Chesapeake Bay Program Reevaluation Technical Workgroup Meeting January 10, 2008 Draft SUMMARY OF DECISIONS, ACTIONS AND ISSUES Review of Agenda and December 17th Meeting The goals of the conference call are to review past action items, continue discussions on allocations to waterbodies and sources, and identify agenda topics for upcoming conference calls. ¦ The Reevaluation Technical Workgroup was overall satisfied with the presentations on the Chesapeake Bay models at the last meeting. ¦ Nauth Panday, MDE, pointed out that the workgroup had asked for a presentation from the Bay Program on the interpolator. ¦ ACTION: The Reevaluation Technical Workgroup will receive a presentation on the interpolator. ACTION: Some changes were made to the graphic illustrations that demonstrate geographic allocation options for the TMDL. They will be redistributed in the near future. Status of Action Items ¦ States are to continue laying out their public participation process for TMDL review. ¦ Sue and Rich have been talking to the states about their state specific issues, concerns and needs. Discussions have been conducted with New York, Virginia, West Virginia. Discussions with Delaware, Maryland and Pennsylvania will be completed within the next week. ¦ No comments were received on the Issues Table or Timeline since the last meeting. They'll move forward as they are but can be continually revised as necessary. ¦ On the Water Quality Steering Committee call on January 22nd, one of the agenda items is to update the Steering Committee on the activities associated with the Reevaluation Technical Workgroup. The workgroup will be providing them with a copy of the Timeline, the Issues Matrix, and a summary of some of the key action items and decisions that we've been discussing over the last couple of months. For more information, please go to url: http://www.chesapeakebav.net/calendar.cfm?EventDetails=9043&DefaultView=2 ACTION: If a workgroup member has something in particular that they want Sue to highlight at the Water Quality Steering Committee conference call, let Sue know no later than noon on January 17, 2008.. ------- ACTION: Workgroup members will provide information to Sue on how their states handle the TMDL public review process by the end of the month including contact information for the states' communication and/or PIO who may be interested in helping out with the public outreach/communication strategy, (mcdowell.susan@epa.gov) Continued Discussion of Allocations—Sources, Scale, Waters In December, the workgroup started discussions on source allocations. Because it is a collaborative effort, we want to be able to capture all of the sources to make the TMDL strong and legally defensible, ensure that all the partners have some level of consistency across jurisdictions, and that we abide by the TMDL regulatory requirements to avoid legal actions. Some states may identify sources by watershed and allocate a lump sum to them, perhaps equal to design loads and accounting for growth. Another option would be to allocate a lump sum to a watershed without identifying significant and non-significant sources. We want to avoid re-opening TMDLs to the extent possible and we want to view the process from a regulatory and implementation perspective to promote Bay restoration. At the last meeting, states were asked to describe on this conference call their process to date on dealing with non-significant sources and MS4s. Virginia ¦ Significant dischargers are listed and receive a waste load allocation. VA has included 125 significant dischargers (including a portion of Blue Plains). In general small, individual permitted sources discharging > 40,000 gal/day, including single family dwellings are included under the general permit and receive an aggregated allocation. Should one of the smaller facilities wish to expand, an application to the State would be required and they would under the general permit program and an N & P loading would be assigned to them They try to avoid having to come back in and reopen and revise the TMDL allocations. ¦ For new dischargers, no allocation is given, and therefore the new sources would require offsets (per VA regulation) through the Nutrient Credit exchange program. Specific to nitrogen and phosphorus, VA has enumerated significant dischargers with cap loads never to be exceeded. VA includes all permitted dischargers, including stormwater dischargers (oversight via DCR), in their TMDLs. Industrial dischargers are more problematic due to lack of readily available information. Maryland ¦ All significant and non-significant facilities are listed in the TMDL reports, including minor facilities for non-tidal sediments TMDL as well. Facilities loads are estimated based on their design flows. Their non-regulatory policy under their Tributary Strategy includes significant and non-significant sources of nutrients that were submitted to the Bay Program to model. They are following guidance from EPA Region 3 to list all sources in the development of their TMDLs. Maryland wants flexibility to move around loads to avoid reopening TMDLs. ------- Delaware ¦ All municipal and industrial facilities are listed and assigned WLAs. WLAs are for design capacity, similar to MD and VA. They cannot go above that cap. If they want to increase their load, they have to do better treatment. DE does not have MS4s in the portion of the state in the Bay watershed. DC ¦ DC allocates loadings to major categories: CSOs, MS4s, POTW (Blue Plains) or major point sources, and areas that are not covered by MS4s or CSOs. DC has developed a sediment/TSS TMDL jointly with Maryland where they identified small industrial facilities with permits and allocated loads to those facilities. Generally, small sources are not specifically identified or allocated, but included in the other major categories. ¦ New York ¦ NY typically deals with the major and significant