The decision process that gave Lynchburg $25 million for sewer upgrades, or one-third of Virginia’s water-quality money from the federal stimulus, was laid out long before the money became available.
Preston Bryant, Virginia’s secretary of natural resources and a former Lynchburg legislator, said “the process was a pretty straightforward one” that followed a formula established years ago.
Lynchburg’s high sewer rates, plus the engineering work already done that qualified the combined sewer overflow as a “shovel-ready project,” were two key factors.
Kimball Payne, Lynchburg’s city manager, said, “It was gratifying that the work we have done over the years let us be in a position for this to pay off.”
Another key element was Lynchburg’s unemployment rate, which had doubled from 4 percent to about 8 percent in the past year.
Those factors catapulted Lynchburg high up the priority list when the state Department of Environmental Quality began deciding where the $76.9 million in water-quality funds could have the most benefit, Bryant said.
“The (federal) Environmental Protection Agency had expressed a great desire for Virginia to consider the award of these stimulus funds by using the very same process we always use” for improving treatment plants and collection systems, Bryant said.
“That said, yes, I was a cheerleader” for Lynchburg, said Bryant, who once described a boat trip on the Chesapeake Bay as a sort of epiphany that revealed the impact cities as far away as Lynchburg can have on the once-bountiful source of seafood.
In fact, $65 million of the stimulus money went to municipalities whose sewage plants are on the Chesapeake Bay or its tributaries, primarily the James and Potomac rivers.
Bryant credited the standard formula for assigning the funds to those localities.
The formula “is weighted toward those facilities in the Bay watershed,” Bryant said, because most of Virginia’s population lives in that territory.
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