To the members of the State Control Board (Chair Heather Wood, Vice-Chair Lou Ann Jessee-Wallace, Timothy Hayes, James Lofton, Nissa Dean and Robert Wayland),
The people are very concerned that the waterways of Southwest Virginia, SWVA, are being polluted. The clean water habitat required for the Roanoke Logperch, an endangered species involved in a decades-long recovery, is being destroyed by Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) construction and its failing sediment controls.
Concerned citizens from SWVA traveled many hours to attend your September meeting to update you with new, relevant information about the harm MVP continued to wreak on our environment after the Department of Environmental Quality, DEQ, issued a stop work instruction, Citizens had to endure listening to the DEQ provide the board with misinformation. When one of the citizens tried to correct the misinformation, Chair Wood said the citizens would have an opportunity later in the meeting to make the correction. Valley Pipeline and the Attorney General's consent decree isn't even on it. This is untenable after many people and organizations submitted comments to the SWCB explicitly stating why the consent decree was inadequate and calling on the SWCB to do more to protect our waterways from further harm by the MVP.
Please add the MVP and the consent decree to your December 13, 2019 agenda and allow the citizen monitors to present their evidence to the SWCB for your respectful consideration. The SWCB has the ability and responsibility to protect Virginia's water. Virginia § 62.1-44.15:31 statute says "the Department may issue a stop work instruction, without advance notice or hearing, requiring that all or part of such land-disturbing activities on the part of the site that caused the substantial adverse impacts to water quality or are likely to cause imminent and substantial adverse impacts to water quality be stopped until corrective measures specified in the stop work instruction have been completed and approved by the Department."
