NOT A DROP TO DRINK — YET
No permission so far for Cranston’s Mill Pond owners to tap water
Often, the challenge with reservoirs is getting permission to establish one — but the owners of a 55-acre pond created more than a century and a half ago are having a hard time getting permission to tap theirs.
State water regulators say they’re planning to deny Restoration Systems Inc.’s request for a permit to take up to 15 million gallons a day from Cranston’s Mill Pond in upper James City County.
The company proposed doing that back in 2016 in response to regulators’ warnings that the aquifer that hundreds of thousands of Tidewater Virginians rely on for drinking water was shrinking too fast. Restoration acquired the pond 12 years ago and replaced a failed dam when it set up a program that generated credits for reducing phosphorus flows into the James River and Chesapeake Bay.
The state has since slashed the amount of groundwater that big users can draw from the aquifer to 69 million gallons a day from 145 million — for James City County, that meant an eventual cut to 3.8 million gallons. It currently draws about 5 million.
But the problem with Restoration’s plan to sell water from the pond is that it hasn’t lined up an end user, Scott Kudlas, director of the state’s Office of Water Supply, told a public hearing last month. That makes it hard to say if the benefit from using the water offsets any negative effects.
Jeff Corbin, senior vice president for water quality markets at Restoration, said he feels caught in a Catch-22.
Two draft permits, one in 2017 and another in 2019, proposed a conditional permit, which wouldn’t go into effect until Restoration signed up a buyer and state regulators approved of the use and the details of how the water would be drawn and shipped from the pond. Neither draft ever went into effect.
Corbin needed that conditional permit, and especially what it
would say about how much water could be drawn, before any end user would commit to the idea. He said he’d been talking to James City County about using the pond.
But the 2017 draft proposed that Restoration draw only 10% of the water that flows into the pond.
Over the next two years, Restoration and the water and biologist experts it engaged worked to assess how the flow of water into and out of the pond affected currents and saltiness of downstream Yarmouth Creek. They thought they made a case that they could tap millions of gallons a day, rather than the 300,000 gallons state regulators suggested, without harming either.
The 300,000 gallons a day wouldn’t be enough to make a deal financially viable, the company said. On the other hand, its experts said a flow of 300,000 gallons from the pond into Yarmouth Creek would be enough to maintain the creek’s water quality, which meant the company could withdraw millions of gallons without any significant impact.
State regulators didn’t agree.
Four months later, the Department of Environmental Quality went a step further and declared it would not issue a permit until an end user had been identified.
Restoration is objecting. A Department of Environmental Quality hearing officer is reviewing the issue, and is slated to make a recommendation to the State Water Control Board when it meets in the spring.
“What’s crazy about this whole circular reasoning is that the draft permits included several special conditions dealing with when we identify an end user in the future,” Corbin said.
“Those were DEQ’s conditions and we agreed to them — now they say no end user, no permit,” he continued. “Had they told me this three years ago I could have saved a lot of time, effort and money.”