[Editor's Note: This piece was updated on Oct. 19 to include a new response from People for Puget Sound.]
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will be stepping up its enforcement of the Clean Water Act (CWA)—a 37-year-old statute that the agency calls the “cornerstone of surface water quality protection in the U.S”—with a revamped Clean Water Act Enforcement Plan. The plan seeks to improve the protection of water quality, raise the bar in federal and state performance, and enhance public transparency.
“Updating our efforts under the Clean Water Act will promote innovative solutions for 21st century water challenges, build stronger ties between EPA, state, and local actions, and provide the transparency the public rightfully expects,” said EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson in a press release.
The plan outlines how the agency will address water pollution challenges that include pollution caused by concentrated animal feeding operations, sewer overflows, contaminated water from industrial facilities, construction sites and runoff from urban streets.
The executive summary of the plan says:
“Over the last 30 years, water enforcement focused mostly on pollution from the biggest individual sources, such as factories and sewage treatment programs. Now we face different challenges. The regulated universe has expanded from the roughly 100,000 traditional point sources to nearly 1 million far more dispersed sources.”
Mike Sato, director of communications at People for Puget Sound, a citizen's group dedicated to protecting and restoring the health of the region's land and water, said it's a good thing the EPA is pursuing runoff pollution, which is a major problem in the state. "It’s going to take some serious resources invested in state and federal agencies’ overall data management programs and a serious commitment to ensure that both state-issued and EPA-issued discharge permits are strictly written, up to date and enforced," he wrote in an email.
The organization would put stormwater and toxic chemical pollution at the top of the local priorities list, he said.
The goals of the plan include:
- Develop more comprehensive approaches to ensure targeted enforcement.
- Work with states to ensure greater consistency through the country with respect to compliance and water quality. Ensure that states are issuing protective permits and taking enforcement to achieve compliance and remove economic incentives to violate the law.
- Use information technology to collect, analyze and use information in new, more efficient ways and make that information available to the public.
The plan was developed in response to data showing that the nation’s water quality is unacceptably low in many parts of the country. Currently, “state compliance and enforcement vigor is uneven,” according to the executive summary of the action plan.
Since the Clean Water Act was passed, the action plan notes that several things have changed, creating “significant limitations that affect EPA’s ability to identify serious problems quickly and take prompt action to correct them.” These limitations include two Supreme Court decisions; according to the plan, the court's 2001 decision on Solid Waste Agcy. of Northern Cook Cty. v. United States Army Corps of Engineers and the 2006 decision on Rapanos v. United States have “added layers of confusion regarding which water bodies are covered by the CWA in many parts of the country.”
The EPA's website for the plan has links to a 2008 Washington “State Review Framework Report” that assesses state performance in the enforcement and compliance monitoring programs and a recommendation status report.
To learn more about the plan, go to the EPA’s website (you can view the text of the action plan here).
Related Northwest Hub coverage: EPA: King County and Seattle Must Reduce Sewer Overflows
