THOSE FIGHTING SPRAWL SEE NEW FRONT-WATER

The anti-sprawl brigade is marching on Harrisburg again. This time, the cause is water. With too much development, wells dry up and faucets slow to a trickle. Rainfall cannot seep into the ground through a parking lot. In Pennsylvania, the state and its 5,568 municipalities have little power to use concerns about water to stop development.

But the two state lawmakers who led last year’s drive to protect open land could change that. For Sen. James Gerlach (R., Chester) and Rep. David Steil (R., Bucks), protecting water is merely an extension of the smart-growth movement. They intend to introduce legislation that would change the way the state’s water supply is managed.

Gerlach says water issues are similar to land issue. Questions of how much water should be pumped from a region or which creek is worth extra protection are best settled closer to home, he says. Water in Pennsylvania is now controlled by the Delaware River Basin Commission, an agency with a four-state territory (Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York) and not much of a micro-focus. Its purview, in general, is withdrawals of the 10,000-gallons-a-day variety, not backyard wells.

Under Gerlach’s bills, municipalities sharing a watershed could adopt a joint plan to protect water resources. The aim is to make rivers, creeks and aquifers the basis for planning, instead of municipal or county boundaries. Like traffic problems created by new shopping malls, water does not recognize political boundaries.

Though the Ridge administration encourages watershed planning as part of its "Growing Greener" initiative, the governor has not taken a position on increasing the state’s control of water resource management.

Steil is proposing allowing counties to put a tax on homes and businesses to pay for maintaining stormwater-management systems, such as clearing drainage ditches of debris and repairing storm grates. Steil envisions counties using the fee to leverage more money, such as by floating bond issues. he estimates the fee would be no more than $50 a year for owners of residential properties. Commercial properties would be assessed based on the amount of ground paved or otherwise converted. Exemptions might be provided for those companies that manage their own stormwater, Steil said.

Another obstacle for Steil and Gerlach could be one they faced with their anti-sprawl legislation: the state’s geographic diversity. "Even if water is important, but not critical, in Southeastern Pennsylvania, when you get in Central Pennsylvania it hardly shows up on the radar screen," said Mike Stokes, a Montgomery County planner. "It’s going to be a hard sell to get some sort of statewide concurrence."

Across the country, there is a passion about water conservation as fervent as the movement to save open land, said Jan Bowers, last year’s president of the American Water Resources Association, a 3,200-member group of water resource professionals. She is also executive director of the Chester County Water Resources Authority, which is preparing a countywide water-management plan.

Out West, where the scarcity of water makes every raindrop valuable, state control of water use is generally more stringent than on the East Coast, said Kris Polly of the National Water Resources Association, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group that lobbies for water customers in 17 Western states. In Pennsylvania, there is no state agency that controls water use. Only recently has the Department of Environmental Protections begun evaluation of how well Pennsylvania is faring environmentally, spokeswoman Chris Novak said.

In New Jersey, the Bureau of Water Allocation has restricted withdrawals from three aquifers because they are at dangerously low levels. The state has recently been divided into 20 watersheds, and each is required to develop a comprehensive plan for growth, conservation and water allocation, said Barry Seymour of Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, which is working on some of those plans. He said the need was more pressuring in New Jersey because that state is more dependent upon groundwater for its drinking water. Pennsylvania relies more on surface water from creeks and rivers. The building community will oppose anything that would interfere with its ability to make a living, said Debra Tingley of the Pennsylvania Home Builders Association.

DEP recently issued a new policy saying it would give more consideration to local land-use plans in deciding whether to issue permits. That does not change much-criticized 11th hour revision to last year’s historic land- use law revisions that exempted utilities from conforming to local anti-sprawl plans. For such exemptions, they must demonstrate a public need for their projects.

Commenting that Pennsylvania has long been criticized for lagging behind neighboring states on land use issues, Bowers said, the state now had a chance to "write water law that can eclipse everything that has gone on around us. I hope we can do that," she said.

(The Philadelphia Inquirer-1/28/01)