Rivanna River Basin Commission Meeting   4/7/2026

Very good.

So we'll do order introductions and stuff afterwards.

Yeah, I think that sounds great.

All right.

Well, thank you all for being here.

I will welcome those in attendance for the Rivanna River Basin Commission meeting on April 7th at 1 p.m., back in the beautiful meeting room here at TJPDC.

And until the rest of our active voters get here, we will move on to our presentation with Ian Blair of Wetlands Watch.

Thanks so much for all of it.

There we go.

All right, before I begin, can you hear me?

Does it sound good?

Fantastic.

All right.

Well, let me start my timer.

I'd like to keep you on time as well as myself.

Hello.

I'm so excited to be talking with you.

My name is Ian Blair.

I work for a small nonprofit that works statewide in Virginia based in Norfolk, Virginia called Wetlands Watch.

You may have heard us because we run the Catch the King community science flood mapping initiative where we all chase the king tides around coastal Virginia.

put GPS markers and then take that data and send it to VIMS to do some flood mapping data collection as well as ground proofing our flood models here in Virginia.

You also may have heard us because we manage the Chesapeake Bay landscape professionals certification for the state of Virginia.

So if you had conservation landscapers or landscapers that wanted to learn more about using native plants and maximizing native plants in specific ways and techniques of planting plants,

to slow down and mitigate in clean water is a training program that we use but I am here to talk to you about the General Assembly because we are one of the few environmental nonprofits that actually has a little bit of money to do some lobbying.

And so I had the unique privilege to just sit in a lot of the Natural Resource Committee meetings this session in 2026 for the General Assembly.

And then I, in sitting in all those meetings, took some notes and tracked some bills, and I wanted to share some that may pertain to your commission, as well as just keep you aware of what trends happened here in Virginia in 2026.

Also recognizing, kind of moving on, that we're not actually done.

So if you're unfamiliar of how the process works, I think making sure everyone has a foundation, we just went through 60 days of our part-time legislature here in Virginia.

It ended us

Technically in March, but we are going to be coming back.

The governor has a deadline of April 13th to either sign bills, amend bills, or veto bills.

And then I'll explain more next steps, but we are at the very end.

The dust is settling.

We're slowly, I feel like every day there's a new press release of what the governor has signed specifically with some sort of topic.

So I think either today or yesterday she did a whole bunch of bills on schools.

And I'm just tracking to see how those go through, but technically it's April 13th.

That is her deadline to do all of those actions.

So backing up, bills are introduced in the legislative process through

Some sort of committee, that committee then assigns a subcommittee to then debate the merits of the bill that's being discussed.

So really, if you're thinking about looking at conversations around bills, those subcommittee meetings are the most important because that's where you hear from support and opposition.

And then you can figure out

You know, how people or any lobbyists are feeling about other bills in that.

If that moves out of that subcommittee, it goes to the main committee.

That main committee then brings it to the floor where it's heard three times.

The first time is just to let everyone know.

The second time is to amend any of the language.

And the third time is to vote whether they want to pass it out of that chamber.

crossover is when both bills from the House and the Senate, House being the 100 delegates, the Senate being the 40 senators, send their bills over to make sure that they both agree in order to present all of these bills to the governor.

And really like there are a lot of things that went through and I'll talk more with specific bills and different moments throughout the General Assembly session that

explain why some bills died and why some bills made it through.

Moving on or yeah we are at the very end and we're waiting to see what gets signed.

Generally when bills unless they have an enactment clause attached to them everything gets enacted on July 1st if it does get signed by the governor.

So current stats as of last week

It was interesting to see how many bills moved through it, but we had 3,637 total legislative items, which includes bills, resolutions and joint resolutions.

When we only look at bills, it was about, or when we look at the same type of legislative items in 2025, we had 3,107.

So there was a 17% increase in legislative items.

Moving on down to that second bullet point,

Out of the 3,637, 2,366 were bills, so that's a lot of bills that people were tracking.

Of course, I'm an environmental nonprofit, so I really honed in on what was happening in these natural resource committees and

I can use what was in both committees as like a proxy.

I was tracking pretty much 6% of all the bills.

So it takes a network in order for everyone to follow other sort of bills and keep each other updated.

I looked at what the pass rate was in 2025, and I realized that this year was a 26% increase, but that pass rate of what the actual for both the House and the Senate was about 48%.

So most things did not make it through, which is not uncommon.

When I look at just our little nonprofit, what we were tracking, we were tracking like 67 bills initially, most of them starting in the house, most of them were bills, but we were watching some resolutions and watching some budget items.

a little bit more, you know, 52% died, but there were some good reasons, there are some bad reasons.

And we're also tracking who the top patrons are with Delegate Krizik leading with five bills in this previous session.

Trying to explain also, sorry, if you have questions, I can take those at the end.

Sometimes I go in a flow state and I've got,

We can go back to any slides and talk about it.

Bill overview.

I went and looked at all the bills that we're doing.

I reduced them to a policy area.

And so, of course, like wetlands were number one.

We looked at environmental justice, some governance, invasive species management had a really successful year this year compared to last year.

but then there were a lot that didn't make it through.

I recognized coastal resiliency that wouldn't really apply to this commission however that is something that we were tracking since I am based in Norfolk that is top of mind and it really didn't make it through.

Most of this was because many of the coastal resiliency bills that were put forward had a fiscal impact and for this first session we were really trying to be lean

and not have fiscal impacts because we don't know how federal insurgency and all these cuts are going to impact.

So everyone was kind of putting forward bills that weren't going to create a big budget lift, especially if it was coming from general funding.

When we look at our priorities for our organization, just to show most didn't pass, most passed.

It was a mixed bag and that was to be expected.

It's the first term of a new governor administration.

People are still figuring out what the priorities are, making sure that the budget was, you know, affordability is the word for the season.

Any additional costs were looked and scrutinized very carefully when they went to the Appropriations Committee and most of them didn't make it out.

So with that being said, let's go and jump into some bills.

I worked on two bills specifically and the way I've structured this presentation for the rest of the 10 minutes is I'll talk about my two bills I worked on really, really carefully.

