Nutrient trading regulation talks hit impasse at Cave Springs meeting

Timothy Tinsley, an operator for CH2M Hill, which operates Fayetteville’s West Side Wastewater Treatment Plant, walks Dec. 13 through the plant.
Timothy Tinsley, an operator for CH2M Hill, which operates Fayetteville’s West Side Wastewater Treatment Plant, walks Dec. 13 through the plant.

CAVE SPRINGS -- Negotiation on a statewide water quality regulation collapsed Friday when Fayetteville's representative voted against the latest draft proposal.

All four cities comprising the Northwest Arkansas Nutrient Trading Research and Advisory Group -- Bentonville, Fayetteville, Rogers and Springdale -- had to agree on the proposal for the measure to advance.

Fayetteville's City Council rejected the proposal as drafted. The draft was given to members at a Sept. 5 meeting to allow each city council time to make any objections. Fayetteville was the only city to offer amendments.

The advisory group members declined Friday to add the amendments.

The state Legislature created the Northwest Arkansas group and gave it the authority to draft regulations. Adoption would have required state Pollution Control and Ecology Commission approval. Those four cities were selected because they have the most experience dealing with similar issues such as the dispute with Oklahoma over nutrients in the Illinois River, according to group members.

The proposed regulation would have let operators of wastewater treatment plants engage in nutrient trading. Some plants already remove more nutrients, such as phosphorus and nitrogen, from their discharge than required by the plant's state-issued permit. Operators of those plants would be allowed to let another treatment plant in the same watershed use the deficit in return for payment or something else of value.

To use an analogy, suppose two homeowners have the same size garbage can. The first homeowner often has more bags of trash than will fit, while his neighbor rarely fills his up. So the second homeowner lets the first homeowner toss his extra trash in his container for a small price.

The goal was to encourage discharge permit holders to lower their nutrient level so they would be sellers, which, in turn, would improve water quality across the region.

Fayetteville insisted on more water quality monitoring, and not just at a public wastewater treatment plant or other sources such as factories. The city also wanted a long-term commitment to reduce the level of phosphorus and nitrogen in local watersheds from any source.

Opponents of Fayetteville's conditions said the degree of testing demanded was expensive, excessive and too restrictive for a statewide regulation. Detailed testing requirements should be included in permits taking local conditions into account, group Chairman Bradley J. Stewart, pretreatment manager of Springdale Water Utilities, said after the meeting.

"Springdale is about as happy as we're going to get with the proposal," Stewart said during the meeting in reply to Fayetteville's desire to amend it. The group agreed to meet again if there's a chance of moving forward, but Stewart and others said that appears unlikely.

Tim Nyander, Fayetteville utilities director and that city's representative, said he voted as his city council instructed. Teresa Turk, a Fayetteville City Council member who attended Friday's meeting, said almost anything has to be tested to tell if it's working.

Water bodies in Fayetteville have already had three algae blooms -- a sign of worsening area water quality -- in the past year, showing nutrient levels are already too high, Turk told the group before the vote.

Jene Huffman-Gilreath, Rogers representative, agreed with the majority in remarks after the meeting. The testing requirements as proposed by Fayetteville would have been so demanding they would have largely convinced cities and industry not to make any nutrient trading agreements, she said.

Bentonville's representative and public works director Mike Bender had no comment after the meeting.

NW News on 11/09/2019

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