Center supports most PCS recommendations
Despite delays in pursuing approval of a groundbreaking inland bays clean-up regulation, it is still unclear whether or not state natural resources officials will meet with Center for the Inland Bays’ scientists to discuss the regulation’s controversial buffer proposal.
The proposed buffer regulation in the spring 2005 version of the PCS would have protected with a 100-foot buffer perennial and intermittent streams; ditches, tidal and non-tidal wetlands; and ponds on developed lands.
After meeting with The Coalition, a group of property-rights advocates in the area, officials reduced the buffer’s application, and its width to 50 feet, in the 2006 version of the proposed regulation, citing potentially serious economic impacts on area property owners.
A report published by the Center for the Inland Bays last fall blasted the effectiveness of that most recent proposal and requested formal discussions with state officials about the buffers.
Kevin Donnelly, director of DNREC’s division of water resources, insisted last week that officials have already met many times with the center, indicating no further meetings were needed. Ed Lewandowski, the center’s executive director, said that the center and its committees have helped craft a proposal since 1998 but added that the formal request to discuss the buffers in last fall’s report has not yet been answered.
“Certainly this is not the only component of the PCS in which we are interested,” Lewandowski said. “We do support the majority of the recommendations. This is the one that is really of concern.”
The agency’s regulation would eliminate direct sources of pollution and regulate septic systems and buffers along the inland watershed, aiming to reduce the amount of nutrients entering the bays daily by as much as 85 percent.
The strategy’s controversial buffer proposal — partly because of the CIB report, officials noted — has been an object of public scrutiny since late-summer public meetings.
State Sen. George Howard Bunting (D-20th) co-authored a letter recently, calling for a more thorough examination of the buffer proposal, according to the senator.
Because of an influx of comments and with a new legislative session starting this week, officials close to the project said last week that they will delay a potential public hearing — a necessity before adoption of the regulation. Officials had planned to go to public hearing this month.
Kathy Bunting-Howarth, a DNREC principle planner working on the project, said last week that officials are considering all options — including more meetings with the CIB.
“That’s an option,” she said. “There’s a lot of science out there about buffers. We’re trying to weigh the science and the policy,” Bunting-Howarth added. “We’re considering all of the comments.”
In the CIB report issued this fall, center Science and Technical Coordinator Chris Bason found massive inefficiencies with the current proposal when compared to the 2005 version.
Bason compared the buffers’ effectiveness in an analysis on Hopkins Prong and Dirickson Creek — two waterways picked arbitrarily, according to the report. The proposed buffer regulation in the 2006 version would eliminate 99 percent less nitrogen annually than the 2005 version in Hopkins Prong and 97.7 percent less nitrogen in Dirickson Creek, Bason reported. The numbers for phosphorous load reductions are almost identical.
Both nutrients are used in fertilizers applied to stimulate growth of crops and other plants on agricultural and residential properties, and enter the area’s waters partially through runoff. They cause excess growth underwater, leading to low oxygen levels and the increased potential for fish kills and other environmental problems.
“They are significant reductions,” Lewandowski said of the numbers in the report. “Depending upon your interpretation, your numbers change. That’s what other people are going to bring into the discussion. But as far as the efficiency of the buffers, we stand by those numbers.”