news-record.com

RALEIGH - Newly adopted state environmental regulations could cost taxpayers in Guilford County and throughout the Triad tens of millions of dollars over the next decade and are heading for a showdown at the General Assembly next year.

The rules are designed to curb the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus flowing from Greensboro and other points north and west of Jordan Lake, which is between Pittsboro and Apex.

Although the lake is a water supply for the Triangle area, streams that cut through Guilford, Alamance and Rockingham counties feed it.

Greensboro alone will have to complete $70 million in upgrades to its sewage treatment plants to comply with the new regulations. But that number would be only a small part of the larger cleanup total. And the new rules could set precedents for how other water supply cleanups are handled throughout the state.

"It puts a gun to the heads of cities," said Allan Williams , Greensboro's water resources director and one of the leading critics of the rules.

Phosphorus and nitrogen, naturally occurring chemicals, are useful in fertilizers that help crops and lawns grow. But too much of them are flowing into the lake, causing blooms of algae that grow unchecked and suck the oxygen out of the lake. That results in water that is harder to treat for drinking, is inhospitable to fish and is nasty to navigate for canoeists and others who use the lake for recreation.

The new rules aim to reduce the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus flowing from a number of sources, including farms, sewage plants and lawns outside homes and businesses.

Williams, representatives of the building industry and others who object to the rules are most concerned about portions of the regulations that deal with pollutants that run off from "existing development," subdivisions that have been built for years.

Rich Gannon, a supervisor with the Division of Water Quality, helped draft the new rules and said that runoff from existing homes contributes 25 to 45 percent of the pollution going to the lake.

"We simply can't ignore that contribution in designing the strategy," Gannon said.

So the rules require local governments to curb the stormwater runoff from subdivisions, even if they've existed for decades.

Some steps are deceptively simple, such as street sweeping or leaf collection. But while big cities like Greensboro already do those things, smaller towns such as Gibsonville do not.

Other measures involve construction, such as building detention ponds in existing neighborhoods, potentially requiring governments to acquire and knock down houses.

"It's completely unrealistic and impractical," said Marlene Sanford , who leads the Triad Real Estate and Building Coalition, one of several business groups that have joined with local governments to fight the rules. "You can't go back and retrofit old subdivisions. And even if we could do it, we couldn't pay for it."

The recent economic downturn that makes individual mortgages hard to come by makes it difficult for governments to borrow money.

Gannon said there's "no question the costs will be significant" but notes that the rules give local governments a list of options rather than require any one set of measures.

But what Gannon describes as flexibility, opponents of the rules call ambiguity. Local leaders say they are worried that cleanup standards could become a moving target and that the new rules would give too much authority to the state.

Administrative "rules" are created by agencies to carry out the directions given by the General Assembly when it passes a law. Once put in place, they carry the force of law, and violators can receive fines and other penalties.

The Jordan Lake rules have been in process for years and respond to two separate pieces of legislation. They cleared their final administrative hurdle this month when they were approved by the Rules Review Commission.

But if there is enough opposition - state law requires letters from 10 individuals - opponents can appeal rules to the General Assembly for one final review.

That threshold was met months ago, although it is worth noting that the legislature has never completely rejected or accepted a set of environmental rules. Rather, compromises have been crafted in prior cases.

Curbing runoff from existing developments by way of administrative regulations is a relatively new step for state governments anywhere in the nation , Gannon said. And the rules for Jordan Lake are the first of their kind in North Carolina.

But if the existing development standards survive review, they could be used to help clean up reservoirs elsewhere in the state. That means the battle over Jordan Lake will be watched closely by local government and advocates across North Carolina.

"They're already pretty watered down from the protections some people feel are needed," said Rep. Pricey Harrison , a Greensboro Democrat. Harrison, a leading figure in the legislature on environmental issues, said that despite the city's objections, she is more sympathetic to the need for environmental cleanup.

And although legislative staff members are getting ready to put together a working group made up of experts and advocates on both sides of a problem to seek a compromise, opponents are cagey about their options.

"It's going to be easily a couple of weeks before we know what our next steps might be," Sanford said. Besides appealing to the General Assembly, opponents are considering a lawsuit to challenge the state's legal authority to regulate runoff from existing subdivisions.

"We'll go anywhere we can get some relief," Williams said.

Contact Mark Binker at (919) 832-5549 or mark.binker @news-record.com