The Ripton Conservation Commission is working to reclassify three headwater streams that run through the Addison County town.
Goshen, Blue Bank and Alder brooks may be bumped up to A(1) status — the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources’ designation for excellent waters.
At its core, reclassification of the three streams — which are currently rated as B(2), or good — to A(1) is about ensuring that they stay that way.
“Reclassifying, essentially, it raises that bar in terms of when we are obligated to respond,” said Bethany Sargent. She manages monitoring and assessment for the department’s watershed management division.
The streams already meet A(1) criteria. So, if the water quality were to degrade, the streams wouldn’t need to drop all the way to B(2) status before the environmental agency took steps to restore them, Sargent said.
The Department of Environmental Conservation’s water standards include eight designated uses for surface waters: aquatic biota and wildlife, aquatic habitat, swimming, boating, fishing, aesthetic conditions, public water source, and irrigation. Waters can be classified independently for each of these uses, Sargent said.
Ripton’s three streams could be bumped up to excellent status overall — if the conservation commission succeeds.
Why were the three streams initially classified as B(2)?
Vermont law stipulates that waters that are at or below 2,500 feet above sea level are automatically classified as B(2) for all uses unless they’re reclassified. Waters above 2,500 feet are automatically given A(1) status, unless they are a public water source, in which case they are designated A(2), Sargent said.
The reclassification process for Alder, Blue Bank and Goshen brooks has stretched on for several years.
It began in 2016, when the environmental agency and the Addison County River Watch Collaborative reached out to the Ripton Conservation Commission about the opportunity to reclassify the three streams, said Mark Nelson, chair of the commission.
The commission considered the opportunity by conducting research, weighing benefits and landowner impacts, and securing the approval of the Ripton Selectboard. The group held a public meeting and mailed notification letters to landowners in the watershed, Nelson said, though some landowners later claimed they were not notified at that stage.
After securing approval from the selectboard in Lincoln — a town through which two of the streams run — and spending more than two and a half years preparing petitions and running tests verifying the status of the streams, the commission submitted the petitions to the Department of Environmental Conservation in December 2019, Nelson said.
The department then reviewed the petitions and began “internal procedures” that extended until January of this year, he said. The department held a virtual meeting and invited public comments about the reclassification efforts on March 30.
A number of landowners in the watershed submitted comments. Many asked questions about whether their access to or use of their property would be affected by the proposed stream reclassification.
In response, the department clarified that access would not be affected. In terms of use, there are a few prohibitions for Class A waters, all of which pertain to waste management. Landowners can’t dump untreated waste that contains organisms pathogenic to humans, Sargent explained.
There are also restrictions on indirect discharge systems, such as in-ground septic systems, that have a design flow of greater than 1,000 gallons per day. But 1,000 gallons is well beyond what would be required for a standard house, Sargent said.
Class A designation also prohibits solid waste management facilities and use of biosolids or septage within the watershed, according to the Department of Environmental Conservation’s public comment responses.
“So, in terms of, you know, what a landowner could do with their land if their land is within a watershed that is classified as an A(1), there are relatively few restrictions on that,” Sargent said in an interview with VTDigger.
Vermont water quality standards provide specific guidelines for land management within watersheds, according to Nelson, but many of these guidelines apply to all surface waters, regardless of classification status.
Sargent said she thinks some landowners are worried that additional restrictions could be imposed in the future.
“It’s hard to answer that question … other than to say that we know that lots of activities can go on in these watersheds in a way that is protective of water quality,” she said.
Many other commenters said landowners had not received enough notice about the petition process. Though the commission and the state agency had been engaged in reclassifying the streams for years, some landowners said they had not heard about the process until 30 days before the March public meeting.
One landowner, Ellen Forshaw, said some landowners “would find this petition a complete surprise” because they were not contacted by the environmental agency about the meeting and comment period.
The department was not involved in the outreach process before the petitions were submitted, Sargent said.
But then, “once we were initiating our public comment process, we notified landowners and evidently were able to get in touch with some landowners that hadn’t been notified initially,” she said.
Some landowners were living out-of-state at the time, she said, and were unable to return to gather information or look through municipal records due to the pandemic. Because of that, the state agency decided to delay the reclassification process and hold another comment period in October, allowing those landowners to return to Vermont should they want to.
Sargent said there was a second silver lining to the delay: another opportunity to clarify what reclassification “does and does not mean.”
With several steps in the reclassification process still ahead, Nelson said, he’s unsure what the outcome will be.
“We’re hoping that the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation will approve the petitions and the final rulemaking will go into effect and these streams will get the classification and the protection they deserve,” he said. “But we don’t have any idea what the outcome will be at this point in time.”
