As I write this message; I look forward to our annual Beaufort County Council retreat this month. The retreat is an opportunity for self examination and adjustment to address the interests and issues that most affect our citizens. As you may know, I am especially concerned about the health and vitality of our waterways. I have recently encouraged the development of a joint regional County/Municipal Office of Water Quality. My thoughts are that we would begin by creating a partnership with the Town of Bluffton. By combining our resources, the town and the county can expand and strengthen its combined focus to measure and regulate the environmental infuences upon the May River. Eventually, this ofce will expand its mission for all waterways, marshes, streams and tributaries of Beaufort County.
The environment, with its magnificent waterways and marshes, should be sacrosanct. The challenge for our government leaders is to raise the level of our vigilance. We simply cannot allow the continued degradation of our rivers and marshes. The lesson from the May River is that there are inherent dangers from increased run-of volumes.
Excessive fresh water can be both a pollutant and a disturbance to the delicate salinity balance necessary for our marine life. And, I am afraid that once this natural salinity balance is altered, we may not be able to restore the water’s natural purity.
The question we must answer as community leaders is: What can we do? The answer is to enforce our new legislative achievements for excellence in our environmental practices.
One example is the creation of the Stormwater Management Implementation Committee, a partnership between the county and municipalities. The committee reviews and recommends jointly funded actions for coordinated countywide stormwater monitoring, education and outreach programming. It promotes retro-fitting improvements to existing developments and sets forth the best management practices for proposed developments. It is a combined source of governmental resources uniformly applying new initiatives and achievements in the feld.
One major addition that the committee is to implement is the introduction of nitrogen as a pollutant to the County’s Best Management Practices Manual. This toxin will now be regulated and hopefully, its negative infuences will be reduced as a harmful contaminant in our waterways. This amendment to the BMP manual makes Beaufort County a leader in environmental waterway protections.
Other legislative changes for Beaufort County include regulations to control stormwater volume to protect critical tidal resources and to establish a joint bacteria-monitoring program with the Town of Bluffton. Its mission is to identify sources of high fecal coliform. This new program will address this issue in the May River. Hopefully, this initiative will discover and correct pollutant sources and fx them. Our community can get involved and learn from this process. We post our data and process on a dedicated web page, www.bcgov.net/Stormwater/MayRiver.php.