And I will also like show you what it's like to be working in policy for these two bills.

Then I'll go a little bit high level for some bills I think would be interesting to you and then I'll go even higher level with just a category of bills and list the bills if you want to do research.

But I was really passionate about HB 1356.

This is from Delegate Converse Fowler in Virginia Beach.

It did not end up making it, but it was really interesting to track it through the little bit of time.

This, I feel like, would apply for your commission.

Because we were trying to update the state precipitation design standards, I don't know if you're familiar with Atlas 14, volume 13, or Atlas 15, volume 1 and 2.

But essentially, we in Virginia are using Atlas 14, volume 2.

which is a precipitation value data set that engineers use to design roads, bridges, culverts, and other sort of infrastructure projects.

I think the data set is from 1860 to 2000, so we've been using data that has not been updated for the last 26 years.

We do have this new data set that's coming out which is called Atlas 14 volume 13.

We're not entirely sure when it will come out.

Here you can see this is a screenshot from the most recent NOAA report that came out in December of 2025.

It says end of Q3 in fiscal year 2026.

So hopefully it will come out soon, but it seems quite silly to build infrastructure projects using precipitation values that are not

workable with the current precipitation climate.

And so if you're building, for example, a culvert that's handling a 10-year storm from 1980, well, that 10-year storm, probably that volume of water is going to be increasing so that culvert will be undersized.

But we just spent money building a new culvert.

So trying to increase our data so that we can plan for the future was one of the backgrounds in this bill.

I'm going to just escape and show you.

So if you've never looked at bills or research bills, this is the legislative information system.

You can see a lot of really cool things of like how many bills there were in the entire place.

You can look at them by statistics and measure what sort of did they, were they introduced, passed House, passed Senate.

You can also look up specific bills.

So in this case, I'll look up

HB1356, and we can see what the actual bill was.

If you have researched LIS in the past, you're like, whoa, this is a different color.

It's a different format.

They recently updated it in 2025, and this is like the first year we've been able to use this new updated system.

Of course, there are learning curves for any time there's an update to an old system.

The old system was a nice maroon color.

It had a pretty neat search feature.

This has a neat search feature, but it takes a little bit of

Working around, you really need to know what you're looking for and then filter it out versus the old system.

But one of the cool things is the history is always going to show you the most recent action that happened.

But if we go back and just look at what this bill was, it was going to amend two sections of the code, Virginia.

One was like chapter 33, which is VDOT's section.

And the other was in chapter, I think, 62.

which is DEQ in the Stormwater section.

The reason it didn't end up working was because of this line and this is where it's important if you are thinking about writing legislation you will send a concept or you can even send a language to the Department of Legislative Services, DLS.

This is a group of lawyers that end up writing the drafts for these bills

This section right here that I've highlighted is one of the issues where it says the board may adopt standards or issue guidance through regulation consistent with the subdivision A4, which is the part of the code that allows you to expedite through the APA system.

Now, if we go and we actually click on this section and we can see, OK, when can state agencies sort of skip public comment in that public process?

They're like, OK, anything like fixing rates or prices, any sort of internal stuff that doesn't need to be commented on, any sort of like just corrections of technical errors.

And then here are the regulations.

And so.

The big one right here was a regulation that section A, B, and C says necessary to inform where no agency discretion is involved.

Now, for Atlas 14 volume 13, there wouldn't be any discretion.

You're just updating numbers.

but Atlas 15 volume 2 is a new data set that's looking into the future and we would need to figure out as a state what curve in the future would we want to use the similar way that sea level rise you know NOAA had a low intermediate and high curve which curve do we want to use so there would be some discretion essentially making this line unworkable so the bill couldn't really move forward

Oop, wrong bill, going back.

Talk about that bill next time.

So we met with a bunch of different stakeholders as one of the environmental nonprofits that were leading this bill, tried to workshop, but everyone at the table, DEQ, VDOT, we all realized that we probably should take the summer to talk about how we want to move forward with figuring out what the state precipitation values are in the future.

And everyone decided to, as a voice vote,

Continue to 2027.

This will probably not be taken up in 2027 and we will have a new bill that will be reshaped and reformatted to be a workable bill.

Go back here.

Atlas 14 volume 13 includes Virginia and then we have this timeline of it's supposed to be out in 2027 which is Atlas volume 1 and volume 2 and the big difference between Atlas 14 and Atlas 15 is this idea of non-stationarity where there are changing environmental conditions with each gauge and so they're sort of averaging

Different gauges as opposed to having single points doing these giant concentric circle radiuses which then creates a seamless type of precipitation data over the continuous United States as opposed to having breaks at state lines where if it's not in the region they're not going to update.

So it's exciting if it comes out.

The other bill that we worked on was HB214 and this was going to help localities establish a home flood protection assistance program.

I think the background of the bill that's important is that

We have a fund called the Resilient Virginia Revolving Fund and Delegate Fagans, who is also from Virginia Beach, knows about this fund and also recognizes that Virginia Beach property owners are having flood issues.

The City of Virginia Beach has a stormwater service that can go out and help people understand their flood issues and their stormwater issues on their property.

but it's missing that funding component and so he wanted to put forward a home flood protection assistance program.

The one thing, and I will minimize out, is that we actually already have a bill that came through in 2021 which was Senate Bill 1309 and that was authorizing the local stormwater management funds to be used for flood mitigation protection measures.

Northern Virginia, particularly Fairfax, and that area has already been successfully using this sort of program since it came out, as well as I think, let me go back, back one more, I think there was another bill in 2023.

Senate Bill 1091, which also allowed private property owners as well as like common interest condominium communities to also tap into this fund.

So if you're having flood issues in localities within the commission, they may be already empowered to use the local stormwater management fund to help resolve those stormwater issues.

And when introducing a bill like this, there was an issue of $3,000 per household, whereas I think it's $5,000 in the other grant.

So you were already limiting it.

The other thing was a lot of the localities were uncomfortable with this onsite assessment by the locality, which is just going to increase the amount of the staff load with a limited staff capacity.

There were rumors that a nonprofit started this bill, but I don't know anyone who would want to be the third party administrator to try to figure this out.

