Vermont, EPA agree on new phosphorus limits

The Environmental Protection Agency and the state have agreed on new limits to the amount of phosphorus entering Lake Champlain.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has released a new final draft plan to reduce the amount of phosphorus that drains into Lake Champlain by more than 30 percent in the next decade.

The plan seeks to curb phosphorus pollution by controlling runoff into the lake and its tributaries.

Gov. Peter Shumlin and EPA Region 1 Administrator Curt Spalding announced the plan [August 14] at a joint news conference with EPA officials at the lake’s North Beach in Burlington.

“We stand here on Vermont’s most beautiful natural resource to celebrate that Vermont and the EPA have come to a meeting of the minds about the best way to clean up this lake,” Shumlin said.

The state has $10 million to launch the new project and anticipates several million dollars annually from federal, state and private sources to implement the plan, said Vermont Natural Resources Secretary Deb Markowitz.

The state also has established a Clean Water Board to manage clean water funds for the project, Markowitz said.

The EPA will accept public comment on the plan until Sept. 15.

Three public hearings on the plan are scheduled for later this month:

• Aug. 26, 6-8 p.m., St. Albans Historical Society, 9 Church St.
• Aug. 27, 10 a.m.-noon, Doubletree Hotel, 1117 Williston Road, South Burlington.
• Aug. 27, 2-4 p.m., Rutland Free Library, 10 Court St.

You can download a copy of the plan from the EPA’s website: http://www.epa.gov/region1/eco/tmdl/lakechamplain.html

Work gets under way on new Community Sailing Center

This is great news for Burlington and Vermont:

The nonprofit Community Sailing Center in Burlington could break ground on a new building as early as September.

“The expectation is that the site work, closing of the area and doing some preliminary foundation work will be complete … before they close up shop for the winter,” sailing center Executive Director Mark Naud said.

The building is part of Waterfront Access North, a major public-private redevelopment project along the north end of Burlington’s lakeshore. The $9.1 million project also includes a new skate park and infrastructure improvements along Lake and Depot streets.

Crews broke ground on Waterfront Access North last August. Naud said workers have cleared the lot on which the new sailing building will sit. He hopes crews can complete the foundation of the building this fall.

“I don’t think that’s an unreasonable goal for us, at all,” Naud said.

The center projects the 21,000-square-foot building will cost $2.5 million to build. Burlington voters in March 2014 approved $500,000 in tax increment financing for the project.

Naud said the entire sailing center capital campaign, which includes dock repairs, new boats and other site improvements totals $5.75 million. The new building will include indoor and outdoor watercraft storage, a classroom, locker rooms and offices for the center’s half-dozen employees.

The Community Sailing Center not only gets lots of folks out on the water, it also uses sailing as the delivery vehicle for a great elementary school science program, which the CSC calls Floating Classrooms.

Senate bill would ban microbeads nationwide

More help is on the way in the effort to remove microbeads from the nation’s waters.

Following the lead of the Vermont Legislature, which voted earlier this year to ban the tiny plastic beads — used in all kinds of personal care products, from toothpaste to facial washes — U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., has introduced legislation to ban cosmetics containing microbeads nationwide.

“Every morning when we brush our teeth and when we wash our faces at night, we don’t consider these acts to be harmful in any way,” said Gillibrand. “But for many of us, myself included, the toothpaste, soaps and facial washes we’ve had in our homes are leaching into our water supply and damaging the local environment.”

New York and 13 other states are now considering legislation similar to that passed by Vermont in January. In one New York study, microbeads were discovered in 74 percent of water samples taken from 34 municipal and private treatment plants across the state.

Mike Winslow, staff scientist of the Lake Champlain Committee, says plastics have no place in our waterways. “There are numerous studies documenting the physical and toxicological effects of plastics in the environment,” said Winslow. “Some microbeads are the size of fish eggs and look like food to larger fish and other aquatic organisms, an all-too-literal junk food.”

Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy has said he supports Gillibrand’s push to ban microbeads, and hopes that manufacturers will not wait till the federal legislation passes to reconsider including microbeads in their products.

 

Bringing some perspective to talk about septic system spills

So it turns out there are sewage overflows, and there are sewage overflows. There has been a lot of talk lately in the media about challenged municipal septic systems, and how much effluent they are spilling into local waterways, and eventually the lake.

