Governor Kaine, Governor Rendell, Mayor Fenty
Chesapeake Bay Executive Council
December 5, 2007
Governor O’Malley: Let me begin by calling on Governor Kaine of Virginia. Governor.
Governor Kaine: Thank you, Governor O’Malley, and I want to thank you for hosting this and also congratulate you for your leadership. And we just appointed Governor O’Malley as the chairman of the executive council for another year and we’re all pleased to do that by acclimation.
Sort of to follow on what Governor O’Malley said, this is a time where much good is happening, but we’ve got to be candid and acknowledge by the end of 2010, at current pace, we’re not going to meet the goals that were set in place back at the turn of the century. So we need to be candid about that. Celebrate what good is happening and then be very precise in pinpointing what we need to do to succeed.
I’m going to talk a little bit about Virginia, where Virginia is, but then I want to raise up and champion the issue of non-point source pollution and what we need to do in the agricultural sector throughout the region to achieve our goals.
Virginia -- good news is that in the last two and-a-half years we put in place regulations dealing with point source pollution and then in the last 21 months we found $700 million of both grant and loan funds to upgrade sewage treatment plants and provide other point source improvements.
With those investments in the bank, and they’re still being spent, we have to actually make the upgrades, but we have put both the regulations and the dollars in place, so that Virginia will meet our point source obligations for reduction by 2010. That represents, when fully implemented, about a seven million pound reduction of nitrogen pollution entering the Chesapeake Bay every year. And so that’s the good news. We feel very good about where we’ve come on the point source side, both from regulations and from dollars.
Where we have to turn our attention now in Virginia -- and I think we all recognize across the watershed that this is such a significant challenge as it is to non-point source pollution -- and, in particular, I want to talk a little bit about agriculture.
Agriculture and forestry is the number one industry in Virginia, to the tune of more than $50 billion a year. So it is a critical sector of our economy, always has been, it’s always been number one and it’ll be number one for a long time.
But we’ve tended to lag behind in terms of the wise regulatory practices of agriculture. I think there’s been maybe some sense that, you know, the attachment to family farms, recognizing that family farms are often financially very stressed, we found it easier to go after the point source improvements than to put additional burdens on farmers.
But the time is now when we have to face non-point responsibilities. And the good news is in Virginia the agriculture community is at the table with us, saying we’ve got to do this, the farmers are our best environmentalists, first and best environmentalists, but they need help if they’re going to make things happen.
Let me talk a little bit about what we’ve done so far in non-point pollution, but what we want to do going forward.
We’ve reached two agreements in the last months with the Virginia poultry industry, which is a huge industry and it is responsible for a lot of pollution into Bay watershed, particularly in the Shenandoah Valley. In these agreements, we’re going to -- in the first agreement, share the cost of providing financial incentives to move poultry litter out of the counties where surpluses exist and into counties where we can better use litter as fertilizer, poultry litter as fertilizer, better than other kinds of fertilizers, will help us protect the watershed.
Second, we’ve struck another agreement in this area dealing with feed additives. And feed additives that will ultimately reduce the amount of phosphorous that’s contained in poultry litter. Once again, that will help us in terms of run-off with the poultry farms and the Bay.
Second (sic), we are doing what we can to produce somewhat of a nontraditional form of agriculture, but one that’s dear both to Virginia and Maryland, and that is aqua-culture. Clams -- aqua-culture clams have become a huge industry on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. And so we are embarking on an effort to do special water protection on the Eastern Shore, especially on the sea side, that will help agriculture, but will also be smart in terms of Bay preservation efforts.
Third, we have embarked -- as I began as Governor, I announced what I hoped would be a gift to Virginia for the 400th anniversary since Jamestown, in which we would preserve 400,000 acres -- a thousand acres for every year since Jamestown by the end of my administration, one term in Virginia. That would essentially double the pace of land preservation in Virginia, and by doing that when you preserve open space you help scenic beauty, you help farming, but you also help both air and water quality. We are on-track to meet that goal, nearing 200,000 acres in the first two years I’ve been in office. And much of that is going towards farmland preservation, so that we can keep farms and working landscapes.
