Water Planning Office, on how the the multi-state initiative to clean up the bay got to where it is today.
According to Hines, the issue dates back to 1972 with the passage of the federal Clean Waters Act. The law forbids any state from polluting the waters of another downstream state, Hines said.
The state was sued in 1996 by Maryland for causing pollution in the bay, and in 2000 Pennsylvania agreed to a cleanup plan to reverse the problem, Hines said.
When Maryland stepped up its water quality regulations in 2005, it “ratcheted up” Pennsylvania’s need to comply with the standards, Hines said.
DEP is the agency charged with enforcing the federal regulations, according to the agency’s northcentral region director Robert Yowell.
Lycoming County Water and Sewer Authority Executive Director Christine Maggi discussed upgrade activities of treatment plants in the county.
According to Maggi, seven wastewater treatment plants are operated by six municipalities.
Of those plants, three — two operated by the Williamsport Sanitary Authority and one operated by the Borough of Montgomery — must be in compliance with nutrient reduction standards by 2010.
Treatment plants operated by the county Water and Sewer Authority and the boroughs of Jersey Shore and Muncy must become compliant by 2012, Maggi said.
The Hughesville-Wolf Township plant must be compliant by 2014, she said.
Although each plant has different issues that require different solutions, the common denominator with each is that it will cost a lot to upgrade and sewer system customers are going to see higher sewer rates, she said.
A panel representing different stakeholders groups was held. The panel included Lycoming County Cooperative Extension educator Thomas Murphy, Williamsport Sanitary Authority executive director Walt Nicholson and Williamsport-Lycoming Chamber of Commerce president Vincent Matteo.
Murphy discussed the challenges of implementing a program to reduce nutrients in agriculture.
“Unlike (sewage treatment plants) where you can reference something very specifically, with agriculture it is hard to pinpoint (a problem),” Murphy said. “You are talking about a very wide landscape.”
Murphy noted that agriculture’s involvement in the cleanup initiative “has to have economic sustainability.”
“Ag is an industry that is run very leanly,” he said.
Murphy also discussed some of the successful conservation programs that farmers have implemented, adding that farmers in the state have spent $500 million to reduce pollution in recent years.
Nicholson said he was concerned about a proposed nutrient trading program, which allows a treatment plant can buy credits from the agriculture sector to help meet its nutrient reduction requirements.
The program allows farmers to sell credits for instituting best management practices that reduce the nutrients and sediment that enters the watershed. If a treatment plant cannot meet its requirements, purchasing those credits will bring it into line with regulations.
Nicholson said the cost of the credits is unknown, so sewage treatment plants facing expensive upgrades are unsure of whether to include them in their compliance plans.
Matteo said he was worried the initiative will hurt not only industrial and commercial development in the county but residential development as well.
During the afternoon phase of the workshop, participants broke into three focus groups to discuss challenges and possible solutions associated with each group. The groups included point source, non-point source and planning and economic development.
Point source polluters are sewage treatment plants and non-point sources are polluters such as agriculture, forestry and real estate development.
Later the groups met to discuss their findings. Funding was a common issue with each group.
According to Auker, that information will be used to better define the goals of the stakeholder group. Delta Development will compile the information and notify participants about the results, he said.
The county’s effort to find a solution to the problem is unprecedented, Hines said.
“I’ve been involved in the Chesapeake Bay effort for three years and this is the first time I’ve been in a forum like this on the county level,” said.
The county and its stakeholders clearly has its work cut out for it, said William Kelly, county Department of Planning and Community Development deputy director.
“Today is a starting point,” Kelly said. “We didn’t get there overnight and we’re not going to solve it today.”