A lot of the talk can be traced to sometimes hyperbolic press releases issued pretty much weekly this (very wet) spring and early summer by Lake Champlain International. The organization, which organizes fishing derbies, has become one of the loudest advocates for cleaning up Vermont’s waters, though it doesn’t really do nuance.

The Burlington Free Press’s Joel Banner Baird did folks a favor by examining these claims, and what he found was that, while no sewage spill is a good thing, the specifics of each spill matter.

Mike Winslow, a scientist with nonprofit Lake Champlain Committee, notes that most fecal pathogens do not accumulate in river and lake water — unlike other pollutants such as heavy metals and nutrient phosphorus. Nor, when our micro-organisms hit a body of water, do they tend to migrate far.

It’s a mistake to equate the potency of a sewage spill only by its gallon value, Winslow said.

Typically, the volume of sewage in a municipal system remains fairly constant, he said; “the excess that’s causing the flows is the addition of relatively clean rain or groundwater.”

The significance of sewage spills might be sometimes exaggerated, Winslow said, but complacence can be just as harmful, particularly when it comes to identifying and tracking the passage of pharmaceuticals and other chemicals through our bodies and into bodies of water.

“There is no way to talk about sewage going into the river in a good way,” he concluded.

The problems come from so-called combined systems, in which both storm water and sewage are processed in the same plant.

There are lots of things to worry about when it comes to the health of the lake, and outdated combined sewage systems are certainly among them. But the significance of these spills pales when compared to the effects of phosphorus pollution, from agricultural run-off and stormwater.

We should certainly fix these out-of-date septic systems, and in a perfect world we’d tackle all of the contributors to lake pollution. Right now, the focus needs to be on keeping phosphorus out of streams, rivers and the lake.

A beach-closing because of a short-term E. coli contamination is one thing; phosphorus pollution that turns an entire section of the lake into a potentially toxic soup of blue-green algae for most of the summer season is another thing altogether.

State of the Lake 2015 buries the lede

The Lake Champlain Basin Program came out with its latest “State of the Lake” report this week. This is a great document with tons of useful information on the health of the lake and its watershed. Unfortunately, the headline in some news outlets was that 98 percent of the lake’s waters are of excellent or very good quality. This came from the opening paragraph of the report’s summary at the LCPB website:

Although the water quality trends in Lake Champlain are cause for concern, it is important to know that more than 85% of Lake Champlain’s water is consistently of excellent quality and another 13% of the water is usually in quite good condition. In the remaining 2% of the Lake, conditions are seasonally alarming. The most compromised parts of the Lake are St. Albans and Missisquoi Bays, where excess nutrients and other factors trigger blue-green algae blooms in summer, and the South Lake, where the water tends to be quite muddy.

While this may be objectively true — you don’t need to spend much time on the main lake to know that the water looks quite clean — it doesn’t really help folks understand the challenges facing the lake. More to the point is the news, in the second paragraph of the summary, that phosphorus levels in 10 of the 13 areas of the lake are above targets adopted by Vermont, New York and Quebec. And that levels are rising in many of the segments, particularly in the north and south.

Missing the most important bit of news — called “burying the lede” in the news biz, the “lede” being the first paragraph — happens all the time, but more often when newsmakers themselves choose to put less important stuff at the top of their summaries. Editing matters. Given the importance of reducing phosphorus levels to the health of the lake, and all of the attention, time and money being devoted to this issue, you would expect that it would be right up front. So, great report, but its impact was not what it could have been. Seems like a missed opportunity.

Feeding Frenzy

Hundreds of seagulls descended recently on the last bit of ice on Hawkins Bay, along the southeast shore and at the entrance to Little Otter Creek. The reason could be found in and around the ice: thousands of dead or dying alewives. The small invasive fish often have die-offs in the spring, as they move from colder, deeper water to warmer, shallower parts of the lake.

Alewives littered the ice and floated in the frigid water of the bay just off shore.

Senate committee approves water quality bill

More progress for water quality in the Vermont Legislature: On Wednesday, the Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee approved the Senate version of the bill, S.49, on a 4-1 vote.

The bill moves on now to the Senate Finance Committee. As approved by Natural Resources, the bill envisions raising more than $10 million dollar to pay for clean-up efforts, nearly $2 million more than in H.35, which passed the full House earlier this month.

