What are you thinking?

I want to hear your questions and concerns about the Bay TMDL.  This should be a discussion, and I can’t do that on my own.  Please post questions or comments, or if you would rather e-mail them you can send them to Dave@Shorekeeper.org.

I will make an honest effort to answer every comment or question I get but will not entertain personal attacks on anyone.  The goal is to inspire a constructive dialog in the community regarding the value of a clean, healthy Chesapeake Bay.

Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace.

When the decision was made to publish a full page ad in the Eastern Shore News regarding the Bay TMDL, the intention was pretty clear: We need to get the public involved in the discussion of this issue, and we need them to be informed.  This decision was not made lightly, and it was made with the consultation of many community leaders from both Accomack and Northampton Counties. 

Of course we knew that not everyone would like this.  There are plenty of people who would prefer that the public not worry about the details and debate over when, how, or why our government makes the decisions it does.  Most of those people are the ones who make the decisions.  You see, governing is a messy job (trust me, I did a little bit of it), and you have to balance competing interests in a way that generally ensures that someone is going to be upset with you.  On the Shore we have some powerful special interest groups who do apply a lot of pressure to our elected officials.  Unfortunately the environmental movement is not generally considered one of these powerful forces.  We tend to look for compromises and accept that anyone saying the word “jobs” is going to win any debate, whether they have the facts or track record to back up their promises or not.

As we saw the direction that the discussion over the Bay TMDL was taking in the public forum, it was easy to see that the folks who think that the government should stay away from regulating pollution and just leave us all alone were controlling the tone and content.  We could talk privately with individuals and make a little bit of progress, but it was getting clearer and clearer that when it came time to vote, nobody else was going to stand up in front of their Board members and make a strong argument for supporting the Bay TMDL.

This issue is important because we are standing at a unique crossroads in time for the Bay.  For the first time we have a Federal mandate with some teeth to it that will compel all of the Bay States and the District of Columbia to take meaningful steps to reduce pollution flowing in to the Chesapeake Bay.  Everyone is going to have to make sacrifices, and it’s going to be hard, but we actually have people who are willing to hold our feet to the fire and make us clean up our mess.

With pressure mounting form special interests to join in to a lawsuit filed by the American Farm Bureau Federation and the National Association of Homebuilders, we recognized that two of our most influential lobbying groups were ahead of the game in the public discourse.  Last month I spoke at the Northampton Board of Supervisors meeting to encourage them to reject the temptation to join this lawsuit designed to stall the Bay cleanup efforts.  Not one word about it was reported in either of our papers.  I have spoken to Accomack Supervisors about the Bay TMDL, and asked to be included on their meeting agenda so that we could discuss the issue in public.  I have received no response to this request. 

While it may be uncomfortable for our local leaders to have this discussion in public, I believe that it is important for the citizens of the Eastern Shore to have their voices heard regarding clean water and the vital importance of the health of the Chesapeake Bay.  This is an issue that affects all of us, and failing to address it because it’s politically difficult is not an option.  We do have some political leaders who don’t want to have difficult discussions about difficult issues.  I have no sympathy for them. 

Having sat on the Board of Supervisors and listened intently to a wide range of viewpoints on highly contentious issues, I know how hard it can be to be assaulted on all sides of an issue, and I think that this type of contentious public discourse forces leaders to have courage and conviction in their decisions.  I am not here to demand that anyone do as I say, but I will demand to be heard, and so should you.

If the leaders of our Counties want to vote against cleaning up the Bay, and spend our money fighting for the right of special interests to keep polluting, then they can make that decision, but our job is to ensure that they’re going to have to make it in public and they’re going to have to justify their actions with more than mumbled platitudes about mom and apple pie.

For some more information on why the TMDL is being implemented and what it means, please check out this article in the Bay Journal: http://www.bayjournal.com/article.cfm?article=3417

They also have an interview with the head of the EPA’s Senior Advisor on the Chesapeake Bay, Jeff Corbin here: http://www.bayjournal.com/article.cfm?article=4058

It’s not the most challenging interview, but gives you a little bit of insight into how Mr. Corbin sees his job and the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.

(Incidentally, during his time with the Kaine Administration Mr. Corbin spent some time on the Shore and has expressed an affinity for what he recognized as one of the Commonwealth’s most significant natural areas.

More TMDL discussion

One of the objections we have heard to the Bay TMDL is that the Agriculture community is being picked on and that the whole responsibility rides on their shoulders.  While nobody likes to be told what to do, it’s time for everyone to stop pointing fingers at other parties and start doing the things we all know need to be done to clean up the Bay.  This means farmers, towns, businesses, and individual homeowners. 

But since the Ag community is particularly bent out of shape over the Bay TMDL, let’s address a couple of their concerns.

