Editor, Gazette-Journal:

The Gloucester Board of Supervisors decided last fall at its Oct. 4, 2016 meeting to reduce the Resource Management Area from full county protection to something less. They submitted a proposed ordinance to the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality. After requests for additional information and discussion with the county, Virginia’s DEQ recently sent a letter to advise the supervisors that the proposed ordinance would not be approved as written. The supervisors discussed this matter at its June 6, 2017 meeting, and decided to continue the discussion at the July 5 meeting to reduce the RMA.

The Chesapeake Bay Protection Act is a state law that helps protect the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries from nonpoint source pollution arising from land use practices. As mandated by the CBPA, Gloucester County established a Resource Protection Area 100 feet landward of waterways.  This is where the most stringent land use rules apply, and it is unaffected by the County’s proposal. 

However, the county’s CBPA ordinance also currently designates the rest of the county as its RMA, where development must meet certain performance standards of protection. The proposed ordinance would amend Gloucester’s current countywide RMA, substituting a smaller contiguous area along with numerous “pockets” located across the county.  

The supervisors think that adoption of a smaller RMA would be of economic benefit to the county. However, this benefit is unknown and would have to be weighed alongside the harm to the existing land use protections that protect our water, increase our property values and make our county attractive to industry, developers and tourism. Because of the lag period of ecological systems, our waters are only now beginning to see the benefit of decades of protection from the Chesapeake Bay Protection Act. We can’t afford to slack off in our efforts at this point. These proposed pockets in the RMA would make it necessary for developers to retain engineers for site-specific impact studies, creating additional expense and uncertainty which would then be passed along to consumers.

Please let your supervisor and at-large supervisor know that any change to the RMA would not be a real benefit to the majority of the county, and ask them to vote against a change.

Denise Mosca

Gloucester, Va.