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Phillips questions buffer regulations
By Jonathan Starkey
Staff Reporter
Buffers were again a major topic of conversation on Tuesday when Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control (DNREC) officials presented their latest Pollution Control Strategy to Sussex County Council. But this time, it was for a different reason.
After environmentalists questioned DNREC’s move at a recent hearing to reduce mandatory buffers for developed lands to 50 feet in its current proposal from 100 feet in last year’s draft, County Councilman Vance Phillips (R-5th) on Tuesday suggested the buffers still might cover too much land.
“I think there’s a major concern among property owners that that’s an overreach,” Phillips said of the 50-foot buffer that applies to tidal wetlands, perennial streams and ditches and ponds.
Despite accusations by another county councilman, George Cole (R-4th), that Phillips was “more worried about developers,” Phillips said that he was attempting to uphold rights of property owners along the Inland Bays watershed.
“Your rhetoric has been heard before,” Phillips said to Cole in a banter that has become familiar to anyone who regularly attends Sussex County Council’s weekly meetings. “The one little field that has ditches in it becomes unusable to anybody that owns that property.”
The PCS draft’s buffer regulation is similar to the 50-foot buffer already enforced by Sussex County officials, which was adopted with the 2002 county land-use plan. DNREC’s regulation would, however, protect perennial ditches — perennial meaning they flow year-round — whereas the county’s regulation does not.
DNREC officials scaled back the buffer requirement in the most recent draft after many meetings with a group called The Coalition, comprising development and agricultural interests throughout this part of the county.
After meeting with the group, Kevin Donnelly, the director of DNREC’s Water Resources division, recently said that “the 100-foot proposal before had serious and widespread financial impacts for the property-owning community of Sussex County.”
DNREC officials hope to schedule a public hearing on the PCS by the end of this year and have it approved by early 2007. If and when it is approved, the $38-million-a-year plan will attempt to reduce the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus entering the Indian River and the Indian River, Rehoboth and Little Assawoman Bays daily by up to 85 percent.
The strategy would do so by removing point sources that dump nutrients directly into the bays and by placing regulations on septic systems, agricultural lands and buffer requirements within developed areas.
Despite the high cost associated with the proposed plan, the buffers have received most of the attention in recent weeks.
“We’ve done an analysis between the two strategies, of the efficiency between the first and second strategies,” Chris Bason, science and technical coordinator, and wetlands project leader at the Center for the Inland Bays, said in an earlier interview.
Bason said that CIB should have a formal response to the new draft by early this month.
“The strategy that is currently being proposed is far, far less efficient at reducing nitrogen and phosphorous,” he added. “We’re very concerned about that.”
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