Falls Lake quality at Raleigh water intake looms large in water clean-up debate

The end draws near for the Division of Water Quality's legislature-mandated process to draft anti-pollution rules for Falls Lake, the manmade flood control reservoir and Raleigh water supply that's fed from a range of rivers and creeks running through Durham.

Deputy city manager Ted Voorhees and assistant county manager Drew Cummings -- key players for both governments in the debate -- appeared on "Shooting the Bull" last week to discuss the rule-making process and outcomes, which represents a high-stakes, possibly multi-billion dollar decision on remediation and acceptable nutrient levels.

You can download a show podcast, or listen to the show now via the embedded player below:

Raleigh officials in recent weeks have expressed concern about the timeframes in a DWQ draft rule set, concerned they provide too much time for nitrogen and phosphorus removal to take place in Falls Lake, and claiming that the resultant algae blooms and other effects in the lake would hurt drinking water quality and cost the City of Oaks hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up.

Voorhees and Cummings argued the Durham side of the debate, noting that the data to their evaluation remained unclear about the rapidity of decline in Falls Lake's water quality, and expressing a concern that economically unfeasible restrictions -- including deep declines in allowable development and the possible need to retrofit existing subdivisions with catch basins and BMPs, taking residential land or even homesites if needed -- weren't merited based on the science they were seeing.

As the draft rules issuance and stakeholders' comment meeting loom later this month, Voorhees noted a hopeful sign: that Durham and Raleigh leaders seemed to be making some headway on a compromise measure that could be a win-win for both municipalities.

"Fortunately, I think we heard some positive things from Raleigh's city manager and some other officials [Wednesday] in a meeting held between the city managers and the county managers," Voorhees said. "We're going to try to take the high road and pursue those opportunities for compromise and reasonableness."

"We are committed to the health of the environment. We do want Raleigh to be successful and to have healthy and safe drinking waters," Voorhees continued. "We just have to get reasonableness into how we achieve that."

As Voorhees and Cummings noted at the radio show's end -- and as Ray Gronberg printed in a weekend metro story at the Herald-Sun -- the compromise involves focusing on near-term improvement of the water quality at the lake's lower end, the much-deeper part of Jordan Lake where Raleigh's water intake pulls water for treatment that's later consumed by much of Wake County's residents.

As Gronberg notes in the H-S:

Raleigh officials have signaled that they might not press for the most expensive long-term controls on the upper reaches of the lake, provided that everyone involved tries to act quickly on short-term measures, Voorhees said.

In response, "we have said there are probably some things that can be sped up, but there still needs to be a reasonable timeline on stage one, 10 years," Voorhees said. "Natural systems take time to respond and programs take time to work. You can't expect all these things to come together too quickly."

Raleigh's official, public position has been that any program should bring the lake into compliance with pollution targets within five years.

But administrators there have signaled state regulators that there's give to their position, provided a rules package contains a lot of incentives for action by 2016.

Any such compromise, the Herald-Sun notes, could still be derailed if environmental groups don't think it goes far enough to clean up Falls Lake -- and since only a small number of appeals letters to the Environmental Management Commission is all it takes to challenge rules before they're adopted, it's not a stretch to think that could occur.

The compromise under discussion aligns with a point Cummings made on-air last week, noting that the "constructed watershed" in the upper lake is very different from the 50' deep lake at Falls' southern end, viewed from the air Falls Lake is more like six individual lakes, some crossed by narrow causeways that restrict water flow.

"The drinking water quality at the intake is very good, compared to the water in the uppermost part. To some degree, I think it makes sense to think of these different lake as doing their job," Cummings said.

He added that if water quality was going downhill rapidly -- a point on which Durham and Raleigh disagree, with Durham citing data from the USGS and others showing water quality as flat or improving -- it would be a different story, but that the current data calls for a focus on improving the drinking-water-source lower end of the lake's quality now, while pushing out compliance times and requirements for the upper end of the lake.

Falls Lake appears on the federal government's 303(d) list of impaired waterways, requiring clean-up under the Clean Waters Act.

Nitrogen and phosphorus are the main problem in Falls Lake, Cummings noted, as they form the "building blocks" in sunlight of Chlorophyll-a, a major pollutant for drinking water quality and a contributor to fish kills. 

Durham's often-polluted urban stream Ellerbe Creek is one of the flows into Falls Lake, with Durham's wastewater treatment plant sending treated sewage as a "point source" into the lake as well.

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Voorhees noted that the creation of Falls and Jordan -- itself also now under nutrient management rules that could have a sizable cost for taxpayers -- was not without controversy as civic leaders foresaw these issues decades ago. As he pointed out on "Shooting the Bull:"

In the case of Jordan, the City of Durham and others, I believe including Orange County or some of the other municipalities there, actually filed suit in Federal court to prevent... at least the Jordan reservoir from being built, because the science of the time showed that it was a terrible location to build a reservoir, that we were going to have problems like this over a period of years as our community urbanized.

We all know that the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Triangle is the economic engine of our state. That's where we really decided we were going to really try to promote growth and development. Then to plop down some reservoirs right in the middle of them and not expect this problem to now face us was kind of ludicrous.

