Agricultural and regional organizations in the Tri-County coverage area recently finished the last of their meetings for the region’s Watershed Implementation Plan III (WIP) on Dec. 11 at 1 p.m. at the Prince Edward Natural Resources and Agricultural Building Conference Room at 100 Dominion Drive.

Cam Johnson, regional planner for the Commonwealth Regional Council (CRC), said the meeting involved representatives of CRC, who have been handling the aspects of the WIP that affect urban areas, and representatives of Piedmont Soil and Water Conservation District (SWCD) and Peter Francisco SWCD, the regional agricultural organizations within the Chesapeake Bay area.

“We decided to hold this joint meeting for the citizens and local officials and different things like that to get perspective from both sides to see what type of work we had been doing throughout the process,” Johnson said.

No members of the public attended the meeting, Johnson said.

The WIP assists localities in the Chesapeake Bay area in meeting Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) program goals, which were designed to help implement restoration efforts to lower pollutions in the Chesapeake Bay and surrounding rivers and streams.

On a regional level, rivers and streams that impact this study include the Appomattox River in Farmville, the James River’s course in Cartersville and Deep Creek in Mannboro.

The WIP is a non-binding item, meaning that the state cannot enforce localities to participate. CRC Executive Director Melody Foster said the plan acts more like a wish list to justify funding needs to the Virginia General Assembly.

The council previously discussed participating in the watershed program after being contacted by the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) and hosting previous meetings about the program earlier in the summer and fall.

Johnson said the area SWCDs were “undergoing a parallel process similar to us. … They had the task of handling the agricultural side of the watershed implementation process while we handled the urban side.”

Johnson said on the side of the CRC, CRC representatives had concerns about the accuracy of their septic figures.

Johnson said CRC representatives rechecked the numbers for accuracy and “ensured that the numbers we were putting forth to DEQ were the most accurate figures for this region.”

According to the figures provided by CRC, four area Local Area Planning Goals (LAPG) are listed involving septic efforts in the region. The column,“2017” represents the number of times each effort was reported and credited as of June 30, 2017.

The column, “WIP II,” represents the numbers set by the DEQ that, according to Johnson, the DEQ would have liked for the region to attain.

The column, “2025 available,” is the estimation by the DEQ of how many units the region could take advantage of in 2025 to fulfill the goals.

The column, “WIP III,” are the figures that Johnson and other organizers determined, based on the data that they collected while conducting the plan, the goals that the region could feasibly attain.

Johnson said the CRC has already submitted the WIP to the DEQ prior to its Dec. 14 deadline in order to answer questions that DEQ might have of their figures.

Deanna Fehrer, a representative of Piedmont SWCD, said the purpose of the third WIP was to determine which WIP goals the region could meet.

“All of the data that we provided was based on agricultural data for water quality, improvement projects in our district, so we were given a set of goals from the last WIP, which was WIP II, and we were asked to review that with our knowledge of the area and the clients that we work with, what we could reasonably implement in the WIP III goals,” Fehrer said.

Fehrer said the area SWCDs submit their data to the Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR).

“The goals are for the state, the Commonwealth of Virginia … to meet goals to clean up the Chesapeake Bay,” Fehrer said about the WIP program.

Fehrer said there are programs that the area SWCDs offer to landowners that can help them cultivate Best Management Practices (BMPs) to reduce the pollution in waterways and land, such as finding ways to remove cattle from waterways.

To learn more about these programs, contact the Piedmont SWCD at www.piedmontswcd.org, (434) 392-3782 or Peter Francisco SWCD at www.peterfranciscoswcd.org or (434) 983-7923.