RD60 - Report of the Water Policy Technical Advisory Commission


Executive Summary:
Pursuant to Senate Bill 1221 (2003), the Department of Environmental Quality (“DEQ”) created the Water Policy Technical Advisory Committee (WP-TAC) to assist DEQ, the Virginia Department of Health (“VDH”), and the State Water Commission in addressing water planning issues. The WP-TAC was deliberately made up of widely divergent interests, with the intention of creating the most broad-based consensus possible on these issues. Meetings of the WP-TAC have been conducted with the assistance of outside facilitators.

Criteria for Local/Regional Planning

While it was thought at the outset of the process that the result of the WP-TAC’s work would be draft regulations to propose to the State Water Control Board, after a great deal of discussion it was apparent that the group was not ready to commit to draft regulations. This was in part due to a sense that there was not enough time to review and discuss them in adequate depth before the deadline for submission of criteria. The group feels that a number of key issues must still be discussed, including the fundamental issue of how the state plan itself will work. There are important policy and guidance “overarching” issues (see Appendix G) that need to be decided in order for the regulations to have context so that the regulations can be discussed in a meaningful fashion. Instead, the WP-TAC did reach consensus on general Criteria for the Development of Local/Regional Plans, with the understanding that there were still many open issues to be discussed in future meetings.

Preliminary State Water Resources Plan

The second component of Senate Bill 1221 was that DEQ was to begin work on a preliminary water resources plan. Unlike the comprehensive plan envisioned for completion in 2004, this year’s task was to create a compilation of existing plans as a baseline and a means of determining where gaps currently exist in planning. The gaps, or deficiencies, identified in this process will allow DEQ to note policy issues that will need to be addressed as a more comprehensive planning process is designed and implemented. The WP-TAC also identified issues and began discussion of the state’s role in water planning.

Future Steps

The WP-TAC remains committed to continuing work next year in this stakeholder-guided process in an effort to ensure that the needs of the citizens for water are served while the resources of the Commonwealth are protected.

The WP-TAC is committed to continuing its work to: begin development of a state plan, discuss major policy issues left unresolved during the previous phase of work, and continue work on the final draft regulations once the state plan framework has been clarified.