The only vote against the water quality bill came from Sen. Mark McDonald, a Democrat from Orange, who felt the bill should have included mandatory water-friendly management practices for foresters. Still, he called the bill “a good step forward.”

Big win for water quality bill in Vermont House

UPDATE: 133-11. That was the tally on Thursday when the Vermont House gave final approval to this session’s major water quality bill, H.35, and sent the bill on to the Senate.

The landmark bill launches a cleanup effort expected to take decades in waterways such as Lake Champlain. It aims to curb pollution runoff from farms, roads and developed areas and raises about $8 million in state revenue to support the cleanup.

Proponents says the bill is a historic step toward restoring dozens of Vermont’s impaired lakes, ponds, rivers and streams. Farmers, municipalities and private landowners will shoulder the more stringent pollution prevention measures, but much of the money in the bill will be used to leverage federal funds and provide grants for pollution reduction projects.

David Deen, D-Westminster, chair of the Fish, Wildlife and Water Resources Committee, defended the bill as concerns were raised about how to pay for it.

“Now is the time for us to put our money where our mouths is. We say we want clean water, but are we willing to pay for it?” Deen said.

The bill that started in Deen’s committee now heads to the Senate.

Voting no on Thursday were 11 Republican House members: Paul Dame of Essex Junction, Mark Higley of Lowell, Ronald Hubert of Milton, Patti Lewis of Berlin, Constance Quimby of Concord, Vicki Strong of Irasburg, Job Tate of Mendon, Thomas Terenzini of Rutland, Donald Turner of Milton, Warren Van Wyck of Ferrisburgh and Gary Viens of Newport.

Broad support for lake clean-up in town meeting poll

Sen. William Doyle’s annual town meeting survey found that a significant majority of Vermonters feel that water quality is a major issue facing the state, and specifically that Lake Champlain needs to be a lot cleaner than it is.

Doyle, who is also a political science professor at Johnson State, compiled the numbers from 11,000 completed surveys. His team received surveys back from all 14 counties and 162 Vermont towns.

Among his new findings:

— 63 percent believe water quality is now a major issue facing Vermont.

— 9 percent think Lake Champlain is as clear as they’d like it to be; 69 percent do not.

* * * * * *

The questions Doyle asks are never an accident — often reflecting hot button issues before the state Legislature.

A bill designed to stem a persistent flow of phosphorus feeding into Lake Champlain is expected to arrive on the House floor this week, for example. The bill includes new regulation and taxes to attack the problem that has fouled beaches and triggered federal pressure on the state.

“The survey result tells me there’s very deep concern,” Doyle said Monday. “It’s the first time I’ve ever asked that question.”

Doyle doesn’t pretend this is a scientific survey, but in any event it’s good news that public opinion appears to be strongly in favor of action on water quality. Let’s hope that support gets translated into legislation sooner rather than later.

Ways and Means weighs in on lake clean-up funding

The House Ways and Means Committee has approved its solution to provide the funding required for H.35, the headline water quality bill making its way through the Legislature.

On March 19, the committee added an increase in the property transfer tax of about $6 million about $2.3 million in increased fees on developers, towns and farmers. It also added back to the bill a penalty on farmers who don’t follow best practices on water quality protection, denying them access to current-use property tax reductions. That piece had been removed when the bill went through the Agriculture Committee.

The increase in the property transfer tax is the largest source of clean water funding lawmakers have approved this session. It would raise approximately $6 million per year for the state’s newly created Clean Water Fund.

“I think there is a commitment in the public generally and there is definitely a commitment in this building to make the investments we need to make to clean up Lake Champlain and other fragile waterways. We’re going to do that,” said Rep. Janet Ancel, D-Calais, chair of the House Ways and Means Committee.

All of the revenue sources adopted by Ways and Means have their detractors. But just about everyone recognizes that the Legislature, one way or another, needs to capitalize on the momentum for protecting water quality in Montpelier and elsewhere.

The state should be raising money now while water quality is a salient issue in the minds of lawmakers and the general public, according to Lauren Hierl, who is the political director for Vermont Conservation Voters.

“We need to make the commitment now. This is the year to do it and get these dedicated revenue streams on the books so we don’t have to come back next year and fight for clean water,” Hierl said.

Exactly.