Editor’s note: This op-ed is by Buzz Hoerr, former chair (for 16 years) of the Vermont Citizen’s Advisory Committee on Lake Champlain, chair of the Education and Outreach for the Lake Champlain Basin Program, and a member of the board of ECHO for more than 10 years. He lives on Lake Champlain in Colchester. This piece is a summary of the testimony he recently gave to the Senate Natural Resources Committee.
H.526 is a misguided piece of legislation that has rightly become a political football. It was a weak value proposition in the beginning and it has only become weaker going through the legislative process. It needs to be tabled and the public comment process proposed by Sen. Hartwell over the summer should take place before any regulations are put into place.
While some inland lakes and ponds would see modest benefit from limiting shoreline clearing since development may be the only source of excess nutrients and pathogens for those bodies of water, to say that those limitations would help solve the nutrient problems in Lake Champlain in any substantive way is not correct.
It is possible now to focus on specific fields and land use practices to significantly reduce nutrient inputs to the lake with our limited resources.
I am fortunate to live on Colchester Point, am not “rich,” thanks largely to property taxes that have eaten up most of our discretionary income so we can stay here, and I can tell you without doubt where the nutrient pollution in the lake largely comes from. Right now, tons of sediment is pouring into the lake 24 hours a day from the Winooski, Mississquoi and other rivers from snowmelt and rain runoff, carrying with it the majority of phosphorous that causes blue green and other algae blooms. I can watch it and have done so for years, both here and in my travels around the lake working to solve this problem. And the science backs that up.
The amount coming from all homes on the lake, the prime targets of this misplaced legislation, is miniscule in comparison. In fact there are no numbers available to quantify what comes from shoreline homes because it is such a small part of the equation.
We know where 78 percent of the excess is coming from now thanks to a terrific study commissioned in the aftermath of the floods two years ago, called Concentrated Source Area or CSA. It is possible now to focus on specific fields and land use practices to significantly reduce nutrient inputs to the lake with our limited resources. Instead of focusing on a source that is not even quantified except in socio-political terms, it’s time to get focused on where it really comes from and solve the problem.