And when talking with the delegate, it seemed like he was really trying to tap into the RBR funds that haven't been actualized as of late and trying to connect them to issues that he's seeing in the locality that he represents.

So those are the two bills that I know the most about because I was in almost all of the meetings.

But let's move in back over and just go through all the other bills really quickly.

HB 52, this is when we dredge canals, I know not necessarily, maybe, no.

When we dredge canals, essentially that material gets dumped off in the ocean and since sea level rise is impacting wetlands,

There's this new technique called thin layer placement or marsh elevation enhancement that takes that dredge material, if it's clean, creates a slurry and then sprays it on top of wetlands and that then sediment goes down for wetlands to regrow and then move up with the quick sea level rise rates.

HB 237, also wetlands bill, was just adding

Not to conserve Virginia, now it's the Coastal Resiliency Master Plan where my wetlands will try to migrate so that we can prepare if it's a rural area to try to use conserve Virginia or another sort of acquisition fund to prevent the death of wetlands when they hit a bulkhead, the water is rising, they don't rise with it and then they just turn into a mud flat.

So this is just a mapping service that was

trying what will be added to the Coastal Resiliency Master Plan and potentially figure out how we will deal with the prioritization of this in a future bill.

HB 521 is a fun bill where everyone in Virginia has been acting as if we have no net loss as a policy.

And

It turns out we didn't have no net loss in the Code of Virginia for the Virginia Marine Resources Commission.

And this bill was just adding a single line in the bill to say, hey, we're recognizing it in the Chesapeake Bay Agreement.

We also have it in DEQ.

But for VMRC, it's just making sure that no net loss of acreage and functions was codified.

HB 390 created an Habitat Policy Oversight Committee.

There are a whole bunch of really cool shoreline adaptation techniques that are happening right now.

And we need a policy committee to figure out if this is actually meeting our goals of what a living shoreline is, for example, and have someone

be the arbiter of moving forward with all of this innovation that's happening in the field, figuring out how we want as a state to move forward without selectively giving permits here and not there, making sure that we have a standardized sort of approach moving forward.

HB 487 and SB 192 were for the Coastal Storm Risk Management System.

We see these big projects specifically with coastal storm and coastal surge.

And so the Army Corps has three projects in the Hampton Roads area.

And one of them was to try to figure out how you can give state owned bottom land to localities so that they can then put projects on it.

It was killed, but

Not because it was bad, they just ended up putting it into the budget language so it's being legislated through the budget so that it can be moved forward.

HJ16 continuing the joint subcommittee on recurrent flooding.

This is really the only place in the General Assembly where we're talking about flood issues.

And so it's going to be continued for another two years.

They did change the language because they accidentally put forward an older version that only looked at coastal flooding.

So then they were able to change it for this HJ16 for the entire state.

H-Bay 389, a climate adaptation plan for fisheries in Chesapeake Bay.

It was one of the first bills to die, and it was because of that fiscal impact.

Essentially, sea level rise is drowning fish habitat, and so we lose wetlands, we lose our fishing industry, and this plan will help figure out if there are places that are hotspots that we really, really, really need to protect in order to maintain the fishery industry.

HBA 641 as well as SB 393.

This is Virginia's great outdoors tax and this gets into the data center question.

A lot of people are looking at the data center tax exemption at the state level and if you roll that back and no longer give it an exemption, you just open up a whole bunch of revenue for the state.

Senator Perry wanted to use that money to then help fund land conservation and it did not make it out

both of them because of how if you've been following the General Assembly and why we're having a special session on April 23rd is we need to figure out how the state wants to move forward with either allowing data centers to continue building through an exemption or removing that exemption and taxing it and then potentially slowing down that industry.

HB 256 as well as HB 257 were both environmental justice bills.

They were from 2024.

They were just not really continued because it's not the proper word, but they just borrowed that same language and ran it again this year.

It is a May, I know it says it requires cities

that have a population of over 20 in counties over 100,000 to consider adopting environmental justice strategy and the comprehensive plan.

So this is part of that Dillon rule confusion where the state needs to empower locality and other political eligible subdivisions to do actions.

And this one passed.

And it's just thinking about, you know, we use land use planning because we're looking at the use, but not necessarily people.

So if we're thinking through uses like data centers are a great example, making sure if we are zoning those, thinking about the impacts on the communities that live around them.

SB197 amends the Community Flood Preparedness Fund.

And right now, so if you take a loan out with the Community Flood Preparedness Fund, there was a high interest rate.

This one, it's not high rate interest rate, it's actually 2.2%.

But it defers the interest until the project is complete in this alliance with historic federal climate projects.

so that you know if you're like trying to do an RFP but the interest is still accruing it you know suddenly at some point for a locality that doesn't make sense so no that interest is deferred until the the project is complete or the study is complete.

HJ20 thinking about managed retreat and this one was just looking at legacy property owners facing seal rise it was a limited scope and it wanted to have Jay Lark or the joint legislative

Research Commission.

Thank you.

That was continued to 2027.

Now we're going high level.

There was a bunch of disaster.

Disaster response was something on people's minds.

There were HB 904, which wanted to have the Virginia Disaster Assistance Fund have amendments to align it with the state resilience planning principles.

While this bill did die, it just moved the language because technically the Virginia Disaster Assistance Fund doesn't exist in the Code of Virginia.

And it's hard to legislate something that's not in the code.

So it was recommended that they just put this as budget language underneath that budget item.

I think it's 102.

HB 937 was the Virginia Resiliency Grant program that was going to give $100,000 to people impacted by

Hurricane Helene and other future disasters.

Unfortunately, fiscal impacts, they were limited on how money was being spent.

So that one was tabled pretty quickly.

HB 1189 and companion SB 635.

So when you look at disaster preparation, you have to declare the state of emergency in order to activate those dollars.

Virginia has now created something called the state of preparedness, which

activates the money without having to declare an emergency.

This will help with the public reception of like, oh, no, the governor has declared a state of emergency.

But then, for example, the snowstorm that I think the second one that came through this winter in February, nothing really happened.

