On January 16, the PA Chesapeake Bay Watershed Planning Steering Committee heard updates from two of the counties involved in the County Clean Water Planning Pilot Project and their strategies for reducing local water pollution.
The Committee also heard a presentation from the Penn State Agriculture and Environment Center on more Farm Survey results.
Lancaster County Strategy
Allyson Gibson and the Lancaster Clean Water Partners gave a presentation on the status of Lancaster County’s action strategy for meeting nutrient and sediment pollution reduction targets.
As presented, the strategy will achieve about 80 percent of the needed nitrogen reductions and exceed required phosphorus reductions. Lancaster County alone is responsible for 20 percent of the nutrient reductions needed to meet Pennsylvania’s Chesapeake Bay Watershed cleanup obligations.
The strategy makes a series of recommendations in 6 areas-- Data Management, Agriculture, Stormwater, Stream Buffers, Stream Restoration and Land Use and Preservation.
Among the most significant recommendations are--
-- Find a way to end winter spreading of manure and identify, promote alternative practices in priority locations
-- Build new manure storages and implement barnyard management in priority areas
-- Support state efforts to ensure all individuals have met baseline agriculture environmental
compliance, which requires drafting 2,400 new conservation plans for farms across the county
-- Outreach to private landowners to install 5,000 to 7,500 acres of new stream buffers (the county does about 580 acres per year now), priorities are on agriculture lands and headwaters streams
-- Accomplish 50 new stream restoration projects, including floodplain (legacy sediment), wetland and in-stream restoration projects in priority watersheds
-- Work with developers to incorporate Best Management Practices into their projects like has been done by Rock Lititz and in Lime Spring. [See: Triple Benefits of Green Infrastructure]
There are many more recommendations made in the strategy and outlined in the handouts available to the Steering Committee--
Click Here to read more about the inclusive process Lancaster Clean Water Partners used to develop the plan.
York County
Felicia Dell, Pam Shellenberger and John Seitz from the York County Planning Commission provided a similar presentation for the York County action plan. Among the recommendations in the York County strategy developed in cooperation with the York County Conservation District and a variety of local stakeholders are--
-- Form a countywide stormwater authority to develop a sustainable, efficient, responsible county entity that can fund, administer, coordinate and achieve countywide water quality/flooding efforts on behalf of all county stakeholders including the agricultural community, municipalities, industrial and commercial entities and residents.
-- Change DEP’s stormwater permit program to allow for watershed-wide permits and allow the installation of best management practices anywhere in the county.
-- A whole series of recommendations, like in the Lancaster strategy, on the installation of stream buffers, increasing tree plantings, installing green infrastructure with new development.
The presenters pointed out how critical DEP and other technical help was in developing their plan.
The recommendations also achieve about 80 percent of the necessary nitrogen reduction goal. York County has already met the phosphorus reduction goal thanks to investments made by wastewater treatment plants.
There are many other recommendations in the proposed plan. Available handouts--
Farm Survey Results
Penn State Agriculture and Environment Center Director Matt Royer gave a presentation on the results of their deeper dive into the 2016 Farm Survey the Center undertook to help identify additional conservation measures farmers adopted in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed that were not previously counted.
The results from over 7,000 farms were reviewed again by the Center to determine trends of adopting farm conservation measures based on size of farms, type of farms, funding assistance, location in the watershed and other factors
The trends uncovered in the Center’s additional analysis will be presented to help guide decisions about the best way to provide farmers with assistance to get more conservation practices on the ground.
Click Here for a copy of the Farm Trends Presentation.
Next Meeting
The next meeting of the Steering Committee will be on February 20 when they will hear from the other 2 counties in the Pilot Clean Water Planning Project-- Adams and Franklin.
The meeting will be in Room 105 of the Rachel Carson Building in Harrisburg from 1:00 to 3:30. Click Here to register to attend the meeting by webinar. Participants will also need to call in 1-650-479-3208, PASSCODE: 640 189 982.
For more information, visit the PA Chesapeake Bay Watershed Planning Steering Committee webpage.
Governor's Budget Address
Gov. Wolf presents his 2019-20 budget request to the General Assembly on February 5. No word yet on whether there will be any proposals to address the obvious need to help farmers and local governments meet their water pollution reduction obligations across the state.
Governors in Maryland, New York and Virginia, upstream and downstream of Pennsylvania in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, have already laid out extensive plans in their states for funding local water pollution reduction projects and to help farmers reduce pollution from agricultural runoff.
At the beginning of the LAST legislative session-- January 24, 2017-- a bipartisan group of Pennsylvania House and Senate members on the Chesapeake Bay Commission wrote to all members of the General Assembly pointing out the obvious need for new, dedicated funding to address the water pollution cleanup problems across the state, but no action to fund the initiative was ever taken.
For more information, visit the PA Chesapeake Bay Watershed Planning Steering Committee webpage.
Governor's Budget Address
Gov. Wolf presents his 2019-20 budget request to the General Assembly on February 5. No word yet on whether there will be any proposals to address the obvious need to help farmers and local governments meet their water pollution reduction obligations across the state.
Governors in Maryland, New York and Virginia, upstream and downstream of Pennsylvania in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, have already laid out extensive plans in their states for funding local water pollution reduction projects and to help farmers reduce pollution from agricultural runoff.
At the beginning of the LAST legislative session-- January 24, 2017-- a bipartisan group of Pennsylvania House and Senate members on the Chesapeake Bay Commission wrote to all members of the General Assembly pointing out the obvious need for new, dedicated funding to address the water pollution cleanup problems across the state, but no action to fund the initiative was ever taken.
The need for funding local green infrastructure projects with multiple benefits that help reduce pollution AND stormwater flooding across the state has only grown as a result of the local flooding from significant storms.
As the widespread “small stream” flooding from storms this past summer has made very clear, the frequency and severity of heavy precipitation events is increasing. A Center for Rural Pennsylvania study in 2017 found these heavy events (5-Year, 2-Day events) have increased in frequency and duration by 71 percent between 1958 and 2013.
The burden for dealing with these issues has squarely fallen entirely on local governments who have no choice but to adopt local stormwater fees on property owners to fund local solutions, and that’s exactly what they are doing.
Those in control of the General Assembly have failed to provide the financial support to farmers and communities needed to deal with these issues as well as pollution from abandoned mine drainage. We’ll see if this year is different.
(Written by David Hess, Former Secretary of DEP. Send comments to: PaEnviroDigest@gmail.com.)NewsClips:
Related Stories:
No comments:
Post a Comment