BY Julie Speed
Contributing Writer, Delta Business Journal

   In the wake of a federal consent decree between the Environmental Protection Agency and the Sierra Club that filed a lawsuit over Mississippi’s TMDL program, the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality is stepping up efforts to identify pollutants that would affect water quality in the Delta.
  “TMDLs will have an effect on every farm in the Delta,” said Frank Howell of the Delta Council. “There are a lot of concerns from the agricultural community about what will happen and how farmers will be affected.”
  Total Maximum Daily Loads (TMDL) refers to the amount of pollutants that a stream or river can handle without the water quality criteria being violated or the use of the water being impaired. According to the Clean Water Act of 1972, states are required to monitor and report water quality and to identify waters that do not meet standards. Water bodies not meeting
standards are then placed on a Section 303D list. Mississippi’s list is broader and includes impaired waters and waters of concern, said Randy Reed, chief of the water quality assessment branch of MDEQ.
  “The Clean Water Act requires a plan to restore the uses to meet the standards, or TMDL,” he said. “We have to determine the maximum amount of a pollutant that a stream can handle and if there is a particular pollutant that exceeds that limit, we have to determine what we can do to help the stream no longer be impaired.”
  In December 1998, the Sierra Club’s lawsuit resulted in the EPA being responsible for analyzing all of Mississippi’s TMDLs within ten years to determine what is needed to bring them up to standard, he said.
  “There is not a regulatory program that addresses the control of non-point source pollutants from agricultural fields,” he said. “Congress intentionally left that voluntary. We encourage the use of and provide funding for best management practices (BMPs) to help farmers. The only real regulatory authority that we have is for point sources, folks that have to have a
discharge permit.”
  Most pollutants in agricultural runoff don’t have water quality standards at this point, Reed said.
  “We don’t have standards for sediment or nutrients, two of the most significant pollutants in runoff,” he said. “But by 2003, the EPA is requiring the state to determine nutrient criteria.  If we find pollutants from agricultural land, it’s our job to educate farmers and work with the local district conservationists to encourage the use of BMPs.”
  Chat Phillips, chairman of the Yazoo/Mississippi Delta Joint Water Management District, chairman of the Delta Council’s water conservation committee, and a Yazoo City farmer, said MDEQ was handed “a very difficult task” by the courts.
  “We’re all working together to assist them in finding workable solutions in the Delta to meet the goals,” Phillips said. “They realize that cookie cutter approaches will not work all across the state because the geography and the non-point issues are so different. Those individualized solutions have got to come from local leadership.”
  A big concern in aquaculture is that the EPA will determine that catfish pond effluent is a point source pollutant but “the science isn’t there,” Phillips said.
  “Typically, the only time discharge occurs is during heavy storms and the amount of discharge compared to the large volume of rainfall is insignificant,” he said.
  The state is divided into five major drainage groups, with basin teams formed for each one. Work begins in a new group each year on a rotating basis with a five-step development process and a five-year repeating cycle. The five-step basic management cycle includes planning, gathering of data, assessment of data and TMDL, developing and implementing a basin plan.
  Five stakeholder meetings were recently held in the Yazoo River Basin Delta Region to receive public input on water quality issues, to inform the public of pending activities and establish ongoing dialogue with the public.
  “The stakeholder meetings are part of a management approach to come up with a basin plan to help explain the water conditions in the Yazoo River Basin, identify problem areas and develop strategies to prioritize and address the more important issues,” Reed said. “We’re trying to foster community involvement in the solutions. This was not required by the Clean
Water Act or the Sierra Club lawsuit.”