And so everyone's like, wait, we declared something, but I didn't really see any snow happen.

So this state of preparedness helps resolve that we're going to be prepared for something, but it's not actually an emergency.

and then there was an emergency management capabilities work group that changed drastically.

It's now a work group initially was going to give a whole bunch of emergency management capabilities for localities all over including at one point every locality was going to get an emergency car but that got watered down because of the fiscal impacts.

Tribal affairs, a lot of them died but it was just for consistency.

They're going to use the tribal

Commission to continue to talk about how they want to move forward with these consultations between governments and governments.

The General Assembly wasn't entirely sure moving forward, but one of the things that we were looking at were these tribal conservation easements.

Some tribes want to do nature-based solutions on their lands, but they need to have a conservation easement in order to do that.

So there's this land title issue that needs to be resolved.

Disclosure reform.

So flood disclosure is not actually in Virginia.

We have a limited type of disclosure that only discloses repetitive loss properties, which is like 0.0002% of properties in Virginia.

Virginia based off of Milliman report that came out in January of 2025 is like the fourth highest state

in their study that sells properties that have already been flooded.

So it is a problem in Virginia where we're like kind of playing hot potato with houses that continue to flood but aren't being disclosed.

And so two things that happened was

The Board of Housing and Community Development has these ad hoc groups that now need to disclose the votes essentially if it goes there.

Sometimes bills that are discussed kind of just appear and so there's now going to be a process of HB 951 and then

Then look at Congress Fowler, who did the first repetitive loss disclosure back in 2021.

It brought HB 1518, and this is a buyer beware work group to figure out if our buyer beware, that seems like we keep amending, is it going to be reversed?

Is it transparent enough?

So a bunch of lawyers, there's a work group that's going to be put together with the Bar Association, the Virginia Home Winners Association, and the Housing Commission to figure out what they want to do with buyer beware.

Things that might be interesting to you guys is PFAS monitoring.

There were three bills that made it through.

One, I mean, they're kind of limited in scope, but HB938 requires industrial users to self-report PFAS discharges to DEQ.

Self-reporting is, you know, I'm just going to do that hand motion.

But I guess it's a step forward.

We have to know.

What's going on with industrial users?

HP 1072 allows local governments to test sewage sludge for PFAS and then HP 14433 prohibits land application of sewage sludge with high PFAS levels.

We don't want manure and growing, you know, crops with sludge.

Data centers.

There were so many data center bills.

I'm only giving four that I'm aware of.

And data centers, that tax exemption has been eyed by other people.

And there was one for teacher salaries.

And it's just been the big question mark.

So I'll be really curious to see what happens on April 23.

But the two things that did pass were data centers have this really interesting issue where if you go out with a microphone,

and try to record sound it actually doesn't have a decibel type of feature it's a frequency issue and so the decibels it will be very low but you can still hear it because human ears hear different frequencies and so HB153 allows the sound profile for site assessment of data centers if you're living close to a data center it might be annoying having this like low frequency sound all the time

and then HB 507.

If there are emergency tier four generators that data centers have to have redundancies because of the way that their business model works, there is a permit now required that DEQ is going to be looking through to make sure that there is no air pollution or what the air pollution is.

They're going to start monitoring that for the permit.

Reggie, which is the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

We're going back into it.

Technically, it's through the Caboose Bill that funds the government until July 1st.

We will be effective July 1st, and as far as I'm aware, there is a plan to participate in the September auction so that then there is going to be new funding.

We will no longer need to depend on general funding for the Community Flood Preparedness Program or the Housing Innovations and Energy Efficiency Grant funds.

And so those will be rebuilding since we've been using one-time appropriations for the last, I want to say, since 2020 through 2024.

Budget tracking, we'll find out.

That's the big answer.

We will find out on April 23rd.

Will we continue the tax exemption or will we not?

The Senate wants to discontinue and use that tax to help pay for state programs.

House wants to continue because there's economic development.

Based on the last time I was following it, which was, I want to say two weeks ago, things may have changed.

Executive orders are also interesting and I've noticed that a bunch of agencies are now using these orders and the two big ones that the environment community cares about and I imagine you guys would is E01 and E03 which is the statewide affordability directive.

This is for agencies trying to figure out how they can lower everyday costs for

Virginians, and then how to streamline housing regulations.

And I've noticed everyone talking about that at the most recent Environment Virginia symposium that happened at the end of March.

And next steps, we're gonna have the governor can veto or amend on April 13th.

Let me just go back and just pull it.

Then we'll have a veto session.

So the General Assembly takes these amendments and can either accept it or reject it.

And if they reject a veto, it then goes back to the governor.

But before then, we have a special session to figure out that budget bill.

And then May 25th is the deadline for the governor to sign.

It's a 30-day period plus the holiday.

That's why it's not necessarily May 22nd.

And that's when the governor can either veto the General Assembly's response or can sign forward.

And then everything becomes, unless there's another enactment clause, generally on July 1st.

Cool, we blew through that.

Thank you for listening.

Thank you, Ian.

Who's got a question for Ian?

Before I start on my list, I'll go last.

Not I, but taking notes.

And Ian, there were several slides that you had that we did not.

So if you would send your updated deck to Izzy, then she can circulate it for all of us because that would be great.

The last six or seven maybe.

But while I will ask a couple just to generate some discussion, I think the gauges I was interested tangentially in your

Gabe Deere, water gauges business and all the concentric circles and all that stuff.

Because was anybody caring about the fact that the data for precipitation in the countryside of Virginia just is awful?

I mean, the gauge that we run under is 100 miles away and stupid.

And we don't get recognition for the severe drought we've had for six months until last week.

The Atlas 14 and Atlas 15 are separate from creating new USGS or NWS, either rainfall gauges or streamflow gauges.

They are connected, but

Okay.

It's to address the intensity increase.

The storms are more frequent and horrible.

Okay.

For decades ago, it's consistent.

So if you're planning to build a bridge,

Absolutely.

Now, that part I understood just fine.

It's just I get wired up in the statistics stuff.

So thank you for that explanation.