But there’s much more that we need to do in the future. And so what we are pledging to do -- and we are working with our partners, both in agriculture and in the environmental community and we’re also taking advantage, frankly, of some good work done by other States in this area., States here in the watershed, we’re glad to steal great ideas from them -- is really try to focus, now that we believe we can say on the point source we’ve done what we need to do, what do we need to do in agriculture.
We’re going to spend about 80 percent of our time, attention and dollars in agriculture on five very precise strategies that, if implemented, will have a dramatic effect on reducing pollution from non-point sources into the Bay.
Better nutrient management planning, better planning in creation of streamside buffers throughout the watershed. Better stream fencing to keep livestock from getting into the water sources, that’s important. Conservation tillage and then encouraging the growth of cover crops that will help us with sedimentation and pollutants into the Bay.
We have identified these five best management practices and we, again, will spend 80 percent of our energy in these practices with our own agricultural sector in doing what we can to spread what we learn and any good results throughout the Bay watershed.
This is going to be a very aggressive approach, I am going to lay out a budget to the legislature on the 17th of December that will begin to start talking about investments and strategies that we’ll make and those investments and strategies will be discussed when we convene the legislature in January.
So again, I’ll conclude sort of where Governor O’Malley started. I think it’s really important that we just be candid and candor compels us to say, we’re not going to be everywhere we want to be by 2010.
The good news in Virginia is we can say on our to-do list point source, put a checkmark by it. We’ve come up with a regulatory climate and we’ve come up with the investments that we can be where we need to be on the point source. Where Virginia needs to go with this critical industry has now focused all of our attention in a very dramatic way on agriculture run-off. And I look forward to working with these partners and learning from their efforts as well as we strive to do a better job in that throughout the watershed.
Governor O’Malley: Thanks, Governor. Governor Rendell.
Governor Rendell: Thanks, Governor O’Malley, and congratulations on your re-election as chair. Probably the easiest election the Governor has ever run in. (Laughter.)
I want to echo the words of both of my fellow Governors and say that although the Chesapeake Bay Foundation report was somewhat discouraging, I think it misses the point that there are several -- that there has been significant progress and, more importantly, several plans in place that will engender even more significant progress in the years to come.
There’s no question that some of the States, and probably all of us, were a little slow in getting started. There’s no question that there is a funding lag. This is a climate where it’s hard to raise revenues for any type of investment, including investments to protect the treasured environmental goals like protecting the Bay.
It is a question that Federal support for plans like this has been diminishing with the war and the tax cut draining the dollars. We would like to step up that financial support. We would like to enter into some program where the State’s match increased Federal support for cleaning up the Bay. We don’t think we have the resources to do it all by ourselves. But we would pony up significant additional resources if we knew those resources were matched by Federal contributions as well.
But now I’d like to focus on a few things in a report, as Governor O’Malley did and Governor Kaine did, on some of the progress we’ve made. We had a long drawn-out pitched battle between our agricultural interests and agriculture also, Tim, is the number one employer in Pennsylvania -- and our environmental and local township interests.
And out of that came a bill called Acre. And Acre established new manure management requirements for vegetative buffers and set-backs along the edges of our streams. It included in the requirement that nutrient management plans be filed. It included farms that import manure, as well as farms that produce manure. In the past, farms that imported manure didn’t have to file nutrient management reports, it made no sense and didn’t have to do the things necessary to protect them.
Pennsylvania has over 2200 farms with nutrient management plans that account for an estimated 550,000 acres of land under nutrient management in the Bay watershed. Acre will add 5,000 new farms to those required to fund nutrient management plans.
Pennsylvania’s Chesapeake Bay Program has provided over $34 million in cost share funds to the agricultural industry to install best management practices on their farms. We just passed in the last budget in July a $10 million tax credit program called Reap, where farmers will get tax credits for installing best practices, in terms of nutrient management on their farms.
Pennsylvania has met its riparian forest buffer goal of 600 miles by 2010. We’ve already restored 3200 miles of riparian forest buffers over 35 foot wide in the Bay watershed.
