Melinda Tuhus Photo
State Rep. Mary Mushinsky loves the Quinnipiac River. She’s worried that a law she wrote to protect it is getting watered down before it even takes effect.
Mushinsky — pictured above by the banks of the River on New Haven’s Front Street — is executive director of the Quinnipiac River Watershed Association. In Hartford she represents Wallingford, through which the Q River passes on its way to Long Island Sound.
After a state Supreme Court decision ruled that stream flow could be regulated, but only in streams and rivers stocked with fish by the Department of Environmental Protection, she introduced a bill that would cover unstocked streams as well. It would apply stream flow regulations to all rivers and streams in the state, not just those stocked with fish by the DEP. The bill passed in 2005. It’s taken almost five years for the DEP to come up with a set of proposed regulations to do that.
She said the regs are required to balance competing uses— “the needs of public health, flood control, industry, public utilities, water supply, and agriculture, and provide for stream and river ecology and public recreation. They must be based on science and consider habitat, basin boundaries, stream flow, locations of diversions.” She added that the law included a long list of exemptions. For example, it won’t overrule existing dam licenses or requirements of state agencies. Click here for background.
“But we never said anything about setting up a classification of rivers and deciding, ‘Some are not salvageable so don’t do anything about them,’” Mushinsky said indignantly. That’s just what she fears is happening. “I think [the proposed classification system] tends to lock in the history of the river. If it’s had a long working history like the Q and the Mill, that’s locked in, too. Since they are so heavily used by humans, the DEP is not going to regulate them. All the urban rivers are at risk because the competing needs are greater.” The Connecticut River, the longest river in all of New England, has for the most part escaped significant development and water withdrawal and she said it’s not at risk.
The proposed regs include placing streams and rivers in four classes, as a way to balance all those competing uses, explained Betsey Wingfield, the DEP’s bureau chief for water protection and land use. Class I refers to a “natural stream” with little or no human impact; Class II are streams with minimum alteration of stream flow, i.e., minimal extraction of water; Class III are streams with moderately altered flow that still have enough water to meet ecological needs; Class IV streams are “substantially altered,” the assumption being there’s not enough flow to meet ecological needs, she said. Those needs include survival of the ecosystem’s flora and fauna.
“I’m worried about the Q,” Mushinsky said, “because it’s over-allocated already.” That means that if every entity with a permit to withdraw water tried to withdraw its total allotment, there wouldn’t be enough to go around.
“It also has a summer low-flow problem and a heavy past history of industrial and water utility use,” she added. “I’d be the first one to say we should always respect the need for drinking water, because that’s a top priority. But nonetheless, do you drain all the water or use water conservation in the driest part of the year so the aquatic life can remain alive and people can get their drinking water? We don’t ask people to do much water conservation.”
She said in those low-flow times, half the water that comes down the river is treated effluent, i.e., sewage. Although sewage treatment is much improved from past years, would you want to swim in it? she asked. If more water is available in the upper reaches of the river, then the percentage that’s effluent is reduced accordingly.
Wingfield acknowledged that the Q is over-allocated, but added, “That’s not saying what [class] the Quinnipiac is going to be.” She also noted that different sections of a river could receive different classifications, depending on the conditions in each section. But she was more sanguine about any streams and rivers that are designated Class IV. “We don’t see Class IV as permission to continue to degrade; we see it as potentially maintaining the same status or better; we’re not writing them off in the sense that you can take more than you’re authorized to take; but it might be maintaining the status quo rather than moving up to a Class III.”
A public hearing is scheduled for this Thursday at the DEP headquarters in Hartford, beginning at 9 a.m. and going as long as it takes for concerned citizens to be heard. In addition, the Quinnipiac River Watershed Association is convening a meeting at the main library in Wallingford, 200 N. Main Street, on Wednesday at 7 p.m., where Wingfield will be on hand to answer questions. “We want to hear their concerns and all their local knowledge,” she said. “Local citizens have intimate knowledge of their water resources and we want to make sure that as part of the classification process that they’re heard.”
The public comment period ends Feb. 4, after which the DEP will finalize its regulations, which must be approved by the General Assembly’s Regulations Review Committee. It’s only then that specific rivers and streams will be classified, if the proposed classification system is still intact, and full implementation is expected to take 10 years.