FINAL PLAN FOR BAY CLEANUP RELEASED
Virginia finally has its final Watershed Implementation Plan (WIP) — an ambitious road map to further reduce pollution and clean up the Chesapeake Bay.
The plan was released Friday as part of a regional effort that began in 2010 and commits Virginia and other bay states to install antipollution measures by 2025 that will restore the country’s largest estuary. This is Virginia’s third and last cleanup plan under that effort.
“This bold, comprehensive plan will ensure that we finish the job,” Gov. Ralph Northam said.
Virginia Secretary of Natural Resources Matthew J. Strickler said the plan “will result in a healthier, more diverse economy — including recreation, tourism and waterbased industries — increased property values, more sustainable land use and a Chesapeake Bay that every Virginian can enjoy.”
Cleanup efforts target the agricultural and urban/suburban sectors, and commit the state to accelerate reductions in nitrogen and phosphorus loads to the bay to counter climate change impacts. In Hampton Roads, those effects include an increase in sunny-day flooding, greater erosion, the loss of saltwater marshes and habitat and more severe rain events.
Implementing the plan’s anti-pollution measures, however, requires that state lawmakers agree to fund them.
“The 2020 General Assembly session is our best chance to ensure the investments and programs are in place to achieve these goals by 2025,” said Peggy Sanner, Virginia assistant director of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, an advocacy group based in Annapolis.
Recent studies show that Virginia is largely on track to meet its cleanup goals, achieving robust underwater grass beds and a recovering oyster population from longstanding restoration efforts. Water quality is improving, bolstering the bay’s growing resilience to harmful algal blooms.
But continuing success will require not only government action at all levels, the governor has said, but significant efforts by stakeholders such as farmers, lawn care companies, landowners and homeowners, wastewater utilities and the general public.
The plan’s agriculture goals include providing more financial and technical assistance to farmers and forest landowners to employ best management practices — fencing livestock from streams, for instance, planting cover crops and installing buffers along waterways to curb sediment and nutrient loads to the bay.
For municipalities, goals include more pollution reductions from wastewater treatment plants and a new collaboration between the state local planning district commissions to reduce pollution from stormwater runoff. The WIP also includes more urban nutrient management planning, promoting living shorelines to address erosion and expanding septic pump-out and maintenance programs statewide.
To offset the effects of climate change, the Chesapeake Bay Program estimates that bay states will have to boost their 2025 reduction targets by 9 million pounds for nitrogen and 500,000 pounds for phosphorus. Virginia’s share of those additional reductions is 1.7 million pounds of nitrogen and 193,000 pounds of phosphorus. Northam claims his plan will meet those new reductions.
Last summer, the Environmental Protection Agency also issued nitrogen and phosphorus target loads for Virginia’s five river basins — the James, York, Rappahannock and Potomac rivers and the Eastern Shore.
On Friday, Bill Street, CEO of the James River Association, said Northam’s plan “charts a course to achieve a Grade A James River by 2025.”
Northam unveiled his final plan in draft form on April 5, then opened it for 60 days of public review and comment. Of more than 4,850 comments received, about 4,700 supported the plan overall, while the rest generally opposed it or expressed “significant concerns” about one or more initiatives, according to the governor’s office. In many cases, comments resulted in a change to the draft.
Those changes include adding language to explain the basis for calculating the projected impacts of climate change; clarifying wastewater improvements made under the first two WIPs; and an enhanced strategy for high-priority land conservation. In most cases, comments resulted in language revisions for the sake of clarity.
The Chesapeake watershed stretches 64,000 square miles over portions of Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New York and the District of the Columbia. It’s home to more than 18 million people.
All the bay jurisdictions joined with the EPA in 2010 to clean up the estuary. EPA set a “pollution diet,” or total maximum daily loads for nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment into the watershed for each jurisdiction, and each came up with its own blueprint to meet its targets.
To read the final plan, go to deq.virginia.gov.