Darby Creek Advocate Volume 9, Issue 3  November 2001

Darby Watershed Project Underway; DCA Elected to Steering Committee

The Darby Creek Watershed Project—described in the March Advocate—is now well underway. The project is an effort to coordinate a broad-based watershed protection plan, and is being sponsored by the six
county Soil and Water Conservation Districts in the Darby watershed (Franklin, Pickaway, Madison, Union, Champaign, and Logan counties).
The project will tap the energies of local citizens and organizations to develop strategies to preserve and enhance water quality in the Darby watershed.
At a recent organizational meeting DCA was nominated by the Franklin SWCD to sit on the project’s Steering Committee. The Steering Committee
consists of 20-30 members who will devise and promote the watershed plan using the support of numerous stakeholders, which have also met and separated into workgroups. DCA is also sitting on an information subcommittee.
The Darby Watershed Project has several motivations. First, the counties involved recognize “that the quality of watershed resources is high, but at-risk.” Second, the project seeks to offer local control in protection efforts. Third, there was a recognition that meeting new EPA water quality goals will require greater coordination and should involve local stakeholder input.
The project’s mission statement is as follows: “The purpose of the Darby Creek Watershed Planning Group is to develop an implementable community-based plan to maintain and enhance the socio-economic and ecological health of the Darby Creek Watershed.”
In addition to the information group, other committees include Fundraising, Logistics, Outreach, Publicity, Volunteer Resources, and Clean Water Act (dealing with EPA policies). All interested citizens are encouraged to join a committee and participate.
Workgroups are currently preparing for a series of public meetings to be held early next year. Input from these meetings, along with information gathered by the workgroups, will supply the foundation for the watershed plan, to be developed by the Steering Committee later in the year. The plan will then be circulated for public comment, reviewed and revised, and finally adopted, perhaps by early 2003.
The Watershed Project will then help to encourage or coordinate the implementation of the plan by local jurisdictions throughout the watershed. Though the plan will have no force of law, local participation in its development should encourage its adoption by Darby communities.

DCA Meets with Ohio EPA

In response to a DCA inquiry, officials with the Ohio EPA recently organized a meeting to explore ways to enhance the agency’s current study of Darby Creek.
As detailed in the last issue of the Advocate, the EPA is currently in the midst of a watershed-wide assessment of the biological health of the Big Darby system in preparation for a “TMDL” plan for Darby.
A TMDL, which stands for Total Maximum Daily Load, is a process that seeks to identify existing pollution sources and set limits for pollutants based on a stream’s ability to meet water quality standards. The EPA’s Darby assessment will identify problems in the watershed and lay the foundation for plans to maintain or improve water quality.
DCA expressed a concern that existing EPA assessment tools do not specifically measure the status of special species (either endangered, threatened, or special interest); nor does it monitor freshwater mussels.
Because Darby has so many rare and endangered mussels, DCA feels this element of the Darby ecosystem should be considered in any assessment of the watershed’s health. It is generally accepted that many
mussel species in the watershed have declined over the last few decades.
At the meeting, which included more than a dozen EPA, ODNR, and OSU specialists, a plan was discussed to include mussel and other data in the TMDL process. OSU museum curator Dr. G. Thomas Watters noted that Darby may be the best studied stream in the world in terms of freshwater mussels. EPA project director Marc Smith stated that this winter a mussel task force would meet to decide how best to incorporate this wealth of data into the overall Darby assessment.
The EPA also agreed to include data from Dr. Ted Cavender, a fish specialist from the OSU museum who has been studying Darby for decades. At the October Darby Partners meeting Cavender outlined results of a recently completed study of Ohio’s “prairie fishes,” which included surveys of about 50 sites in former prairie regions of the Darby watershed. Cavender has found a distinct decline in these fishes in many parts of the watershed, apparently due to habitat reduction and increases in waterborne sediments.
Results from the EPA’s surveys should be available early next year.

Franklin County to Build Sewage Plant in Darbydale

Under pressure from the Ohio EPA, Franklin County has approved a plan to construct a new sewage treatment plant for the unincorporated village of Darbydale.
For years the EPA has documented pollution from malfunctioning septic systems in this small town along the banks of Big Darby. Leakage from leach beds currently intermingles with storm water runoff, creating a health hazard and degrading Big Darby Creek in the vicinity of the town.
Some residents have complained that they will be forced to pay a connection fee, estimated at up to $2,500 per household. The county will seek grants to lower this figure.
The plant will result in a new discharge into Darby, which is generally not allowed in Ohio’s highest quality streams. But in this case the EPA believes a regulated discharge will be better than the unregulated pollution from existing septics.
Another concern DCA had was that the new plant might be designed with excess capacity that would spur development in this sensitive area. However, officials have assured us that the plant will only serve existing structures, plus expected tie-ins with several trailer parks in the area.

Orient Sewage Plant Improving

In November, 1998, a Columbus Dispatch headline screamed the bad news: “Prison Sewage Fouls Darby.” Partially treated “solids” from a sewage plant serving the Orient Prison complex in northern Pickaway County had covered a stretch of Big Darby in sludge.
Research by reporter Randall Edwards revealed that the prison had been a chronic offender, mostly because the prison population had long ago exceeded the capacity of the small plant.
Just three years later the plant is now consistently meeting federal and state water quality standards, according to a press release from the EPA. The plant has even received two U.S. EPA awards: one in the federal agency’s “most improved” category, and the other a Regional Operation and Maintenance Award. Further upgrades are planned.

Conservation Program Pushed as Refuge Alternative

Madison County officials are promoting a conservation program run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as an alternative to the controversial Little Darby Wildlife Refuge proposed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, according to the Madison Press.
The program, called the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program, or CREP, is designed to target the impacts of agricultural practices on resources of “state and national significance.” Chris Kauffman of ODNR outlined the program at the October Darby Partners meeting.
CREP is set up like the more commonly used Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), except that it targets a watershed or other sensitive area, it offers a greater variety of conservation measures, and it is developed and administered with local input in cooperation with state and federal agencies.
Funding has been approved for 100,000 CREP acres in Ohio. So far, the state Ohio has two CREP projects totaling 70,000 acres: one in the western Lake Erie drainage (67,000 acres), and a soon-to-be-approved project in the upper Big Walnut Creek watershed (3,000 acres). Thus 30,000 acres remain to be distributed.
A Darby CREP program is supported by U.S. Rep. Deborah Pryce and U.S. Senator Mike DeWine.
One potential roadblock is that the program requires a portion of funds to come from local sources (at least 20 percent). The Lake Erie CREP has state funding from ODNR, while the Big Walnut effort has funding from the city of Columbus (which hopes to protect its drinking water). In the face of a shrinking state budget, ODNR funding will not be available for a Darby program, and other sources have not been identified.
The CREP program has the potential to pump much needed federal funds into the Darby preservation effort. However, it should be noted that CREP, like CRP, generally offers only temporary protections through 10-30 year contracts. For this reason the programs are considered expensive ways to protect a watershed.

by John Tetzloff