Jumping on to Virginia Indian tribes, does the General Assembly have to act in order to get them into the table conversations at the Chesapeake Bay Act?

Was that anywhere discussed in the bills that you watched?

Because I know they're being systematically still excluded from the whole program.

There was even more tribal affairs bills that were in the General Assembly.

I wasn't the lead on it.

I was just following it because I recognized it was a trend that was happening.

Okay, thank you.

I wrote that down.

I love what you said about the data center sound metrics because we have had various industrial operations.

The one in my district was a low hum that took a year and a half to be found.

It was a mismatch in the new equipment versus old equipment at a lumberyard.

People were going completely stark bonkers because they could not sleep for weeks and weeks and weeks.

and it's really challenging.

So in addition to that, I know friends in Northern Virginia are completely ruined by the fact that Loudoun has allowed these things to be put right up to the sidewalk, right next to a neighborhood and really don't care what the impacts are.

They're so interested in the money.

Fully agree.

And there was a great presentation at last year's American Planning Association, Virginia chapter.

I think Prince William County, as well as Loudoun County were there, potentially.

Okay.

I'll look that up.

Thank you very much.

Other questions?

On the fund to resolve non-structural fund issues for citizens to get some money, actually, is that

The locality has to adopt this.

What's required of each locality?

We don't have coastal flooding issues, but we do.

Nelson County has the record hurricane in the state, so it's not without.

It is now, like, localities as of 2021 now have the ability to adopt an ordinance to create a stormwater management fund.

And then in 2023, that was expanded not just to be erosion and stormwater issues, but also flood issues for larger, you know, condominium projects that, you know, shared property, community space.

So they would have to adopt that and then create a budget within that locality.

The City, which is like the additional funding those counties in the City have to support the Virginia Conservation Assistance Program.

They are not.

They are not.

Yes, but the City of Charlottesville and Albemarle have ACAP and CCAP where they're offering additional funds to match VCAP.

So it's like a

local program.

But yeah, I know VCAP is funded.

VCAP was the number one asked

budget requests.

So early, right before crossover, every single delegate and Senator can go up to the Appropriations Committee and ask for three items.

And I sat through the entire four-hour meeting of everyone running through that.

And DCAP was, I think, 11 times on the House side and either five or six times on the Senate side, which I found amazing.

The House had 2 million.

Sorry.

It had all of its needs met in 2023 and 2024.

and then because it was still growing, more people got interested and then we needed more.

Yeah, that's great.

It saves a lot of people's structures as well and backyard damage.

This year we've had three non-river but cloudburst floods that have resulted in death in the last three years.

And they were three constituents of mine, unfortunately.

But none of these things are really helping us because we're all still totally unprepared.

Seven inches of rain falls an upper Jarmon's Gap where there happens to be in a ravine, just like what happened in Nelson County, and turns a little 18 inch wide stream into a 50 acre wide raging river that drowns a child.

So I just only share that because it's sort of a very personal insight into why we need so much better planning and data and understanding that we can't just look away anymore.

And I'm not sure that the legislators really get it, that the people are dying and they're up there fruit throwing around talking about statistics.

And I want something real that we can say, we're not going to put houses in these places anymore.

We're not going to do what Houston did and put all the poor people living in the bottom land where they all get ground.

or flooded out in the big hurricane.

But I don't foresee much optimism on that even for this session.

So they're much more busy deciding that they know much better than the local government about everything.

So that'll be how that all turns out.

Thank you.

All right.

Well, this is wonderful.

I'm glad you were down there.

I know that all of you all, while Virginia and all of you working together to

Cover all the bases.

It's like whack-a-mole.

Yes.

Yes.

Thank you so much, Ian.

That again, part of the Dylan rule.

Well, or some new people who actually do their homework.

We will now jump back to the beginning since we now have a full cohort of people and

You don't have to do the electronic meeting notice because nobody has participated virtually.

But for attendance, Ann Mallek, Bea LaPisto-Kirtley, Lonnie Murray, Michael Payne, Jen Fleisher, Jason Halbert,

Well, thank you all for being here.

Now, did anybody have anything to add to the agenda?

before we jump in and adopt it so we can charge through the rest of our meeting here.

No other items.

All right, we need a motion then to approve the agenda.

All in favor?

Any opposed?

I would have to.

All right, we are set.

Abstain.

Okay, very good, thank you.

And then for meeting minutes from August 19th, are there any additions or corrections?

Do we have a motion to adopt the minutes of August 19th?

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

All in favor?

Aye.

Any in favor?

Aye.

And to absentives.

Okay.

Excellent.

Thank you all very much.

We'll get you next time that you're here today.

That's great.

All right.

And am I correct?

We have no public people here at the moment.

Correct.

And no comments were received.

Jump over that.

No comments.

All right.

Yes.

So I'm just going to pull up the bylaws here.

See what page I'm on.

Okay.

So the commission shall elect the chair, vice chair, and treasurer eligibility to be considered for an officer position is restricted to existing commission members and preferably should come from members representing different jurisdictions.

The officers of the commission shall consist of a chair, vice chair, and treasurer chosen from among serving commissioners.

Their term shall extend from the first meeting of a calendar year

until the first meeting of the next calendar year.

Officers may be reelected for one additional consecutive full term, but upon a unanimous vote may serve for additional terms.

Where practicable, no more than one officer shall represent a locality or organization and should include at least two persons elected by the voters of their respective city or county.

Do we have any volunteers?

Basically, while I take up chair-ship?

Lonnie's not here and he's already signed all the bank cards, so unless somebody's dying to be treasurer and wants to troop around to all the banks and sign all those damn cards again, then I would support leaving him in that role.

That would be good.

Second.

Yeah.

Second.

All in favor?

Any opposed?

All right.

Well, thank you all very much.

That's great.

And just the executive committee.

So one other section about that.

We shall establish an executive committee.

It consists of five members, the chair, vice chair, and treasurer, and two additional non-officer members.

They shall be elected annually on the first meeting of the calendar year and serve until the first meeting of the next.

When possible, the executive committee should be representative of all localities that make up the RRBC.

So we have Albemarle, Fluvanna.

Yeah, they're most often virtual.

