By Dennis Rochford
At Delaware ports and others across the country, vessels take on and discharge ballast water to maintain stability and balance as cargo is loaded and offloaded. The safety of human lives, vessel and cargo, and our environment depend on maintaining this balance.
As President of the Maritime Exchange for the Delaware River and Bay representing 300 maritime businesses and organizations in the tristate area, I am reminded of other kinds of balancing required to keep maritime commerce moving. Maintaining a strong economy nationally and in the Delaware Valley region requires efficient navigation to move vital goods on our waterways. And maintaining the health of our ecosystem and quality of life in our region requires protecting the marine environment on which navigation and the communities served by it depend.
At the Maritime Exchange, I see every day the need for, and the challenges that go along with, maintaining this balance across three states that have shared interests and, at times, disparate priorities.
This summer, the U.S. Senate is considering the Vessel Incidental Discharge Act, legislation that strikes just the balance we need between safe and efficient maritime commerce and protection of our marine environment. Delaware Senators Tom Carper and Chris Coons have important roles to play in getting this critical legislation to the Senate floor and enacted into law.
Today, government oversight of ballast water and other vessel discharges is literally all over the map, with the U.S. Coast Guard, Environmental Protection Agency, and twenty-five states all involved in regulating the same discharges in confusing, overlapping and sometimes contradictory ways. This regulatory labyrinth produces major inefficiencies for vessels sailing across state lines, which is the norm for vessels in the Delaware River and Bay, spanning Delaware, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania waters.
This regulatory hodgepodge discourages companies from investing in environmentally beneficial ballast water treatment technology, because a vessel owner cannot be certain that its seven-figure investment will be acceptable in every state the vessel transits. That’s bad for business and bad for the environment. VIDA tackles this problem by creating a single, sensible framework that plays to the strengths of EPA, the Coast Guard, and the states, replacing a duplicative and contradictory structure with a more practical system in which each has a defined role to play. VIDA also protects the marine environment by adopting the most protective standards achievable with current technology and providing a process to raise standards over time as technology evolves.
Sen. Coons is a co-sponsor of VIDA in the Senate, and Sen. Carper, Ranking Member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, is leading an effort to craft a bipartisan compromise for Senate consideration in the coming weeks. We thank them for their leadership and urge them to keep working to get VIDA enacted into law as soon as possible. VIDA is balanced, bipartisan legislation that would relieve significant burdens on the maritime economy of the Delaware River and Bay area while applying the highest standards of environmental protection to Delaware’s waterways.
Dennis Rochford is the president of the Maritime Exchange for the Delaware River and Bay
