Governments can aid the Chesapeake Bay and the economy by spending more to help farmers pollute less, a University of Virginia study says.
The federal and state governments need to spend $603 million to reduce farm pollution to target levels. The money would be used for such work as fencing cattle out of streams and planting streamside buffers that block polluted runoff. Every dollar spent would generate $1.56 in economic activity, including payments to workers to do the planting and building, the study says.
Farmers would match a portion of the government spending with $201 million, bringing the total expenditure to $804 million.
The work would generate 11,751 jobs that last at least a year, according to the study.
U.Va.'s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service prepared the study. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation, an environmental group, commissioned the study for $800 and planned to release it today.
Doing the cleanup work in five years would require a public expenditure of more than $120 million a year.
The amount of public spending on Virginia's portion of the bay was unclear yesterday, but it amounts to tens of millions of dollars a year, said Terance J. Rephann, a Weldon Cooper economist who wrote the study.
"This is going to take a substantially bigger commitment from the federal government and the state" to meet the cleanup goal, Rephann said.
A new federal cleanup plan for the bay should be ready late this year, so the cleanup cost estimates could change.
Cleaning up farms reduces more pollution for less cost than, say, expensive upgrades at sewage treatment plants, Rephann said. "The obvious appeal is you get more bang for your buck."
By spending to help clean up farms, "not only will we clean up streams, rivers and the Chesapeake Bay, but we will generate new, increased economic activity and new employment for Virginians," said Ann F. Jennings, the bay foundation's Virginia director.
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