Pennsylvania’s goal was to restore 4,000 acres of wetlands from 2000 to 2010 in the Chesapeake basin. Through 2005 we restored 2250 acres and there are 2800 acres that have had their functions enhanced. So we are doing very, very well in many different ways.
New conditions imposed on the permits of 190 significant sewage and industrial discharges will achieve an estimated reduction of 5.4 million pounds of nitrogen and 250,000 pounds of phosphorous per year in the Susquehanna and Potomac River watersheds.
We -- also, it’s important to note, the 63 sewage treatment plants responsible for 85 percent of the total nutrient load sent downstream to the Bay will have legally enforceable new permits that put them on track to meet their 2010 goals by the end of this calendar year. The Susquehanna River Basin Commission reported that trends for nitrogen and phosphorous for the Susquehanna River showed decreasing concentrations at six of the seven border quality monitoring stations.
The University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Sciences also produces a report card, as does the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. And the Chesapeake Bay 2006 Report Card gave the upper Bay a C plus, the highest grade for any segment of the Chesapeake Bay. And we think that recognizes many of the steps we’ve taken.
In the submerged aquatic vegetation area Pennsylvania had 4,000 acres in the SAV acreage in 1991. We’ve increased that to 9,300 in 2006, 72 percent of the SAV goal.
In terms of preservation, you heard Governor Kaine talk about preservation, we lead the nation in farmland preservation with 360,000 acres of farmland preserved. We lead the nation in conservation resource enhancement program. All of the counties in the Bay watershed and many additional counties in the northern tier of Pennsylvania, are in the Federal CREP program and that program is helping mightily. We’ve already reached the Chesapeake 2000 Agreement Land Preservation Goal to permanently preserve 20 percent of the land area in the watershed. Over three million acres are now preserved.
So we have made significant progress and we are committed to making continuing progress as well.
Pennsylvania wants today to join with its sister States in championing three new initiatives. One, we intend to, with the cooperation of our sister States and the District and the other States, have a cellulosic ethanol summit in 2008. As many of you know, the corn-based ethanol is almost the exclusive ethanol that is produced in the United States of America. That’s true in Pennsylvania, too, where we are in the process of building five new ethanol plants with millions and millions of gallons of production. They’re all corn-based ethanol except one.
Corn-based ethanol contributes significantly to agricultural run-off and that run-off hurts the Bay. It is also less energy efficient and, of course, has environmental problems, it creates environmental problems.
Cellulosic ethanol comes from wood fiber, wood chips, switch grass, all sorts of plants and agricultural waste. And I am told that the Chesapeake Bay States lead the nation in the concentration of the type of hardwoods that produce the wood fibers and the wood chips. And Virginia, Pennsylvania and Maryland all have significant farming aspects to them and all have a lot of farm animals that are raised for production and, therefore, we are right up there in the level of agricultural waste that’s produced as well.
So, if cellulosic ethanol becomes a viable means of producing a substitute for fossil fuel the Chesapeake Bay States can benefit tremendously, both economically and environmentally, in the impact it can have on the Bay.
In Clearfield County, in the northern tier, there’s a $70 million pilot project planned for the production of cellulosic ethanol and it’s going to break ground in the early part of next year.
But we want to have this cellulosic summit to bring all of the best ideas and the best practices in all of the States that are participants with us in 2008.
We have also today -- Governor O’Malley did not mention it, he was leaving it for me to mention -- we have signed a letter to congressional leaders urging them to enact before the end of the year a new agriculture bill. It is very, very important that the new agriculture bill get enacted, because in that new bill are provisions that protect the environment, that talk about alternative and renewable energy to enhance that industry that aren’t present in the current bill. So we have all been signatories to that letter urging them to do so.
And, lastly, I want to report that the Conowingo Dam Project, as you know, that has been targeted as a major problem. And the Susquehanna River Basin Commission advises that what we really need is to better understand the sediment dynamics of the dam. So Pennsylvania is willing to sponsor and pay for a significant study of what is the actual level of sediment and what Conowingo Dam produces towards that problem.
continue >