They still are public meetings.

Yeah.

I think we just have to switch every other to being virtual in person.

Yeah.

She is trying to send my retired.

Okay, might be able to do it more.

I'm not, if she's retired, I don't have time.

There are the dates for meeting for the days.

All right, okay, all right.

I may try to pass that on to her when I speak to her.

Okay.

If I may get your name, I will pass the information.

Or just a little extra support with RRBC planning along the way.

For the conference planning and things like that.

The Compton.

OK. Well, you guys fight it out.

Right now.

Yeah, I should be able to do that.

All right.

Well, then we will nominate Jen Fleisher then to be representing the city on the executive committee.

And we already have them, city, Fluvanna, county, and

Where are we missing?

Greene.

I guess, but we'll wait.

And we'll wait to see, and hopefully Murray can join up, and that'll be good.

Wonderful.

Thank you, thank you.

And do we need a vote on the executive committee, or are we just doing that by acclamation?

Yeah, they shall be elected.

OK.

So I move, I think I'm allowed to do that, that our executive committee representatives include Jen Fleisher, Lonnie Murray, and Reese Peck.

and hopefully Marie Durrer.

Fall in toll to show up.

Okay, wait.

So one more time, Reese, Jen, Marie and Lonnie.

And then chair and vibe.

Right, right, right.

Because everybody's at the point.

Sorry, I'm just zoned out.

Okay.

And we have a second for our executive committee slate.

We have a second, all in favor.

Any opposed?

All right.

We are now represented by an executive committee.

Excellent.

Perfect.

Are we square on that?

Yes.

Ready to charge on to potential Tenaska something.

Yes.

So I'll just go ahead and read.

Oh, it sounds like broadlining, actually.

I'm not sure.

Sounds a lot like Davidian's, $95 billion for Biscuit Run, but only if they got their compressor station at Buckingham.

Geez, I thought Rick Randolph was going to kill me.

He was so.

Well, he just, it was just... You undercut me very much.

You're not the king.

So this is actually not something that we'll need to vote on quite yet, but just as an item to provide you with the latest information that we have regarding restrictive covenants approved as part of the Tenasca project recently in Fluvanna County.

If approved by the RRBC, this would provide the RRBC with $5,000 annually in perpetuity upon the commercial operation date of such project.

Our donations acceptance procedure included in the packet states individual donations above the specified $1,000 amount shall be brought before the commission to vote on acceptance and direction for the donations use.

Since it will likely be a few years until the project is completed, we will not vote on this today, but can consider potential uses for a funding source such as this and discuss it overall.

As long as they're in business.

As long as it's running.

So at one point you said $5,000 and then later it said $1,000.

I was mentioning our donations acceptance procedure to the RRBC.

So if it's above $1,000, the commission has to accept it.

Yes.

Got it.

For the last 15 years or so, it's remained at $10,500 a year.

But I think it was just two years ago, our executive director kind of came back to the boards and said,

It makes more sense for us to slightly increase this over the years just with inflation and things.

And there was active grant writing.

Demonstration projects in each of the counties and stuff.

So question, is the $12,000, first meeting, is the $12,000 a year, that's our budget?

Yes.

And that comes from all the different, four different counties?

Based on population.

Based on population.

There's a formula.

Well, there's a formula.

Everything has a formula.

For background purposes, kind of negotiating this with NASA, there were essentially three

Environmental Requests that we've worked on in the past with regard to the passage of the power plant.

One was maintaining the 2024 EPA standards

And so that didn't pass.

And then there was this, which was

But there's no specifics, and there's no requirements, and there's no need to maximize the vascularity of those lines.

Flat out, here's $5,000 a year, that's probably going to last 30, 40 years, so you'd still get this $150,000, $200,000 grant.

So my question is, that would give us 5,000 additional dollars.

Could we use that for the benefit of the RBBC?

I mean, that would greatly enhance, okay.

Then, you know, myself, and I know, I don't mind taking their money.

It's gonna help us, and I don't mind taking their money, because otherwise, yeah, that doesn't bother me.

I know it's maybe a philosophical thing, or I know how Ann feels, but you know what?

I might take the money too.

Oh, okay, well.

He takes the money and beat him over the head with it.

How about that?

See, that's what I was thinking of, but I didn't mean to say that.

He knows why he doesn't have to think about it.

He's a little old hound, old hound.

Right.

He's a really, really old hound.

Again, it was really about the technology behind it.

I don't think we're voting today.

So it wasn't necessarily a future class per se, that was the other joke, because obviously probably you've already seen it using those things, but it was just a way to show that we strive for those things.

So the way that the actual measurements as they look at the fields,

They don't have to cease operations.

OK.

But you'd have a civil action against F. Well, I do know that.

Jason Halbert, Jason Halbert, Jason Halbert, Jason Halbert, Jason Halbert, Jason Halbert, Jason Halbert, Jason Halbert,

Any sense of whether, under the new administration, DEQ will actually step up and start to do its, live up to its authority?

So I don't know.

Okay.

The administration will do this.

The current, this is an aspect of my understanding is in the process of applying for the state limits.

They have not had an issue.

So this,

you know, something this year is premature.

It's good to know that this was negotiated.

I was volunteering with RCA earlier last month and ran into one of the previous commissioners for the RRBC, Angus Murdoch.

And he's

I should note that there was one other condition that was put in place and that was that the water would not be taken from previously the first tenacity of the land.

We used Pennington Creek as a discharge line for the water that was too much water line and so it was constructed in 12th and 3.

And was the infrastructure around the outfall properly done at the river since when it was moved from the creek to the river?

Did they do a decent job of that?

Okay.

Okay.

Yeah.

Because the creek was getting totally destroyed.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The volume was too high.

Yeah, so there's no agreement on the temperature of the typical pooling process.

If they have all the water coming in, it sits in there, and it bonds for a period of time.

Then it flows under a pipe, something like a graph, or how it would've been fast.

This case probably felt a hour or miles.

It was not around the same height.

Just try the pooling temperature at a peak

We're a river stewardship body and accepting payments from a project that's discharging into the Urbana, it probably risks our credibility at some level and our independence.

