Your county could be eligible for grant money to support local water quality initiatives through Pennsylvania’s Phase 3 Chesapeake Bay Watershed Implementation Plan (Phase 3 WIP).  If you volunteer to work with DEP on the creation of a Countywide Action Plan (CAP), you could receive thousands of dollars to fund local projects and additional staffing with wide discretion to use that money to further local goals – as long as the efforts also help Pennsylvania meet its obligations under the multi-state Chesapeake Bay agreement. Should your county voluntarily create a Phase 3 WIP Countywide Action Plan?  We’ve offered several reasons why you could benefit from doing so here.

DEP offers a three-year timetable for participation in the Phase 3 WIP Countywide Action Plan program.  Year 1 is dedicated to creating the action plan, but a plan could be created in as little as 6-8 months. Year 2 is focused on initiating implementation and getting the program off the ground. Year 3 is a time to refine the implementation approach based on year 2 results and lessons learned. Since the goal is to accomplish as much as we can by 2025, HRG’s approach to the recommended timetable is to work through plan development in a 6-8 month timeframe and invest the remaining 4 years on implementation.  We recognize that the plan will be revised over time, so there is no need to perfect the plan as phase 1 and implement as phase 2.  Our approach is to take advantage of momentum gained with local leaders during plan development and start projects as soon as possible.  Of course, some water quality initiatives contained in the plan may be ongoing for years to come.  Here’s a closer look at how we’d work with you to  create and implement the plan.

You’ll need the help of many different stakeholders to implement your Countywide Action Plan successfully, so it’s important to involve them in the process from the very beginning.  This helps to ensure the plan’s recommendations are practical and agreeable to the people and organizations that will be charged with doing the actual work.  A well-mounted resistance effort can derail even the best laid plans, so it’s vitally important that you involve every group that will be impacted by the plan in its development. Effective consensus-building on the front-end helps to eliminate resistance on the back-end.

Therefore, your first step in the CAP process will be to form a CAP Planning Team (CPT). This team will work directly with DEP on developing and implementing the plan.  It should include representatives from both the agricultural and the developed sector because each sector has varying needs and concerns.  Agricultural representatives could include full-time farmers, part-time farmers, co-ops, consultants, and advocacy groups.  Developed sector representatives could include municipalities, businesses, and homeowners.  The CAP Planning Team could also include leaders from:

Educational institutions (college, university)

Agricultural service providers (seed/fertilizer dealers, veterinarians, nutritionists)

4H

Watershed groups

MS4 coordinators

Local PA Farm Bureau/Grange chapters

Environmental non-profits

The CAP planning team should communicate routinely while the plan is being developed:

• to make sure the plan accurately reflects current water quality efforts,
• to achieve consensus on plan goals, and
• to discuss the feasibility of any suggested approach to meeting those goals.

DEP will provide you with a Clean Water Technical Toolbox that identifies the current pollutant loadings to your local streams and identifies potential sources of that pollution. An example toolbox can be seen here

This is valuable information to help you understand the scope of the water quality issues you face, but it doesn’t tell you much about the initiatives already in progress to address those issues.  It’s very important to know what’s already being done in order to avoid duplicated effort, prevent the repetition of any prior failures, and build on existing successes.

You’ll want to collect information on the Best Management Practices currently being designed and implemented by local municipalities and farmers.  You’ll also want to look at the Pollutant Reduction Plans that MS4 communities have developed and document the size and location of any conservation areas within the county. Though the toolbox focuses on the agricultural and developed sectors, water quality professionals know forested land can provide significant water quality benefit.  They also know that water and wastewater treatment systems provide extensive pollutant reduction benefits, as well. Your CAP planning team may want to look at the potential of these sectors to provide additional water quality benefit.

The goal of the Countywide Action Plan is to determine the most feasible and cost-effective approach to meeting water quality goals.  The Clean Water Technical Toolbox contains potential Best Management Practices to help you meet these goals, but your CAP planning team should look at all of the data available to develop a locally nuanced approach. You won’t want to limit yourself to the sample solutions DEP has provided; you’ll want to evaluate all possible options to determine the best ones for your community. This may require you to look at additional water quality models beyond the CAST model used by DEP, models that incorporate additional data on karst areas, impaired watersheds, agricultural areas, and more.

