Ask John Pennington, executive director of the Beaver Watershed Alliance, what he thinks of the new standards for determining whether there's too much phosphorus and other nutrients in Beaver Lake, the drinking water supply for much of Northwest Arkansas, and he'll answer with some reservation.
"Well, it is what it is," Pennington said. "It's a testament to public input."
In 2008, a work group formed by the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality produced a numeric plan for determining nutrient impairment for Beaver Lake, replacing the decades-old "narrative" standards for impairment that rely on observation of algae blooms and other signs that there may be too much phosphorus in the lake.
The new standards define the lake as "impaired" if chlorophyll-A levels consistently measure at more than eight micro-grams per liter of water, or eight parts-per-billion, or if the checker-board pattern of a Secchi disc is unreadable when submerged to a depth of 1.1 meters.
Pennington said the new methodology for determining the health of the lake may be an improvement over the old, but it carries the danger of misinterpretation. Levels of chlorophyll and the clarity of the water can vary day-to-day, depending on rainfall and other factors, Pennington said.
"If that's the new standard, then how it's measured is real important," Pennington said. "And I'm not real certain that everybody has a good understanding of how that standard is either not met or met."
Pennington said he wanted to make sure that "what's established is reasonable and fair."
"It's a real possibility that a new rule can be made that's not based on good science, and then you're stuck with it, and it causes a bunch of problems that nobody ever saw, and aren't necessarily needed," Pennington said.
The new method of measuring the nutrient load in Beaver Lake and similar methods for assessing nutrient loads in extraordinary resource waters throughout the state, are topics representatives from the Environmental Quality Department plan to discuss during two public meetings Thursday at the Jones Center for Families in Springdale.
Every two years, each state is responsible for submitting a list of all water bodies, including streams, rivers and lakes, that are considered "impaired" by contaminants, high nutrient loads or other factors, to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. For 2014, the Environmental Quality Department reported more than 5,700 miles of rivers, streams and other waterways as impaired by turbidity or pollutants including nutrients, minerals or other contaminants in its Integrated Water Quality Monitoring and Assessment Report.
Arkansas has historically used "narrative," rather than numeric, criteria for evaluating the nutrient content in streams and other water bodies, said Ryan Benefield, deputy director of the Environmental Quality Department.
"It's really difficult to set a number, because there's so many factors that go into whether nutrients are excessive," Benefield said. "So you've really got to look at a lot more than just a number. How is the dissolved oxygen? How is the biology? Other contaminants are much more simple: six parts-per-billion is impaired, less than that is OK. But nutrients are tougher than that."
The existing narrative standard, as it appears in the Arkansas Pollution Control and Ecology Commission regulation 2.509, states that "Materials stimulating algal growth shall not be present in concentrations sufficient to cause objectionable algal densities or other nuisance aquatic vegetation or otherwise impair any designated use of the waterbody."
According to a 2014 Environmental Quality Department publication that outlines the department's assessment methodologies for determining water quality, the department is currently trying to integrate the numeric nutrient methodologies created for Beaver Lake into its assessments of water bodies throughout each of the state's six ecoregions. Although the specific standards for chlorophyll-A, phosphorus and other factors will be site-specific, the methods for evaluating them will be standardized and numeric-based.
Phosphorus is the most common nutrient found in Arkansas waters, and the biggest contributor is soil, washed into waterways through erosion. Other nutrients, including nitrogen and potassium, are also commonly found in Arkansas soil; all three are strongly associated with the animal manure that is a common byproduct of poultry operations and other forms of farming.
Numeric standards for phosphorus in rivers have been a point of contention throughout the history of the state, especially in Northwest Arkansas, which is known in part for its poultry operations. In 2003, Arkansas entered into an agreement known as the Statement of Joint Principals and Actions, which was meant to settle a series of legal disputes between Arkansas and Oklahoma over the high amounts of phosphorus in the Illinois River generally attributed to Arkansas poultry farming.
While the agreement required Arkansas to reduce the amount of phosphorus and other pollutants being discharged throughout the watershed, it also required Oklahoma to reassess its declared limits on phosphorus in its waterways, which Illinois River Watershed Partnership executive director Delia Haak said were "unattainably low."
"We understand that there's different levels of 'achievable,'" Haak said. "Pretty much anything's 'achievable' if you have enough money to spend to get there.
"For the Illinois River Watershed, one of the issues that we've always had with Oklahoma is that the state of Arkansas didn't agree with the numeric standard," Haak said. "The reason why the state of Arkansas hasn't set a numeric standard before was because it does depend upon the type of geology and the hydrology and the rainfall and the slope, and just a whole lot of different factors."
In 2013, the two states issued an update to their 2003 accord, calling for the appointment of a six-person joint committee to commission and assess a study determining what a realistic and appropriate nutrient limitation should be for the Illinois River watershed.
The committee's study is expected to be complete in February 2016.
Thursday's meeting will focus on reviewing the new assessment methods for nutrients, and efforts to develop numeric nutrient criteria for extraordinary resource waters during the morning session, which is scheduled to begin at 9:30 a.m. An afternoon session, scheduled to begin at 1:30 p.m., will focus on assessments of Beaver Lake using the new methodologies.
Bob Morgan, manager of environmental quality for the Beaver Water District, said measurements taken in the Hickory Creek area of Beaver Lake, using both Secchi discs and chlorophyll-A analysis, show the water quality is typically very close to the numerical standards, either narrowly within or exceeding them. Morgan said this didn't mean the standards were too rigid.
"Those standards are what would protect water quality in the lake," Morgan said. "I don't think they're too stringent. If it's impaired, it's impaired, and we need to do something about it."
NW News on 07/14/2014