Va. submits revised plan to clean Chesapeake Bay

Virginia submitted a revised plan on time Monday to clean up the Chesapeake Bay, a blueprint that tries to ease regulatory pain on farmers, developers and local governments but calls on sewage plants to do more.

The plan is one part of a get-tough policy pushed by the Obama administration to impose new rules and requirements across six states and the District of Columbia in order to restore the Bay over the next 15 years.

The Environmental Protection Agency instructed each jurisdiction to spell out how it expects to abide by a proposed "pollution diet" that significantly reduces the amount of nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment entering and fouling the Bay each year.

Virginia's first draft, released in September, was deemed inadequate, as were all plans from partner states, and was sharply criticized by environmental groups as too vague and too weak.

On Monday, Secretary of Natural Resources Doug Domenech called the new amended plan "the most ambitious Virginia ever has devised," estimating the state cost at $8 billion through 2025.

He said federal aid will be key to ensuring it gets implemented.

Among the highlights, the plan would:

- Reduce an additional 2.6 million pounds of nitrogen from sewage plants in the James River, likely meaning the Hampton Roads Sanitation District would be forced to upgrade its local plants and raise fees;

- Seek tax credits and other incentives to help homeowners replace old septic systems with cleaner ones;

- Call for 35-foot grass or forest buffers between croplands and streams that empty into the Bay;

- Require golf courses and municipal lands to live under nutrient management plans to control their amount of fertilizers and pesticides;

- Expand the use of "nutrient trading" in which farmers, developers, land owners and local governments could buy, sell and trade pollution credits to show compliance with tougher new rules.

Since the plan was released late in the day, environmental groups and other advocates did not have time to assess and immediately comment on the 141-page document.

Monday was the deadline for turning in a revised plan, but some jurisdictions contacted the EPA to ask for more time, said David Sternberg, an agency spokesman.

Sternberg declined to say which states asked for additional time, but Maryland officials confirmed that they would not meet their deadline and would file an updated version by the end of the week. Maryland and Virginia share the largest amount of Bay shoreline among the partner states of Pennsylvania, Delaware, New York and West Virginia.

Also Monday, a leading environmental group, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, released a report saying that, for economic reasons, the cleanup should not be delayed as some critics have urged. Citing a smorgasbord of recent studies, the group said a degraded Bay still is valued at more than $1 trillion and that anti-pollution improvements will create jobs and worth, not harm an already reeling regional economy.

"One has only to look at what happened to the Bay's oyster and crab fisheries to see that dirty water is a job killer," said Ann Jennings, the foundation's executive director in Virginia. "Bay pollution is not only an ecological disaster, it's an economic one, too."

Anthony Moore, Gov. Bob McDonnell's assistant secretary for Chesapeake Bay restoration, said he hopes the plan is accepted by the EPA and will not result in federal "backstops," or strict mandates, that the agency has threatened to impose if a state does not meet its goals on paper.

One unexpected glitch popped up just before Thanksgiving, Moore said, when the EPA told Virginia that a new computer model showed that the state needed to cut an additional 1 million pounds of nitrogen from its plan.

Moore said Virginia has another seven to 10 days to iron out that problem, and he expressed frustration with the EPA's reliance on computer modeling to drive the cleanup.

In a cover letter to the EPA, Domenech, the state's top environmental officer, did not mince words: "As we did in our draft plan, we must reiterate Virginia's concerns about the process, cost, legality, allocations and compressed timing in the development of this plan."

The EPA will announce whether the revised state plans pass muster by Dec. 31.

Scott Harper, (757) 446-2340, scott.harper@pilotonline.com