The Clean Water Technical Toolbox specifies the Phase 3 WIP goals for your county to meet in order to help Pennsylvania meet its obligations to the Chesapeake Bay.  As you think about how to meet these goals, it’s a great time to think about any additional water quality goals your county and its local communities have.  This way, you can craft an approach that meets both sets of goals simultaneously.  Your monthly CAP planning team meetings with stakeholders will be a great forum for determining these local goals and concerns. Use this program (and the funding it provides) to be a catalyst to move local goals forward.    Things like flood mitigation, comprehensive plan implementation, farmland preservation, and dam removal projects could all be potentially tied to Chesapeake Bay goals.

The Clean Water Technical Toolbox contains recommended Best Management Practices with a demonstrated ability to help your county meet its water quality goals, but you’ve collected additional data and evaluated other potential solutions for consideration, too. You’ve identified measurable goals for improving water quality, and you have many options to consider to help you meet those goals.  It’s time to identify which options are worth pursuing and which aren’t.  This will depend on many factors, including a comparison of the cost of each approach vs the magnitude of results it can provide and the amount of time it will take to implement the approach.  (If two approaches can produce the same level of results but one is significantly cheaper or easier to fund, it generally makes sense to choose the more affordable option.)  You’ll also want to consider the input of stakeholders on the practicality of each approach and their ability to put it into action.  Some options may produce great results on paper, but may create major challenges for your farmers or municipal leaders to implement on the ground. No matter how good your plan is, it won’t produce results without buy-in on the implementation side.  You’ll need to choose an approach that your stakeholders can support.

As you evaluate potential solutions, you may want to target areas where efforts are already underway, so you can amplify results.  You may want to target TMDL tributaries or impaired waters to maximize impact.  Don’t be afraid to think outside the box and harness the power of partnerships to multiply your efforts.  Look at where development is most likely to occur and strategize ways to incentivize developers to build beyond minimum requirements. Examine whether MS4s can receive credit toward their own regulatory obligations if they subsidize nitrogen reduction on local farms.  Look at the priorities of funding programs to determine which approaches are the most likely to receive grants and low-interest loans.

By analyzing these factors, you can narrow down a list of specific solutions your team should pursue in its plan and develop cost estimates, a funding plan, and schedule for each one.

Once the CAP planning team achieves consensus on its approach, you can finalize your plan and publish it for the public. You will need a robust outreach and communication strategy to get people in the community on your team, actively working toward your goals.  It will ultimately be non-profit groups, volunteers, municipal leaders, farmers, home and business owners that implement your recommendations, so you will need to be sure they know what you’re asking them to do and see the mutual benefit to them and the wider community in participating. If you communicate effectively and empower planning team members to champion the plan in their communities, you can strive to create a culture of cooperation, instead of relying on enforcement action.

As you shift from planning to implementation, the role of your team will change, too.  They will focus on documenting implementation progress and monitoring water quality results.  They should continue to meet quarterly to report on progress, discuss challenges and evolving needs, and collaborate on outreach opportunities.  You’ll want to develop a tracking system to document all of the implementation activities and their current progress.   You’ll also want to look at opportunities to bundle projects together to minimize costs.  As stated previously, the success of your plan will depend on buy-in from the community, so your outreach strategy should include an effort to communicate the value you are creating as projects are completed.  Share your results with the public and show them the direct benefits they’re receiving from their efforts, so they are motivated to continue.  Of course, some efforts may be less successful than others.  Learn from the challenges and obstacles you face, and refine your plan as you go.

We have described the Countywide Action Plan development and implementation process in a linear, step-by-step manner to make it easy to understand.  In practice, it is not so linear.  You don’t want to wait till step 05 to write your plan; draft it and revise it as you go.  This saves time, but it also eliminates surprises. By the time the final draft of the plan is written, its recommendations should already be well-known and understood by all stakeholders. Likewise, you should be thinking about public outreach in the early stages of plan development, not just after the plan is published. Communication cannot be an afterthought if you want to build true consensus.

Now that you have a better picture of what creating and implementing a Countywide Action Plan involves, it’s time to consider who is best positioned to guide you through the process.

Program funding can be used to hire a coordinator as an in-house member of your staff or hire a consulting firm to serve as coordinator. We’ll help you decide which approach is best for your county here