And if, particularly if that $5,000 for a $2 billion product could be a negligible contribution, but if that's not tethered to anything enforceable or meaningful, I'd rather do a study with another $5,000 grant and

So, I don't know.

Sure.

And that, you're right, $200,000 over a long time.

It's going to be five years from now before we fulfill that.

I think the point of it is to get it, like, what do you do now about having this down?

I don't know what the senior county thinks about that.

That's just a fallen business coming into the town.

No, I've been agreed that, as Jason said, the perfect process.

There's a lot that has to happen.

and we will wait, I will be glad to take a wait and see process on all of that.

So go ahead there.

Yeah.

We were talking about today anyway, this was sort of the introduction of the idea.

Yes.

If I understood correctly.

Just a question.

I know this would be many in this way.

This is not a leading question, but if we were to do private

Fundraising or attempting to increase how much fundraising we do, would this hinder our ability to do that?

Would there be no effect?

I just throw that out there as a practical question in terms of like ultimate net impact.

Of course, maybe, you know, I know we haven't done that kind of fundraising over the years, so we won't do it anyway.

I mean, I work in the front, obviously, and so I don't see it in hindrance.

I mean, Jen's comments are, you know, to be heated, as Autonomy has been, and as Reese said, this is a ways off, so I think we should consider, if it gets to the point of accepting what it's used for, and make sure that it's unrestricted, you know, by our hands.

I mean, you know,

I love the thinking, and I've thought about this for decades, that money has no parents.

Honestly, I mean, it made me think of, you know, LEAP is obviously part of the Dominion, and Dominion's a person sending a letter for criticizing them once.

So I'm not a fan, but LEAP uses that to very good effect.

Yeah, that is interesting.

And it's another one where they're required by the General Assembly to support the weatherization as part of their rate approvals, et cetera, et cetera.

That's a good point.

As part of the negotiations for bigger projects like the Planet Coast Pipeline, which is ultimately defeating the Mount Valley Pipeline, there were

agreed donations in tens of millions of dollars.

Now those are bigger projects.

They're in the same ballpark.

So I don't know what the finality is of this, but we think it could be valentines.

Yeah, that's good.

My understanding when I asked for this was that you were essentially without a budget for the arms, it was $5,000.

I thought I was done.

But I think if I had came back here and said you'd consider it kind of a thousand, I don't know if you'd call it too great.

OK. All right.

Well, thank you, everyone.

That's all good input.

OK.

Oh, OK.

Thanks, Tony.

Thanks for the brought in.

So just a brief update here, but as some of you might remember from our past RRBC meetings, our current work plan that covered the period of 2023 to 2027,

is coming to a close here shortly.

And the strategic plan work plan guides the specific activities of the RRBC's designated funds for the successful administration of the program by the TJPDC.

And this is our current work plan.

And what it really includes is two main sections, program administration,

So sharing information through our Facebook page, as well as promoting the conference.

Our staff work to staff these board meetings and prepare materials and upkeep the website.

Operational and fiscal management, preparing the budget and work program, and maintaining our finances in accordance with all the local laws.

And then

hosting the annual conference and all of the activities associated with that and promoting coordination, local assistance and planning is the second section.

So as requested, we're able to provide technical assistance to local partners.

through the RRBC as well as through the grant that I manage for the PDC, the Watershed Implementation Plan.

So we are able to support the development of local comprehensive plan chapters, environmental chapters specifically, and can reference schools through the basin, provide historical context, and then other forms of technical support.

And

Preparing grant applications as identified.

One thing that we completed as part of this workprint, which was more of a focused project, was modernizing the RRBC website, which has kind of gone through a big overhaul just because it hadn't been updated for probably a decade or two before that.

So that was completed.

And then we also worked with an intern to develop a historical story map and timeline of the Rivanna River as it relates to water quality and environmental justice.

It was completed this year.

And so I just wanted to show you that.

And we're not reinventing the wheel here.

I guess that's all from there.

I'll just stop sharing here for a second.

So we're planning to somewhat simplify the plan just to focus more of our efforts on planning for the annual conference and keeping a lot of the baseline program administration and community outreach and coordination within that.

And I just

Last year, there was not very much engagement with the survey, but I did send out a survey to you all to help inform that.

But I just wanted to point out here that for our next meeting, we will have a draft plan presented for your in-depth review, and then you'll adopt it in the next plan.

So if you have any suggestions for things that you think would be great to include in the plan, you can

tell me now or follow up with email or maybe seeing the draft plan will help inspire that.

But just wanted to give you an update there.

When is the annual conference?

We don't have it determined yet.

So now we can do the third Friday, but we'll see how that goes.

Oh, okay.

So what have we did?

What's the focus last year?

Why am I drawing it?

Last year was data centers and water supply beginning.

That's right.

OK. Yeah.

Oh, that's that Julie Voldhaus.

Yes, that was.

Yeah.

It was.

The center did a really great job.

You recommended that to me, actually.

Last year.

I'll be a broken record for sure, but I mean PFAS is not going away.

It's only getting more and more and more and more visible every time you turn around.

So whether we pick up, get some presenters, delegate Lopez and there were a bunch of people who were very involved with the the bills this year that I, whom I interacted with and

They didn't all get all the way, but there may be something more to be talked about that will help everybody legislatively for next session.

But I don't know any more about, that's just an undeveloped idea right now, but all the localities are going to be paying, water users are going to be paying through the nose when people finally come to the understanding that yes, Rivanna Water and Sewer is doing a fabulous job to clean

what comes in in the raw water to make it safe for drinking.

But it's like, nobody wants to look under the covers to see that there's all this stuff that's come in and they are passive receivers.

So it's not their fault.

But all the makeup, all the disintegrating polyester, all the everywhere you turn in our life now.

is generating the microplastics and the PFAS and sooner or later, the hammer is going to be dropped on our solid waste treatment facilities.

And then the cost of that will be borne by rate payers.

So I hope that there will be state and federal legislation sometime in two and a half more years that we'll be able to turn that shit more toward regulation.

The EPA, Local Government Advisory Committee, we were months from opening, getting the framework going for treatment of solid waste for removal.

