Federal judge rejects permit for King William reservoir

The long-planned King William County reservoir just sprung a leak.

A federal judge struck down the Army Corps of Engineers' permit for the lake, saying in effect it would wreak too much destruction on the environment.

The decision is a victory for reservoir opponents, who said the $250 million project would destroy more than 430 acres of wetlands, threaten rare American shad and flood Indian archaeological sites.

"It should be the death knell" for the project, said Deborah Murray, a senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, a Charlottesville-based group that represents most of the plaintiffs. "Whether it will be or not ultimately depends on Newport News."

She called on the city, which has pursued the lake for two decades, to drop its plans.

Newport News, the Corps or the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency could appeal the ruling. Spokesmen at all three places had no comment yesterday.

The 33-page ruling by Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. of the U.S. District Court in Washington was issued late Tuesday and publicized yesterday.

Kennedy called the Corps' finding that the reservoir would not cause significant environmental harm "arbitrary and capricious."

The Corps should have looked harder at less-damaging alternatives, Kennedy said. And the EPA erred in not vetoing the permit, he said.

The ruling means the Corps will have to reconsider its decision to issue the permit.

The Corps approved the permit in 2005. It was challenged the next year by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, the Alliance to Save the Mattaponi, the Virginia chapter of the Sierra Club and the Mattaponi Indian tribe.

The opponents said there were better alternatives, including conserving water and creating smaller reservoirs.

"I think the judge saw things we knew all along," said Carl "Lone Eagle" Custalow, chief of the Mattaponi tribe.

Newport News would create the reservoir on Cohoke Mill Creek, about 45 miles east of Richmond, to provide water to a growing Peninsula region.

The reservoir would produce up to 24 million gallons a day. It would draw water from the Mattaponi River about three miles upstream from the Mattaponi reservation.

Carl Tobias, a University of Richmond law professor, said the ruling doesn't kill the project but makes Newport News' job of gaining approval for it much more difficult.

Courts are supposed to defer to regulatory agencies to some extent, and that makes the opponents' victory that much more impressive, Tobias said. "I think this is a pretty tough ruling."

Newport News began planning for the reservoir in the mid-1980s and formally proposed it in 1993.

The project appeared to be foundering in 1999, when the Norfolk office of the Corps said the reservoir would be costly to wetlands and the Indians. But then-Gov. Jim Gilmore appealed that decision, and the Corps' headquarters in New York ordered the review to continue.

Contact Rex Springston at (804) 649-6453 or .