The Altoona Water Authority has informally agreed to allow Bryn Mawr College to receive carbon credits for trees that students helped plant on authority watershed land as an environmental project.

The seedlings on 140 acres of the former Cooney property above polluted Kittanning Run have no carbon credit value now, but will have such value in 50 years, when the agreement expires, according to authority Land Manager Katie Semelsberger.

Workers for a contractor planted the vast majority of the 188,000 trees during the spring in a project involving the authority, the Pennsylvania Environmental Council and the college, and the arrangement should have granted carbon credits to the college at the time, to help it achieve a long-term goal of becoming carbon-neutral, according to Semelsberger.

“It kind of went backwards,” Semelsberger said of the matter at a recent board meeting. “We’re now trying to clean up shop.”

The authority rejected an initial proposal from the college to rectify the situation, but the current proposal is “palatable,” said authority General Manager Mark Perry.

“We see this as the right thing,” Perry said.

Correcting the matter will help make the authority a more attractive partner in the future for organizations looking to make environmental investments on authority land, according to Semelsberger.

The board can formally approve the agreement in December or January.

“Everybody’s learning,” Semelsberger said.

Carbon agreements prohibit selling trees for timber, as long as the agreements last, but the ground involved in the agreement with Bryn Mawr is a long way from timber-ready — just as it’s a long way from having carbon credit value, according to Perry.

The authority has lots of other acres of mature forest for which it can potentially sell carbon credits, Perry said.

Planting the trees on the reclaimed stripmine land will help stabilize the ground, potentially contributing to an eventual cleanup of Kittanning Run, which is fouled with acid mine drainage, including heavy metals, forcing the authority to bypass it around the reservoirs below Horseshoe Curve.

Such a cleanup — like one that has been done in recent decades for nearby Glen White Run — would allow for admitting Kittanning Run water to that three-reservoir system, providing additional insurance against drought.

The project involved planting the approximately foot-tall seedlings of various species in rocky ground that had been “ripped” to a depth of about four feet by heavy machinery, a process that allowed biosolids from the authority’s sewer plants to penetrate the ground, providing nutrients for the seedlings.

While the council paid for the seedlings, the ripping and the planting, the authority invested about $60,000 to haul the Class B biosolids to the site and to spread it on the ground, Perry said.

Some of the trees came from the Keystone 10 Million Trees Partnership, with coordination from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, according to a foundation blog post published in the PA Environmental Digest.

Bryn Mawr contributed to the cost of planting, according to an article on a college web page.

Those kinds of contributions help PEC continue to do its environmental work, Perry said.

The Bureau of Abandoned Mines was also involved in the local project, according to Semelsberger.

The hope is to plant as many as 400,000 trees in the area over four or five years, according to the Bryn Mawr article.

A dozen or so crew members did most of the planting.

They used picks to make holes, reaching back over their shoulders to grab the seedlings from backpacks, placing the seedlings into the holes, then tramping on the soil next to their stems to set them, before moving on, Semelsberger said.

They worked quickly, she said, though it still took about three weeks to get the trees planted.

The planting will help prevent runoff, although most of the area where the workers placed the trees was relatively flat, according to Semelsberger, as cited in the CBF blog post.

About 75% of the seedlings are expected to survive, she said.

The species included various kinds of spruce, pine, oak, cherry, locust, aspen, crabapple, poplar, dogwood, basswood, sycamore, serviceberry, arrowwood, dogwood, alder, nannyberry, winterberry, elderberry and hazelnut.

The project is designed to provide the Bryn Mawr students with “hands-on experience with ecological restoration and to instill in them a sense of planetary stewardship with an eye toward sustainability,” according to an associate professor quoted in the college article.

Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 814-949-7038.