So that got axed two Januarys ago, but hopefully it'll be back.

EPA folks promised they had locked all the data away safely so that when the tide turns, they can just open those drawers and take it all out again and we'll take right off.

We'll see, we'll see.

Some of you may come up with other topics that are especially important locally and especially ways to bring new constituents to the meeting and learn about things.

We've tried different ways to involve more broad across the community involvement with locations and with topics and formats and that kind of thing to try to widen.

We don't want to just be talking to the, preaching to the choir all the time.

Little PFAS, would that include, you mentioned microplastics, because I'm horrified.

I mean, there's plastics everywhere.

We have it in our bodies now.

We have it in everything we eat.

Let's just eat something, I guess, fresh.

Hopefully.

I mean, I think people are scared or afraid of, I almost wanted to call it what's in your water, but then I'm afraid everyone would stop drinking water and buy sodas.

Someone did mention to me, and I'm totally drawing a blank on the title, there was some either book released or a project going on about getting toxic-free.

Do you have to head out?

Yeah, I need to leave.

The problem data that I've passed out is the annual report for the Soil Art Association of Thomas Jefferson.

Yeah.

I would direct your attention to pages 16, 17, and 18.

We've talked a bit about the DCAP, CCAP, and ACAP programs.

What you will see on those three pages are the DCAP, CCAP,

2025, what we actually accomplished.

Keep in mind that those are urban programs.

And so, the district covers a lot of rural territories, not in the Wabana watershed.

These programs are urban, they're in the Charlottesville, Nashville.

Most of the money that gets spent there is within the Wabana watershed.

And so when we're thinking about what the legislatures do with that money, those are dollars, and it's not often the time to leave between the Trump's and the Obama's, those are dollars that get spent directly on water protection, both clarity and quality, from one month in the watershed, please.

And hopefully, next time around, we're working on a GIS layer that will tell us exactly how much we've spent,

Thank you so much, Mr. Mills.

Are there more copies of these at the office that we could pick up to share with

We need three more for City Council and four more for Board of Supervisors.

Okay.

It's usually local planners, some elected officials, some members of the public.

I would like, you know, to diversify it as much as possible.

We've had successful food trucks.

Food trucks have been great.

We actually had to change our county rules to be able to

The first time we had the food truck, and I got permission to have the food truck, but then staff looked, it was sort of under the radar as far as for the conference people, and staff looked at it and went, food truck!

And so it was a step each other, which was great.

I don't think we made enough money.

Oh, that was the second person.

We'll figure it out.

So only a few minutes left.

I guess the only update I have is that I think within the next month, the long expected, delayed, and anticipated update to the reparion buffer standards is coming to the planning commission and then the board.

So we're trying to close the loopholes that are so big you could drive a school bus for them to be able to get control of

Okay, so that updates.

I know Lonnie's been working on it.

We've all been slogging away on this for years, but he will get it first at the planning commission.

So with that, my timing may be good.

Hopefully it won't be another quarter before it gets here.

Yes.

On the Charlottesville side, related to the river because it goes around the river, the Loop Deville Festival date is chosen for September 27th.

So explore the river in the 20 mile loop that's around the city.

And that is in concert with other river activists and advocates.

And a lot of river education comes along with that.

A lot of vendors have joined us for a Sunday walk and we have a half loop

This year that was started last year seemed to be 10 miles, is that the whole point?

And you said the September 27th?

Oh, good.

Okay.

So maybe that I'll have to rub it around and see it that Friday right before.

Yeah, okay, that's good to know.

Also, Riverfest is coming up May 9th.

Yes.

Yes.

Yeah, we'll add to that.

In the city, updating our floodplain regulations is in Paper Development Services Work Plan.

Who knows when and if that actually happens, but it's in the work plan, which is at least progress.

And

Within a Parks and Rec master plan, one of the

kind of visionary elements as the Rivanna River Access Plan and implementing that, which I think hopefully could connect to kind of a longer term vision of how the city is going to treat it as maybe something like a small scale River Arts District.

How do you build all things like the Rivanna Boots Festival?

And we're going to get a report within the next month on the Rivanna River Access Plan that's being developed, I think, by a little bit UVA.

It's exciting.

And what would that be, Michael?

The Rivanna River.

Sorry.

What would that be, the location?

Well, the original thing.

Oh, there's access?

I think it's looking from Riverview north to the Costco, basically.

What I'm thinking of is, you know, we have that new free bridge promenade, which is, you know, you would both own Darden Town Park and it's right there.

I think it's definitely looking at kind of corridor-wide, not just one area.

Right.

Boat access.

Yeah, like an economic development, crossover, stewardship kind of thing.

Aren't you a part of the biophilic cities initiative now?

Yeah.

Right.

I know our SWAC committee, the Solid Waste Committee is saying, why is this come before the board?

The application was filled that week, months ago.

So I'm supposed to find out where.

where it fell off the table or something like that because that'll be good.

That's fine.

Yeah, I think down at the River Company, you know, those gatherings and things there have been great.

And for people who don't live right in the neighborhood, it's always tricky to try and figure out, well, you park it past or walk through or whatever.

So having all those, I mean, this was Sunday afternoon, so apparently they're welcomed.

Nobody got scolded.

There was nobody there at the business.

But that it's popular and tricky to get.

people there safely.

I'm just redoing the boat access and the stairs and the canoe slide and things like that.

We've done that at Dartontail a couple of years ago.

I think it's still in pretty good shape.

A number of years ago, some young entrepreneurs came to meet with, and it was when Dan Mahon was still at Parks County.

at Dartow, and they wanted to do some rock gardening, move some boulders around between the boat access and, or upstream around the corner toward LCEC, where the Beto was parked, and the, to make some turbulence for kayaks.

And I thought this was spectacular fun, and this has been done lots of other places, and of course,

The Parks people all went screaming in the other direction because of traffic and all this other stuff.

And I thought, this is, we can manage this.

But anyway, it's one of those things that's still lurking and maybe somebody will come up with some good attempt and maybe there'll be a different point of view now.

Who knows?

Okay.