Do they buy trucks, computers or dungarees from you? Do they eat at your restaurant or insure property through your agency? Do they deposit money at your bank? Do they call on you for medical care, legal advice, a clogged drain?

One more question: Do you favor making Pennsylvania’s rivers and streams as clean as they can be? And, finally, do you pay state taxes?

These questions may seem unrelated, but they’re not.

I ask them to highlight a proposal that would allow Pennsylvanians to send some of their state tax payments directly to farmers they know in their communities who want to finance projects that will protect the environment.

The issue is farm runoff. While much has been done to stem the tide of nutrients, chemicals and soil that gets washed from fields and barnyards into streams after a hard rain, more needs to be done.

Farm runoff, along with other sources of pollution, severely muddies the water in 13,400 miles of Pennsylvania streams and rivers and contributes to the decline of the Chesapeake Bay.

Downstream woes

Most farmers want to do the right thing, says Matthew Ehrhart, an environmentalist with Chesapeake Bay Foundation. They don’t want their farms to pollute the water, but pollution control can be expensive, requiring expenditures that could bankrupt family farms.

While the government helps pay for improvements that reduce soil erosion and manure runoff, the amount of funding is far short of what’s needed. Ehrhart says the state spends $45 million a year to reduce the amount of pollution that flows to the bay. But to meet the commitment Pennsylvania has made to work for a significantly healthier bay, it would have to spend $215 million a year.

While more money is needed, funding has actually been declining, according to Don McNutt, county Conservation District administrator. “Overall, there is less out there than there used to be,” he told me.

What’s to be done? One idea is the newly proposed tax policy. A bill sponsored by state Sen. Noah Wenger proposes giving businesses and individuals tax credits for investing in environmental improvements on farms. The proposal is known as REAP, for Resource Enhancement and Protection Act of Pennsylvania.

If enacted, farmers could get a dollar-for-dollar tax credit — up to $150,000 — for making approved pollution-control improvements.

But the real promise of the proposal comes through making the tax credits transferable to nonfarmers who help finance a project on a farm, such as stream-bank fencing or manure-retention facilities.

Budget implications

The bill proposes $450 million in tax credits over five years, dwarfing current spending. “It would be the single-biggest nutrient-reduction measure in the history of Bay cleanup efforts,” Ehrhart said.

Tax credits aren’t revenue neutral. Whatever money the credits direct to environmental improvements on farms would be money that wouldn’t get sent to Harrisburg for other state programs. “It’s a newer concept, and people will have to look at it very carefully,” Wenger said.

But shouldn’t water quality be a priority?

Ehrhart, citing a federal estimate, said every dollar spent on preventing water pollution saves treatment plants $27.

“If we are serious about addressing water-quality issues,” Wenger said, “then we have to look at innovative things.”

Because half of the fresh water entering the Chesapeake flows from the Susquehanna River, Pennsylvania in 2000 joined with other Bay states in committing to remove the Bay from the federal “dirty waters” list by 2010. Six years into the effort, the Bay is only marginally cleaner. If real progress is to be made, Pennsylvania must do more. Approving the tax-credit plan will show Pennsylvania means business.