1 – We want to get credit for existing practices – The most common complaint I have heard from the Ag community is that they won’t get credit for the good work they have already done.  What they are saying is that they have implemented a large number of voluntary BPS (Best Management Practices) with their own money because they didn’t want the government telling them how to implement them.  This means that they did not receive government assistance for these projects (there are grants and cost share programs to implement BMPs) and they have not reported these BMPs to the agencies that tally the number BMPs on the ground.  The concern is that as goals are set, the farmers will never get recognized for the uncounted BMPs that are currently in place.  I have asked about this in every Bay TMDL meeting I have attended, and asked very clearly “Will farmers get credit for uncounted BMPs that are already in place?”  The answer has been “Yes” 100% of the time.  Of course these BMPs have to meet standards, and they have to be reported in order to be counted.  A farmer or land owner can’t just write down on a piece of paper that they have done X,Y, & Z, and get credit for having done it.  Just like a student can’t just tell their teacher that they’ve written a great paper but don’t want to turn it in.
I firmly believe that all farmers should get credit for all of the BMPs they have implemented.  If any farmer has an issue getting a particular BMP recognized, I want to know about it.  This is an important issue for Eastern Shore farmers, and it is vital to the success of the Bay TMDL. 

2 – We need more testing and modeling in order to make sure we’re going to get all of the results we expect before we implement this plan. -  Nobody seems to be questioning whether or not many of these BMPs work.  Most of the folks involved in this discussion have accepted that vegetative buffers, retention ponds, filter strips, rock dams, and nutrient management plans do reduce runoff pollution to the Bay.  But some lobbyists and lawyers are proposing that since we don’t have exact numbers to tell us how each one will work on every farm that we should not implement these accepted practices.  So while they concede that 1+1=2, they’re not sure that 1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1=22.

This seems to be another example of people deciding when to believe in science or not based on their own financial agendas.   We can keep studying the levels of pollution we dump in to the Bay for decades.  We will never have definitive proof that everything we propose will meet all of its goals all of the time.  But if your child were standing in the middle of a highway, would you wait to get them off the road until you had definitive proof that they were going to get hit by a car, or would you accept that a high probability of their getting hit was good enough for you and take some action to get them out of harms way?

3 – We think the Bay model is flawed. – Some national Agricultural and Homebuilders groups are proposing that the Chesapeake Bay Model is not a useful tool.  This is the basis of much of their PR campaign against the TMDL.  They’ve produced their own study which has been independently assessed to be misleading and flawed.

You can learn more about this here: http://cbf.org/page.aspx?pid=2646

4 – We can’t afford to stop polluting the Bay.  – Actually one of the messages from the Ag community at the beginning of this process was “if you can find the money, we can do this.”  One of the things environmental groups are investing in is a lobbying effort to get more Federal money for farmers to reduce or eliminate the cost of implementing BMPs.  All Americans have benefited from the financial savings that have resulted from allowing pollution to enter our waters, and many environmental organizations feel that we should all help pay the cost of properly dealing with our waste streams.

http://www.cbf.org/page.aspx?pid=2672

Here are a couple of good articles about BMPs & why they matter:

http://www.anr.state.vt.us/cleanandclear/ag-bmps.htm

http://www.vcnva.org/anx/index.cfm/1,403,418,0,html/Agricultural-Best-Management-Practices-Ag-BMPs

Chesapeake Bay TMDL Resources

There has been a great deal of discussion about the Bay TMDL and what it means for the Eastern Shore.  Unfortunately it seems that a great deal of this discussion is driven by misinformation and suspicion of regulations in general. 

If you are interested in learning more about the Bay TMDL, below you will find some links to PDFs and websites that contain a great deal of information about the process and the need for a comprehensive approach to reducing the amount of pollution we dump in to the Bay every day.

The EPA’s Bay TMDL home page can be found here: http://www.epa.gov/chesapeakebaytmdl/

It contains a lot of information, and I’d suggest checking out the following two links from their page in particular.

How does it work? Ensuring results - http://www.epa.gov/reg3wapd/tmdl/ChesapeakeBay/EnsuringResults.html

& Fact Sheets & Key Documents - http://www.epa.gov/reg3wapd/tmdl/ChesapeakeBay/ResourceLibrary.html#keydocs

In particular you may want to look at the Virginia Planning Targets, the Our Waters Our Towns document, and the Driving Actions to Clean Local Waters Fact Sheet.

You can see the State’s TMDL page here: http://www.dcr.virginia.gov/vabaytmdl/index.shtml

It should be noted that the current administration seems to favor less stringent guidelines, nutrient trading (allowing folks to pollute one creek if they pay someone else to clean up another) and other policies that do not fall in line with the EPA’s vision of the TMDL.  That being said, you will still see that their policies include making significant strides toward cleaning up the Bay.

The Chesapeake Bay Program has a good article about the establishment of the TMDL here: http://www.chesapeakebay.net/news_finaltmdl.aspx?menuitem=55465 with links to a couple of other pieces they have put together.

For non-governmental sources, you can see what the Chesapeake Bay Foundation has to say about the Bay TMDL here: http://cbf.org/page.aspx?pid=2518, or  a history of the process that brought us to where we are today here: http://cbf.org/page.aspx?pid=2527 (If you read our ad in the Eastern Shore News you saw a similar timeline.)

There are a ton of other resources out there on the internet, and you can find opinions from people who think that we should get to work today to clean the Bay as well as those who believe that we should wait a few more years, keep polluting, and study the issue some more.   There is nobody who will tell you that they have a plan to stop Bay pollution at no cost, or that it will be easy.  This is a difficult job and there’s no way around it.  At some point we will have to step up and take responsibility for our actions.  I guess the question we have to ask is “are we ready to commit to a clean Chesapeake Bay, or do we think we can wait a while and let the next generation clean up the mess?”