City Manager Tom Bonfield said he hasn't had time yet to examine the Falls Lake rules approved today by the state Environmental Management Commission, but he'll be taking time soon and making a report to the City Council.
Falls's "nutrient management strategy" is designed to reduce nitrogen and phosphorus pollution in the lake. It will take effect Jan. 15, though it could be amended later by the state legislature.
Durham officials aren't too happy about the image they think they have where the Falls Lake Rules are concerned. With some reason.
Some water-quality sampling, according to city and county reports, indicate that nitrogen and phosphorus pollution is actually declining in the lake. Some environmentalists, though, claim that Durham is only trying to weaken the regulations and cover up the dire condition in which it has put the drinking-water supply for 450,000 residents of Wake County.
"I worry that we're losing the perception battle with the public," City Councilman Mike Woodard said, at a meeting of council members and county commissioners this week. "We need to be able to counterpunch at all times."
If you've opened a water bill lately, you may have noticed that the blue "WATERways" insert is all about the Jordan and Falls lake cleanups and preparing Durham's water customers for rate increases ahead.
If you've been paying attention the past three years, that's old news. New cleanup and protection regulations for Jordan Lake got the legislature's approval last year, and the Falls Lake version is due to take effect in January.
Nevertheless, the lakes' water-quality picture is still developing and Assistant County Manager Drew Cummings, who is keeping on top of the process, has tossed some new data into the mix that suggests Falls Lake is getting better already without any new regulations.
Cummings's data, compiled from four U.S. Geological Survey monitoring stations at different points in Falls Lake (at I-85, N.C. 50, N.C. 98 and the Falls dam), shows the level of chlorophyll A -- the chemical marker used to indicate offensive amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus -- has trended down since August 2005. June 2010 levels at all four points are below the 40 micrograms/liter standard for excess N and P.
"This is raw data and there are not enough data points for the shown trendlines ... to be statistically significant," Cummings wrote to the state Environmental Management Commission last month (see attachment below), "but as several statisticians have reminded me, statistical significance is not the same as practical significance and this is some of the best data we have to go on."
As of last week, Cummings said, he had had no reaction from EMC members. "Even if it isn’t a lot of data, it sure seems to be TRYING to tell a story," he wrote in an email reply to Bull's Eye's question.
Raleigh, Durham, Granville and Person counties have agreed on a common position on what they want in the state's regulations for clearing Falls Lake of excess nitrogen and phosphorus, but Durham assistant city attorney Karen Sindelar said Thursday there's conflict still to come.
"We've already been made aware the environmental community is very opposed to what's in here," she told the Durham City Council during its discussion of the governments' "consensus principles," which the council went on to approve unanimously.
The state's Division of Water Quality is drafting regulations for public comment later this spring. The state Environmental Management Commission must approve a final draft by Jan. 15, 2011. The rules take effect immediately on an interim basis, but remain subject to further revision by the state's Rules Review Commission and General Assembly.
"This is a really long-term process," Sindelar said, "and I would not be surprised if this goes on for another two years."
The City Council had already approved spending up to $120,000 for the Raleigh law firm Kilpatrick Stockton LLP to lobby on Durham's behalf in the rulemaking process.
DURHAM Raleigh and Durham, along with several other jurisdictions, have reached a meeting of the minds on Falls Lake.
While their respective city councils and county commissioners have yet to sign off, officials of 11 Triangle-area governments approved a set of "concensus principles" for the state's program for cleaning up the polluted reservoir at a Tuesday meeting at the Triangle J Council of Governments.
"The managers of Raleigh, Durham city and Durham County, the lawyers representing [them] ... all agree with the guiding principles," said Raleigh City Manager Russell Allen. "We are prepared to recommend them to our boards."
The 12 principles prescribe measures to bring water quality at Raleigh’s intake to acceptable standards within 10 years, and for ongoing water-quality monitoring in the lake and its tributaries and revisions to the cleanup regulations if data indicates they are needed.
