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RALEIGH — The latest draft of rules designed to clean up pollution running from Greensboro and other Triad cities into Jordan Lake pleases neither environmental advocates nor those representing builders and municipal officials.

The product of closed-door work sessions, the latest plan was handed to members of the House Environment Committee on Tuesday.

“It’s never what anybody wants,” Rep. Pryor Gibson, a Wadesboro Democrat, said of legislative compromises on environmental bills.

Jordan Lake is principally a water supply and recreation area for the Triangle. But it is fed by the Haw River, which winds its way through Guilford and Alamance counties.

For a decade, environmental regulators have tried to establish rules that would curb the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus running into the lake. Although those nutrients are helpful as fertilizers for lawns and crops, in an overabundance they can lead to harmful algae growth in waterways.

The final draft of those rules as written by regulators was approved late last year, but opponents have appealed the plan to the General Assembly. Legislators have undertaken what amounts to a rewrite of the plan.

Among the most controversial of the rules would be requirements that cities clean runoff from existing subdivisions. Under the new plan, local governments would have to take steps such as educating the public, shutting down illegal nutrient-rich discharges and mapping their stormwater systems right away.

But they could put off until 2017 the most costly steps to curb existing development runoff, such as creating new stormwater ponds or buying land, and would not have to take those more severe steps if they can show improvement in water quality.

“Existing development in many parts of the lake’s watershed makes up a large part of the pollution,” said Elizabeth Outz, who heads Environment North Carolina. Waiting to take the most aggressive steps on existing development, she said, “will likely make the problem worse.”

Steven Levitas, a lawyer working for Durham, Greensboro and other cities, said the new rules “reflected a lot of progress” but still do not go far enough to protect cities.

“Some of this stuff can just be so prohibitively expensive,” he said.

Committee leaders say they will debate and change the bill in the next few weeks before sending it to the Senate for consideration by mid-May.

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