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November 6, 1998
AMSA and Municipal Groups Meet on Urban Wet Weather LegislationAMSA and other municipal interests met November 4 to discuss the Association’s first draft of the "Urban Wet Weather Watershed Act of 1999," a targeted bill that is intended to amend the Clean Water Act (CWA) to allow for more "comprehensive, coordinated, and cost-effective management of urban wet weather flows on a watershed basis." AMSA developed the draft bill to address issues raised during its recent legislative strategy session, which highlighted the current problems municipalities experience nationwide in designing, financing, and implementing urban wet weather control programs that meet regulatory expectations. The draft bill contains seven major sections: urban watershed planning; wet weather water quality standards; total maximum daily loads; combined sewer overflows (CSOs); sanitary sewer overflows; municipal stormwater discharges; and, funding.
The meeting, convened at the request of AMSA, included representatives from the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies (AMWA), American Public Works Association (APWA), CSO Partnership, National League of Cities (NLC), National Association of Counties (NACo), National Association of Flood and Stormwater Management Agencies (NAFSMA), and Water Environment Federation (WEF). The group discussed the goals and each major section of the bill, and reached consensus on the overall intent of the legislation.
Language in the bill requires EPA to develop regulations that establish an optional unified permitting program to address the combined effects of all wet weather flows. Such a program would allow municipalities that must currently meet the requirements and deadlines of multiple wet weather programs to develop a unified plan specifying priorities and phasing of activities across different program areas (CSO, SSO, and stormwater). Once a unified plan has been completed, requirements to develop and implement short- and long-term management measures to meet the goals of the plan could be incorporated into a unified wet weather permit.
The bill contains language that codifies the 1994 CSO policy and encourages the states to review and appropriately revise water quality standards to accurately reflect the site-specific impacts of wet weather. A regulatory program for SSOs is established to provide clear, reasonable goals for the design, operation, and maintenance of collection systems, and would provide liability relief for unavoidable SSOs. The bill would also clarify municipal stormwater permitting requirements by encouraging the application of stormwater management measures and prohibiting the application of numeric effluent limitations in municipal stormwater permits.
The draft legislation also provides for a new grant program to supplement state revolving fund (SRF) loans and which will make grants to municipalities to fund planning, design, and construction of facilities or implementation of management measures to control wet weather discharges. Language amending CWA Section 303(d), the total maximum daily load program, directs EPA to develop wet weather criteria for selected test pollutants.
AMSA plans to incorporate comments from the meeting into a second draft which will be distributed to the membership for comment in the latter part of November. AMSA will then convene another meeting of municipal groups to finalize the legislation and work toward the goal of unanimous municipal support of the bill prior to the 106th Congress.
Urban Air Toxics Strategy Discussed
Municipal groups attending the November 4 meeting also discussed the inclusion of POTWs among the 34 types of area sources identified in EPA’s draft Integrated Urban Air Toxics Strategy issued in late September. Area sources of air toxics, which emit less than 10 tons/yr of any single hazardous air pollutant (HAP), and less than 25 tons/yr of a combination of HAPs, will be faced with new regulatory requirements for reducing air toxics by 2009. AMSA’s Air Quality Committee is currently reviewing the draft and plans to work closely with the Agency over the next several months before the strategy is finalized in June 1999. Comments on the draft are due to EPA by November 30.
Risk Management Guidance for Wastewater Treatment Plants, developed by EPA in close collaboration with AMSA, is now available online from EPA at http://www.epa.gov/swercepp. AMSA Regulatory Alert 98-21, en route to members today, provides additional information and an order form to members desiring a published copy of the guidance.