Effort to revamp clean waterways alarms environmentalists

Last weekend at Fisher Landing, just downstream from New Bern, one of North Carolina’s nonprofit environmental monitors known as riverkeepers found dead fish floating on the surface of the Neuse River.

The Lower Neuse riverkeeper, Travis Graves, says there were tens of thousands of them there – flounder, blue crab, eels – which was surprising because large fish kills usually happen later in the summer. Graves suspects oxygen depletion, as a result of nutrient pollution typically caused by farm and urban runoff, as the killer.

It’s the kind of warning signal that worries riverkeepers, who are concerned that efforts in the state legislature to repeal water protections will leave North Carolina vulnerable to the massive fish kills of the 1980s and 1990s that prompted the safeguards.

Some Republican legislators, developers and upstream communities want to throw out those safeguards and start all over with new rules. They are frustrated at the minimal improvements seen so far and the potentially exorbitant costs of fully implementing protections put in place before Republicans took over the General Assembly in 2011.

They would repeal the restrictions that are meant to clean up Jordan Lake and Falls Lake – which provide drinking water to more than 700,000 people in the Triangle – and do away with stream buffer protections across the state, which have been the primary tool in minimizing runoff pollution.

Environmentalists counter that the protections have not been given enough time to fully work, and that it’s not a good idea to throw out the current rules without knowing what might replace them. They fear a return to past decades and the loss of more than 1 billion fish in the Neuse River, the Pamlico River being declared commercially dead and acres of shellfish harvest rendered unusable.

“This without a doubt will have a very large negative impact on water quality,” said Matt Starr, the Upper Neuse riverkeeper. “We are in the rare situation of being able to see the future. We know what will happen if we roll back these nutrient management strategies.”

Floating islands, SolarBees

The Senate has proposed freezing the Jordan and Falls lakes rules – blocking the parts that have yet to take effect – until 2020, at which time they would be repealed along with all of the nutrient management strategies for most of the watersheds in the state.

That major change wasn’t debated in a standalone bill, but was included as several paragraphs in the Senate’s proposed budget, which is still being negotiated with the House. That language states many of the strategies in place have shown little or no improvement to water quality and have placed an economic burden in the billions of dollars on the state and municipalities, while in some cases significantly interfering with land-use options.

“Instead of continuing regulatory frameworks that may or may not improve water quality in all watersheds now or in the future, new comprehensive management strategies that include in situ (on-site) treatment of impaired water bodies must be developed,” the section reads.

The proposal follows a failed attempt to reduce algae caused by nutrients in Jordan Lake by stirring the lake with floating whirling devices called SolarBees, intended to clean the lake directly rather than focus on the upstream sources of the nutrients, such as wastewater treatment plants, development and storm runoff. Earlier this year state environmental regulators came up with a list of alternatives, ranging from floating islands that might soak up the nutrients to pumping water out of the lake to adding more water into the lake.

In a February presentation to the state Environmental Review Commission, comprised of state legislators, Tom Reeder, a deputy secretary at the Department of Environmental Quality, seemed to downplay focusing on watershed controls.

Reeder said national data shows that upgrading wastewater treatment plants is usually successful, but attempts to filter runoff from rain or snow are far less so, and he doubted the technology to do it was available.

Science or politics?

Documents the state chapter of the Sierra Club obtained through a public records request show that DEQ staff had prepared far more slides for the three PowerPoint presentations Reeder gave legislators that day. A former state environmental regulator, John Dorney, analyzed the records.

He found Reeder didn’t share with the lawmakers examples the staff had provided showing successes across the country through managing watersheds. In one instance, staff had prepared 11 slides on the benefits of stream buffers, and Reeder presented just one.

Dorney said it was understandable that Reeder would whittle the slides down, but his selections “kind of changed the whole nature of the presentation.”

“All three final presentations made appeared to omit scientific and engineering facts provided by DEQ professional staff, which supported the management of nutrients in watersheds in order to protect downstream waters,” said Molly Diggins, state director of The Sierra Club.

In March, a draft of a DEQ report indicated the two-year pilot project with the SolarBees at Jordan Lake had cost $1.3 million and shown no improvement. No in-lake technologies appeared to be feasible for restoring the state’s impaired lakes, it said.

Yet the Senate budget includes a $500,000 study on the effectiveness of introducing fresh-water mussels to clean up Jordan Lake.

Stephanie Hawco, spokeswoman for the Department of Environmental Quality, said Reeder’s presentation reflected conclusions based on scientific data.

“It was drafted and modified to include only the information that was required by statute and replaced broad assessments or judgments with more specific explanations,” she said by email. “Nutrient management systems have been widely tested across the country and no technology has proven to be effective in successfully managing nutrient levels on the scale of Jordan Lake.”

She said the department was not involved in writing the freeze and repeal provisions in the proposed Senate budget.

“The data that has been collected to date has not shown the success we had hoped for but we are encouraging the General Assembly to continue to assess nutrient management strategies.” she said.

This story was originally published June 25, 2016 at 4:46 PM with the headline "Effort to revamp clean waterways alarms environmentalists."