“It's a lot of give and take,” said Durham County manager Mike Ruffin. “I think we feel about as good about it as we can feel. We've done what's best for the watershed, we found consensus on what we can work [on] together.”
Raleigh authorities are not pleased with a preliminary draft of the Falls Lake cleanup regulations, and point toward Durham as a primary polluter.
In a memo presented to the Raleigh City Council today (link to full memo is below), Associate City Attorney Dan McLawhorn, stormwater manager Danny Bowden, assistant utilities director Kenneth R. Waldroup and Environmental Coordinator Ed Buchan show evidence that the lake's water quality is steadily deteriorating.
"This decline in water quality is clearly tied to increased urbanization of the upper watershed," their memo states. The upper watershed is primarily in Durham County, and the lake's upper section shows the highest levels of pollution.
Paul Wiebke of the city's public works department got to give the City
Council its update on the Jordan and Falls lake cleanup rules
yesterday. He was on the council work session agenda two weeks ago, but
other weighty matters ran the council out of time.
Bull's Eye reported Wiebke's report back then, based on the prepared
presentation he kindly made available. In case you missed it then, here
it is again (a link to the full presentation is below):
The City Council ran out of time in its work session today before it heard a planned update on the Jordan and Falls lake cleanup rules.
But council member Mike Woodard, who got the update at a committee meeting Wednesday, told his colleagues, "You need to hear this."
The gist of the update, though, is not new: the rules are going to cost Durham taxpayers a lot of money.
Falls Lake has a deadline for its cleanup rules, and some other protections coming on line sooner, thanks in part to a legislative end run by Wake County Sen. Josh Stein.
In its next-to-last vote of the session, the state Senate approved an amended version of S 1020, into which Stein had incorporated language from another bill that remains in House-Senate conference until next year.
S 1020, which Stein sponsored, sets Jan. 15, 2011 as deadline for the Division of Water Quality to deliver a "nutrient management strategy" for approval by the state Environmental Management Commission. The deadline had been July 1 of this year.
Those rules will remain subject to approval by the state Rules Review Commission and possibly the General Assembly; however, the DWQ rules will take temporary effect and remain the law until they are formally approved and/or amended.
The bill also gives the EMC authority to deny any new "nutrient-loading" permits after July 1, 2010; adds protection for stream-buffer zones; and establishes erosion-control measures in the Falls watershed that take effect in January 2010.
Stein, on his way to some time off his legislative duty, said he was pleased.
S 1020's provisions for Falls Lake were included in H 1099, a bill that included several unrelated, and controversial, provisions regarding other parts of the state. With different versions of H 1099 passed by the Senate and House, legislative conferees were unable to reconcile their differences before the Senate recessed this afternoon.
H 1099, the bill setting a Jan. 15, 2011 deadline for Falls Lake's cleanup plan, passed the state Senate Wednesday.
Now, the bill goes to a Senate-House conference to reconcile the Senate's version with an earlier version the House passed in May.
The house bill set the deadline at July 1, 2010 for the state Division of Water Quality to prepare a "nutrient management strategy" to curb nitrogen and phosphorus pollution in the lake. DWQ had asked for a November 2011 deadline to allow more time for the complex research, modeling and rule-making process.
Once those regulations are written, they must be approved by the state Environmental Management Commission and Rules Review Commission and, possibly, the legislature. That process would take about six months and possibly more than a year.
The Senate version gives DWQ six and a half more months to prepare its regulations, but also provides that those regulations would take temporary effect as soon as they are presented to the EMC in January, according to DWQ engineer John Huisman. They would be rescinded and replaced by the permanent rules when the permanent rules receive the necessary approvals and any revisions.
The bill up for a vote today also incorporates four sedimentation-control measures for the Falls watershed that are outside the nutrient-reduction plan's scope, and would take effect Jan. 1 of this year.
