Wild Virginia continues to lead an effort to reform the way that the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) and State Water Control Board apply our water quality standards. We also ensure those standards are improved to fully protect our waters. Under the Clean Water Act and state law, these standards are a vital foundation for all regulatory efforts to benefit our streams – to keep Virginia’s high-quality waters and clean up polluted streams.
With 55 allied groups, Wild Virginia presented a slate of initiatives to the Water Control Board in September, 2020. We are vigorously pursuing the goals laid out in that submittal. The necessary improvements include:
- Apply our narrative water quality criteria, which describe the high quality conditions that will support all beneficial uses and sustainable natural systems.
- Adopt adequate numeric water quality criteria nutrients (phosphorus and nitrogen) and turbidity or solids/sediment.
- Enforce all parts of the water standards in every instance when the state takes action to regulate any polluting activity.
To read more about these issues and the background for the Campaign, see our blog: Campaign to Protect Virginia’s Water Future . Also check out this guest column we had published in a statewide news outlet in May 2020.
We submitted strong recommendations in regulatory comments to achieve parts of our platform during a current review of all of Virginia’s water quality standards. We also represent conservation interests through a Regulatory Advisory Panel formed to provide recommendations to the Board.
Wild Virginia continues to convene a group of representatives from various citizen groups. We are forming strategies to carry out the Campaign throughout the years to come. You can help make this effort a success.
Get Involved:
– Sign the Petition to protect Virginia’s water.
– Join Wild Virginia or renew your membership here.
2025 Policy Recommendations:
Many of Virginia’s waters are degraded by pollutants such as sediments, nutrients, color-producing waste, and toxic chemicals not yet addressed by numeric water quality criteria.
Currently, DEQ does not designate waters as
impaired by these types of pollutants until
harm to aquatic ecosystems is shown or human health threats emerge.
Virginia has an important chance to improve
protections and clean up many waterbodies by fully enforcing narrative criteria and adopting long-planned numeric criteria for turbidity and/or solids.
Download the full Virginia Conservation Network policy briefing: Our Common Agenda.
CURRENT POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS
DEQ should designate streams and reservoirs as “impaired” waters under its Clean Water Act authority in circumstances where the narrative
criteria are violated by the presence of excessive sediments or turbidity, unnatural colors, high levels of polluting nitrogen and phosphorus, and nuisance algal blooms. In developing permits for discharges to surface waters, the potential of activities to violate the narrative criteria must be assessed and permit limitations or other conditions must be imposed to prevent violations of Virginia’s water quality standards. DEQ should require that PFAS and other toxic
pollutants be eliminated from discharges where they may violate narrative criteria. Given that Virginia has yet to begin processes to adopt numeric criteria for forms of PFAS and that it will be impossible to develop them for the thousands of different chemicals in the PFAS family, narrative criteria should be implemented now. DEQ should re-initiate the regulatory process to develop numeric criteria for turbidity and/or solids and the Board should adopt appropriate criteria in 2025.