News regs, old problems

Adding to their vast but substantively impotent arsenal, environmentalists abetted by state regulators are taking aim, again, at that pit of sludge otherwise known as the Chesapeake Bay. The fire this time is over stormwater, a topic that compels winces in the River City. The question that nags is, will the latest round of regulatory salvos succeed in cleansing the Bay more than nominally, if at all, or will they merely drive bullets into the heart of development, which (remember?) provides growth and jobs, both of which happen to be in short supply at the moment.

Building a new home could cost $6,200 more, and a “big-box” store, an additional $70,000, under new regulations proposed by the state. What would be gained? The rules would require slashing phosphorus runoff by more than a third. Phosphorus produces the algae that coat much of the Bay. Developers would be required to build more retention ponds to catch the pollutants before they trickle into storm drains, flow from there to rivers and continue their travels in the form of green scum.

Naturally, there are rubs. First, developments that have beaten the regulatory gun would not be subject to the new restrictions, so runoff from those sites will be composed of the same stuff as before. The pollution continues. Slashing the flow of phosphorus runoff by a third sounds significant until that fact is considered. Then factor in the downside. The cost of covering the rules could hinder new construction, the absence of which is a central component of the economic standstill. “The benefit to the environment for the cost . really is not comparable,“ Barrett Hardiman, vice president of regulatory affairs for the Home Builders Association of Virginia, told the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Something else: Some $6 billion in federal and state money has been spent over 25 years on a Bay cleanup with the goal of dramatic pollution reductions by next year, a goal that surely will be missed. Environmentalists are pushing for tighter regulations on sewer plants, but huge chunks of government money already have poured into that effort - including $1.2 million at Waynesboro’s Coyner Springs Water Treatment Plant - to no substantive environmental avail.

None of this implies that the solution is doing nothing. But doing something for the sake of it is no solution either. Some in the environmental lobby prefer not to count costs, especially when those costs include development that never happens, a thing they favor. This points to a tendency to view growth as a thing primarily benefiting the affluent, and therefore damnable. In fact, growth benefits not only the working-class folk called upon to turn blueprints into buildings - some of those structures providing homes for people on the lower rungs of the economic ladder - but also government to which tax dollars gush to help pay for, among other things, failed multibillion-dollar cleanups.

It’s true that blindness on the subject of the Bay afflicts the private sector. The watershed’s dismal health borders on tragic. We know the quandary—how to restore the Bay without choking off growth before it happens—but not the answer to it.

Both sides might start by ceding some truths, among environmentalists, that development is neither evil nor unnecessary and among developers, that building to minimize environmental impact improves quality of life and makes good long-term business sense. Somewhere in this is a bridge between the walls.

Until one side meets the other there, more of the same is inevitable. Regulations will be set that will summon resistance from the regulated, benchmarks will sink unmet into the bureaucratic mire, abiding divisions will deepen and the Bay will continue its inexorable wane. Surely, Virginia can do better.