Addison County watershed committee weighs scoring changes, votes not to require applicants’ attendance

The Addison County Watershed Implementation Committee (WIC) discussed proposed changes to its project-scoring system for phosphorus-reduction grants and voted to keep applicant attendance optional at project-review meetings.

The committee’s staff presenter, Mike (staff member), told members the current scoring allocates 70% of points to phosphorus reduction, 10% to likelihood of success and 20% to co-benefits. Mike said, “our current project scoring is 70% of the score goes to phosphorus reduction, 10% goes to likelihood of success, and 20% goes to co benefits.” He proposed tightening the phosphorus-cost tiers, adding a hard cap, and increasing the weight for likelihood of success so reviewers can better favor projects that are feasible to implement.

Why it matters: WIC distributes state funding that is explicitly intended to reduce phosphorus loads. The scoring system determines which projects receive funds and how limited dollars are allocated across types of projects and stages (preliminary design, final design, implementation).

Discussion and proposals

Committee members raised three main topics: (1) whether to set a dollar-per-kilogram cap to limit funding for projects with high estimated cost per kilogram of phosphorus removed, (2) whether to shift some weight from the DEC-calculated phosphorus metric into likelihood-of-success scoring, and (3) whether to simplify and reweight co-benefit categories so applicants can more easily target the points they can earn.

Mike described existing practice:…