BENNINGTON — What will it take to clean the waters in Vermont? According to panelists during a recent forum at Bennington College, quite a lot.
Former state Department of Environmental Conservation Commissioner David Mears, state Sen. Christopher Bray, D-New Haven; Bennington County Regional Commission Executive Director Jim Sullivan, David Bond, a faculty member with the college’s Center for the Advancement of Public Action, all described scenarios that will take years, cost many millions, if not billions, and require a massive political effort.
“I doubt there is any topic more intimate than talking about water in terms of environmental health,” said Bray, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Energy.
He pointed out that humans are about 80 percent water by weight and highly susceptible to anything that impacts water. Although PFOA (perfluorooctanoic acid) contamination of well water is in the news today, Bray said, more than a century of industrialization has left many other impacts, including PCB (polychlorinated biphenyl) contamination in waterways such as the Hoosic River.
He laid out the response of state government to the challenge of cleaning and preserving water supplies, particularly through Act 64, Vermont’s Clean Water Act.
The legislation calls for an additional $55 million per year for at least 20 years to deal with pollution and prevent future threats to water supplies. That is on top of the approximately $60 million per year Vermont spends on related environmental programs and issues, Bray said.
A key feature of Act 64, he said, was the “everybody in” approach to the legislation, meaning no sectors of the state or the economy were considered exempt from its provisions, such as requirements to reduce runoff or emissions from farms, housing or business development sites, logging or industrial operations or wastewater treatment plants.
Citing phosphorus and other forms of pollution in Lake Champlain as “one of our heaviest lifts in Vermont,” Bray said controlling agricultural runoff is addressed through now-mandated control measures, like training for farm workers in reducing phosphorus runoff from fields.
In addition, the current use program, which allows a tax reduction on agricultural land, now requires that a farmer use best practices to reduce runoff or face removal of the land from current use status.
Requirements for stormwater management for new projects have been tightened, he said, and municipal wastewater plants are required to meet treatment targets for removal of phosphorous or other pollutants.
How to pay for these efforts over the next 20 or more years has not been decided by the Legislature. A .2 percent surcharge on property transfers has raised a small amount toward the effort. The state treasurer has provided a list of possible revenue sources and recommended a long-term funding plan not dependent on annual budget determinations, he said.
Mears discussed three general themes in dealing with water issues, including “the need to look at large, complex problems like clean water, with an ecological mindset;” the role of the law relating to clean water, and “the use of the democratic process to solve ecological problems, which presents some unique and challenging issues for us, but is the only way … we are going to develop long-term solutions to the issues that confront us.”
The actual solutions to clean water “are not rocket science,” Mears said. “The solutions are actually easy.”
But that is only the case, he said, if you take away human beings and the complexities of society and can deal with the issues from a scientific, engineering standpoint.
Yet to be dealt with effectively, he said, are the impacts of runoff from the development of homes, factories, roads and paved lots and all other human-created diversions to the natural flow of waters in nature. Low-impact development along with preservation of wetlands, forests and other natural features to control runoff is an obvious solution, Mears said, but gaining a consensus to implement those practices has always been the challenge.
Mears said that years ago he thought of developers and business people as among those who “wore the black hats” and were the bad guys, while environmentalists wore the white hats. But he said he’s come to believe that working in bipartisan ways on environmental issues is imperative, as is that all sides listen to what the others are saying about their goals or proposed solutions.
Finally, Mears told students during the forum, “We need political leaders at all levels” to make the changes necessary ensure clean water.
Sullivan, who lives not far from the former ChemFab Corp. plant in North Bennington and learned last year he had an elevated level of PFOA in his well water, said that “a lot of times it takes a significant event to spur action,” such as the contamination discovered over a wide area around the plant in early 2016.
Addressing those water issues locally and around Vermont could cost billions of dollars, he said, and “take years and years.”
But referring to the acid rain problems that intensified a few decades ago when smokestack emissions generated in other states began to kill off aquatic life in lakes throughout the Northeast, Sullivan said that problem has abated significantly after the federal government began to enforce new emissions standards for power plants and other entities.
A local example of the costs involved, he said, is reflected in the $9.5 million bond Bennington residents will be voting on in October to deal with mandated wastewater plant upgrades to meet new requirements for discharges into the Walloomsac River.
He and Mears noted the effect a massive, well-publicized environmental disaster can have in mobilizing all sides to come together on these issues. The “burning rivers” and other dramatic events led to the federal Clean Water Act of 1972, they said.
Today, the issues seem more complex, Sullivan said, such as dealing with PFOA, which is extremely stable and long-lasting in groundwater and has entered not through a single discharge pipe but from multiple sources.
The same is true of runoff pollution, he said, which has myriad and varied source points.
Many of the programs the BCRC participates in today involve meeting new and evolving requirements for runoff control or other protections, he said.
It is important, he added, that people accept that “we’re all responsible” in some way for these problems, and that it will take strong regulation and enforcement, along with funding for education in best practices and technical support for management projects.
Bond, who has helped lead the ongoing Understanding PFOA project at CAPA, said that crisis has reinforced for area residents the fact that “water is not a given, and has made us think about water in a new way.”
He added, “I don’t think we are alone in this,” referring to research he did in the Caribbean, on the Gulf Coast and in Alaska, dealing with water-related issues.
“What is it about our moment that is making water a kind of urgent problem?” he asked, adding, “It is a challenge and an opportunity to think about what to do about water.”
A key issue, Bond said, is whether traditional methods of addressing environmental issues can still be effective or whether new approaches are demanded.
In addition to new regulatory strategies, he said, “I think there is a way we can rethink water around an emboldened understanding of citizenship.”
The emerging effects of climate change, as well as widespread pollution issues, force us to question whether state-level, or even national-level approaches can be effective, Bond said.
“Have we now reached a planetary scale?” he asked. “I think the question to consider is what authority is best equipped to think of some of these problems on a planetary scale.”
Questions of democracy also are intertwined in determining how responses to global scale issues are addressed, he said, and what governmental format is used is more important than ever.
There is also a mounting pressure to address all sources of environmental contamination at once, rather than as one chemical or substance at a time. With PFOA, Bond said, halting production in the U.S. hasn’t address several similar and closely related chemicals, nor continued production of PFOA in China or other countries.
PFOA presents “a new kind of environmental problem,” he said, in that the measurements are in parts per trillion, rather than larger particles for other pollutants, and the chemical has effects that can take decades to manifest. The medical effects seem clear on a population scale, he said, but are difficult to precisely measure on an individual level.
“There is no easy way to clean it up,” he said of PFOA, referring to contaminated soils and long-term leaching of the chemical into groundwater. “This problem has surfaced with no easy solution.”
Solutions have leaned toward “how do we manage it,” Bond said, rather than how can it be effectively removed from the environment.
The public forum was presented Thursday night by CAPA Director Susan Sgorbati and Bond. State Sen. Brian Campion, D-Bennington, acted as moderator.
