Beaver Water District wants proposal changed

The major water supplier for Northwest Arkansas says a proposed state regulation to protect water quality isn’t detailed enough to be effective. At least one of the cities that must OK the regulation agrees.

An objection to the definition of a watershed may be resolved, but other requests for measurements, monitoring and enforcement require a level of detail and certainty that doesn’t exist, Bradley Stewart of Fayetteville said Friday. Stewart is the chairman of the advisory group writing the proposed regulation.

For example, the proposal would allow wastewater plant operators to make cooperative agreements with other operators in the same watershed. Lane Crider, chief executive officer of the Beaver Water District, said the regulation as originally proposed considered the entire state as a single watershed.

“We’re all in the Mississippi River watershed,” he said.

A treatment plant in Beaver Lake’s White River watershed could make a deal with another anywhere in the state whether it helps either region’s water quality or not, he said.

The group writing the regulation has agreed to make the definition of “watershed” less broad, Stewart said.

But other disagreements remain and threaten to derail the initiative.

The regulation in question would let operators of wastewater treatment plants engage in “nutrient trading.” Some plants already remove more nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen out of their discharge than required by the plant’s state-issued permit.

Operators of those plants would be allowed to let another treatment plant in the same watershed use the deficit in return for payment or something else of value if the nutrient trading regulation is approved.

To use an analogy, suppose two homeowners have the same size garbage can. One homeowner, Jones, often has more bags of trash than will fit, while Smith rarely fills his up. So Smith lets Jones toss his extra trash in his container for a small price.

OBJECTIONS NOTED

Most of the residents in Northwest Arkansas get their drinking water from Beaver Lake.

The Beaver Water District presented a 15-page rewrite of the proposed six-page regulation at the Aug. 16 meeting of the Northwest Arkansas Nutrient Trading Research and Advisory Group.

The regulation-writing group is set to consider the water district’s requested changes in a meeting Thursday. The meeting time should be finalized early next week, Stewart said.

Teresa Turk, Fayetteville City Council member, attended the group’s Aug. 16 meeting and supported the water district’s proposed changes, among others. All four cities represented on the group — Bentonville, Fayetteville, Rogers and Springdale — have to agree to the proposed regulation before it can be sent for state review.

Those four cities were selected by the Legislature to work on the proposal because they have the most experience dealing with nutrient levels, said Jene Huffman-Gilreath, Rogers’ representative on the group.

“This all goes back to the situation with Oklahoma,” she said. Oklahoma once proposed a nutrient discharge level on the Illinois River so low it led to a federal lawsuit. The Illinois River drains from Arkansas into Oklahoma. The states later came to a cooperative agreement to lower nutrient levels such as phosphorus. The federal lawsuit was never resolved.

Whatever draft regulation the advisory group comes up with would require review by

the state Department of Environmental Quality and, beyond that, final approval from the state Pollution Control and Ecology Commission.

Fayetteville isn’t likely to support a regulation that doesn’t adopt much of the water district’s proposals, Turk said. She stressed she’s only one member of the City Council, but she wouldn’t recommend the advisory group’s version of the regulation to the full council.

GETTING TO THE SOURCE

The core problem with the proposed regulation is it only concerns treatment plants — public and private, Crider said. There are far more sources of nutrients in watersheds than those, and Northwest Arkansas treatments plants have already made tremendous progress in reducing the nutrients they release, he said.

Local projects such as stopping stream bank erosion, fencing off sections of river to prevent cattle from entering and leaving waste in a stream and working with real estate developers to reduce or slow runoff would do far more to reduce nutrients and improve water quality than expensive efforts to make many wastewater plants more efficient, he said.

A local wastewater utility reimbursing landowners to make such changes locally would do more to help water quality, he said.

“There is only so much more blood you can squeeze out of that turnip,” Crider said of continued attempts to reduce nutrients emitted from waste treatments plants.

MEASURING STICK

There is also concern about how to test to see if nutrient trading has the desired effect. That monitoring and testing would be, by far, the most expensive action requested in the Beaver Water District’s proposed changes to the draft regulation, Huffman-Gilreath said.

Neither Crider nor Huffman-Gilreath had an estimate of how much such monitoring would cost.

“You have to have trust at some point,” Huffman-Gilreath said at the Aug. 16 meeting, a point she repeated Thursday. Trust is needed to believe the nutrient trading process will improve over time, she said.

There’s no substitute for some real-world experience of how a nutrient trading program works, she said. And there’s no way to get experience without a regulation allowing some first-step compromises to be made. The process can be refined in light of that experience, she said.

Turk, though, said there’s no substitute for measurement to tell if a program enacted is doing any good.

WATCHING THE WATER

The problem isn’t so much a lack of trust as an evident lack of the means, Crider said.

Crider argued the state Department of Environmental Quality simply doesn’t have the resources to fully handle the mission it has already. He pointed to wastewater treatment issues with state permits in Bethel Heights, West Fork and others just within this region.

“If we have an algae bloom and have to issue a ‘do not drink’ order, that affects half a million people,” Crider told the advisory group at its August meeting.

Huffman-Gilreath also noted monitoring of nonpoint efforts would require more manpower.

“Someone has to make sure the cattle are not on the wrong side of the fence,” she said. “Someone has to make sure the stream bank erosion was stopped, and the bank was not washed away by the last storm.”

That the regulation would be statewide is another factor to consider, Stewart said.

“Our philosophy is that

there is no ‘one size fits all’ regulation for all the eco-systems in the state,” he said. “There has to be some flexibility.”

One big problem is the regulation as written seeks to maintain water quality statewide, while the real goal should be to improve it, Turk said.