THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, July 18, 1996 TAG: 9607180334
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY SCOTT HARPER, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: 78 lines
Tributary strategy.
This mouthful of jargon will be muttered, cursed and questioned in town halls and county board rooms in coastal Virginia over the next two years, as the next phase of the vaunted Chesapeake Bay cleanup gets rolling.
Essentially, state and local officials must draft plans, known as tributary strategies, by Jan. 1, 1998, on how to meet ambitious goals for reducing pollution and increasing habitat in the York, Rappahannock and James rivers. Locally, the Nansemond, Elizabeth and Pagan rivers will be addressed as part of the James River plan.
A strategy for the Potomac River should be done by 1997, and blueprints for improving water quality in the tidal basins along Virginia Beach and on Virginia's Eastern Shore must be finished by New Year's Day, 1999.
The idea is simple: Repair the rivers and streams that feed the Bay with fresh water and serve as nurseries for many species of fish, and the Bay will slowly recover.
But it will not be so easy. At a conference Wednesday in Norfolk, a leading environmental lawmaker warned that Virginia will likely fail to meet a key cleanup goal if the state does not spend more money fixing up sewage plants.
Sewage treatment plants are big, primary sources for nitrogen and phosphorus pollution. The two nutrients encourage algae blooms, which rob water of life-sustaining oxygen. Much has been done to reduce phosphorus, including a ban on phosphate detergents in 1987. But nitrogen is another story.
State Del. W. Tayloe Murphy Jr., D-Warsaw, said that without state aid to help local governments upgrade their plants, it will be nearly impossible to cut nitrogen levels by 40 percent, as prescribed under the Chesapeake Bay Agreements as a central way to revive the Bay.
Murphy noted how, in contrast, Maryland is offering millions of dollars in assistance to city halls and sanitation districts across the Free State to help install sophisticated anti-nitrogen technology at 59 major sewage plants.
He called it ``disgraceful'' that Virginia, with the most Bay coastline of any state, spends less than 1 percent of its annual budget on environmental protection.
``The state absolutely has to show some financial commitment,'' Murphy said after the conference, sponsored by the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission to brief local officials about tributary strategies.
Also attending the conference was Virginia's secretary of natural resources, Becky Norton Dunlop, who has been criticized for a draft plan for the Potomac River that is heavy on ideas but includes no state money to implement them.
In answering Murphy, Dunlop said that other, less expensive technologies are being studied for sewage plants and that money is not always the answer.
``Our goal has been not to focus on the funding question,'' Dunlop said. ``If you have a feeling that any solution will be financed automatically, you tend to come up with the most expensive solution.''
The technology mentioned most often Wednesday is called biological nitrogen removal. The expensive process, installed at a handful of sewage plants in Virginia, including one in Norfolk, moves sewage through a series of tanks containing micro-organisms that consume nitrogen.
Bill Matuszeski, director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Chesapeake Bay office, said that nine of the top 10 nitrogen-producing plants that lack commitments to install the new technology are in Virginia.
Six discharge into the James River, including two in Hampton Roads.
Matuszeski said that if all those plants were equipped with biological treatment, one-third of the nitrogen problems remaining in the Bay could be solved.
Neither Matuszeski nor Murphy could say how much those improvements would cost, or where Virginia would come up with the money. The price tag would probably be in the tens of millions of dollars, if not higher, other officials estimated.
For his part, Murphy said he will ask the House Appropriations Committee to study upgrade costs for plants on the Potomac River. He wants the figures in time for the legislative session next winter, in case he decides to press for greater state spending.
``I'd be asking the legislature to begin the funding process,'' he said. ILLUSTRATION: Map
KEN WRIGHT/The Virginian-Pilot by CNB