facilities, assigning WLAs to them. Usually the bottom 10% of the loads will be reserved for non-significant facilities that are too small to deal with. New York looked at how many facilities we were talking about that were non-significant, a total of 114 were identified, or 3% based on flow and 4% based on load, using permit limit flow numbers and assigning standard values for nitrogen and phosphorus to get load values. In NY's Tributary Strategy, they wrote that they're reserving 10% of their load for those non-significant facilities which they believe has covered these facilities and still allows room for growth. Pennsylvania ¦ Everyone is included down to single dwellings. WLAs are aggregated for most non- significant facilities. The only treatment that they might have would be for phosphorus. There are no freshwater TMDLs that deal with nitrogen. The bigger facilities, over 50,000 gallons/day, do not have loading caps. WLAs for MS4s have reflected EPA guidance. No TMDLs in PA give explicit WLA to any MS4. PA's MS4 communities are municipalities. Often it's not possible to effectively model that loading and give specific WLAs to MS4s. PA is currently giving allocations to significant facilities. As for non-significant facilities, no net increase in point source loads is in the Tributary Strategies. New point sources must offset all of their discharges. PA is limited by lack of monitoring data, which is essentially only available for significant dischargers. West Virginia ¦ In normal TMDLs, WV allocates to all point source dischargers. They get a WLA incorporated into the permit. The new dischargers have been allowed to come in. Some TMDLs have approached the MS4 issue. They're working with municipalities to delineate MS4 areas. With this Bay TMDL, they may do things differently. What WV decides to do must be consistent with all of the states. To date, WV has not developed any TMDLs for N or P, but WV has developed TMDLs for sediment for 19 impaired streams in the Potomac waterhsed. Those TMDLs are currently pending ------- EPA approval and resulted from local biological impairments that were determined by benthic macroinvertebate assessments. Discussion ¦ Arthur Butt pointed out a technical and policy issue. We want to develop the tools the best we can to give us an accurate and precise load description in regard to the fall line. It's necessary to try to get those numbers together so that we have the best representation of the loads going into the Bay. As far as consistency with reporting, when it gets into the allocations and how jurisdictions do those, it's a policy issue. States can always allocate up. The problem is if the information is not there, the numbers cannot be segregated out. Arthur urged everyone to build upon the best information. ¦ Looking down the line at other programs' impacts, there may be a push-back from every permit you try to issue if there is no load allocation. ¦ With the finer segmentation in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Model, we will have to locate the smaller plants. ¦ Charles Martin reinforced that if we include sources (significant/non-significant) we can always build on them. ¦ Russ Perkinson said that VA would rather see the minors accounted for as specifically as possible to know that there is a load allocated to that source. Non-point sources want so see allocations assigned to non-significant dischargers. ¦ Mike Haire asked if it was possible to think differently about the level of detail in the allocations for those 78 segments that we will be more accountable for under the TMDL. At least initially, we may need to focus on defining the loads from all of the sources right now. There seems to be a major difference in the challenge-ability of permits above the fall-line than the 78 segments below the fall line. o Workgroup members seemed to think that it would not be necessary to distinguish between the above and below fall line allocations but take in under advisement and will consider the legal and implementation ramifications of such a strategy. ¦ ACTION: Sue McDowell will look into the issue of timing and follow up with workgroup members about some of the points that were made in this discussion. She will then start to develop possible options for moving forward. Next Steps, Future Agendas ¦ The Water Quality Steering Committee will be reviewing the workgroup's actions and decisions to date on their next conference call on Tuesday, January 22nd from 2:00 to 4:00 PM. ¦ The next Reevaluation Technical Workgroup conference call will be on Thursday, January 24th from 10:00 to 11:30 AM. ¦ Tentative February dates for workgroup calls are Thursday February 7th and 21st. For March, the tentative conference call dates are March 6th and 27th. ¦ At the next conference call, the workgroup will look at recommendations coming out of today's discussions and will review the draft 303(d) lists. ------- Gary Shenk will talk about the hydrological periods, and we will get a briefing on the interpolator in late February or early March. Participants Sue McDowell EPA Region 3 Sara Parr CRC/CBPO Ed Reilly NY DEC Pat Campbell WV DEP Russ Perkinson VADCR Charles Martin VADEQ Art Butt VADEQ Dinorah Dalmasy MDE Nauth Panday MDE Monir Chowdhury DDOE Chris Day EPA Region 3 Ruth Izraeli EPA Region 2 Katharine Dowell EPA HQ Clint Bosch en Tetra Tech Kenn Pattison PA DEP Bill Brown PA DEP Pat Buckley PA DEP Hassan Mirsajadi DEDNREC mcdowell. susan@epa. gov sparr@ chesap eakeb ay. net exreilly@gw.dec. state.ny.us pcampbell@wvdep.org russ.perkinson@dcr.virginia.gov chmartin@deq .Virginia, gov aibutt@deq.virginia.gov ddalmasv@mde. state, md. us npandav@mde.state.md.us monir.chowdhury@dc.gov dav.christopher@epa.gov izraeli.ruth@epa.gov dowell .katharine@epa. gov clint.boschen@tetratech-ffx.com kpattison@state.pa.us willbrown@state.pa.us pbucklev@state.pa.us Has san. mir sai adi @ state. de. us ------- |