We lost the suit, but now here we are, being asked by ourselves really to pay for this. What we've been trying to do then... is to think a little broadly about who ought to pay for a problem that's really a regional problem, or really even a statewide problem.

Cummings added that there's precedent in other environmental models to see both the creators and beneficiaries of clean-up to help pay for government actions.

Voorhees went on to say that, as with the Jordan Lake Rules, Durham would be advocating for economically reasonable and supportable clean-up standards.

"If we were to spend the kind of money that's being estimated without certain safeguards -- we're talking about a billion dollars in the Falls watershed, a billion dollars in the Jordan watershed" would create "the single largest public works project the City has ever undertaken," more expensive than the cost of all of Durham's public buildings, waste water treatment plants and water plants combined.

Voorhees added that some of DWQ and parent agency DENR's modeling for Falls Lake showed that even "if you returned the whole watershed to its pre-development state -- meaning no Durham, we're just forested land, no Hillsborough, no subdivisions out in the county -- you still would not meet water quality standards in Falls Lake 100% of the time," Voorhees said.

"So if we bulldoze the whole world and bring it back to a forest... is that really reasonable?"

"What we're asking are reasonable approaches that have some level of certainty of being successful before we're asked to spend at the kind of 'blank-check' level," he continued.

During the show, Cummings acknowledged that Federal law puts the onus on drinking water quality on the source of pollution, not the recipient agency or city seeking to use their water.

"This could potentially be a burden that would be very difficult for taxpayers in Durham to bear," he warned. "We'd like to have Raleigh and the state to have a stake in these being reasonable rules."

He added that the Jordan and Falls rules are a "guinea pig" for rules to be promulgated in the rest of the state, and called for better models on reasonableness and cost-sharing for the state to consider.

"This is the first time something on this scale's been tried," Cummings said, noting the expense already for the Neuse Rules a few years ago with "mixed success." He added that if communities benefit without paying, they won't have an incentive to make these rules logical and successful.

"Ultimately everybody is going to have to be facing these rules, so it would be good to get off on a good, reasonable footing," Cummings said.

Asked about Brier Creek and some of Raleigh's growth near the lake, Voorhees noted that Raleigh and Durham both feel that Wake County's approach to development in the watershed is responsible, and that Wake's taken "a balanced approach" to the whole process. "Having said that, when you go inside the city limits of Raleigh, there's a fairly marked level of density in some of these shared borders with Durham County."

"I'm asking for some very detailed, comparative analysis of what' is actually in the watershed, because I don't want just impressions to guide us, but I think Drew would agree with me we have been very careful for many years to have policies that limit development in our water supply watershed."

Brier Creek apparently does flow into the Neuse -- but bypasses Falls Lake, moving any run-off down the line.

Still, as Cummings noted, "whatever shape these rules take, there's no way they won't impact growth. Growth will have to be lower-impact; there will probably have to be less of it, and people are going to have to learn to build in new ways, learn maybe to live in new ways, and that goes for existing development and new development."

Photo credit: Wikimedia user Jcwf, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 license; that license applies herein to the photo and not the written or audio works presented.

Comments

[Reyn]

Durham is the 4th/5th largest city, shoehorned into the 17th smallest county land area. Then to make it even more restricted, Falls Lake was created so Raleigh and Wake County, giving it the potential to develop.

Some people have always felt that maybe Durham is due a part of that assessed valuation as compensation. Personally, I think the low density created in that part of Durham will be and bigger and bigger asset as the areas surrounding it build out.

Sounds like Durham has some excellent negotiators involved.

[Will Wilson]

I posted this question in your announcement for the show, but didn't hear it asked (did I miss it?):
I understand that current laws regulate just nitrogen and phosphorous (using measures like chlorophyl concentration), reflecting the water quality problems from the 1960s and 1970s, problems driven by leaking septic systems and rather liberally applied fertilizers. However, these days I believe we should be much more concerned about heavy metals, PAHs, PCBs, pharmaceuticals, even the recently commercialized nanoparticles that get into our waters from urban runoff. For example, last summer the EPA released its lakes study with Jordan Lake samples as one example, showing the presence of many contaminants. Have these contaminants been measured in Falls Lake, and will proposed rules reach beyond the fertilizers N and P, and address pollutants more current and more relevant (and unique) to urban areas?

I believe the focus on N and P is too narrow, and the only reason for the focus is legislation, not science. Let's do better.

[Bull City Rising]

@Will: Sorry I missed this; we ran out of time on the show and didnt get to it. After the show, Ted and Drew mentioned that one reason why its important for municipalities to be paying attention to the development of these rules -- even if, like Raleigh, youre not paying this time around -- is because tomorrows rules will cover things like pharmaceuticals and that everyone will have a stake at that point in what becomes decided.

[Will Wilson]

I worry that the region will push rules (and BMPs) addressing N and P, but don't address concerns with things like pharmaceuticals, things that have completely different biological/hydrological pathways. Just as Falls and Jordan were designed to deal with sediments 50 years ago, not to deal with N and P in drinking water, I fear that the way things are going today we'll set ourselves up for a big battle a few decades from now to solve these "new" water quality problems.

[mulberry bags outlet]

So cute! I already like you on FB and also get your posts on Google Reader. :)