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Special Edition - November 18, 1997AMSA Recommendations for Clean Water Action Plan Finalized
As reflected in Regulatory Alert 97-24, and FaxAlerts on November 6 and 14, AMSA's staff and members have rapidly mobilized in response to Vice President Gore's Clean Water Initiatives. Today AMSA's Clean Water Task Force finalized the Association's recommendations for the Action Plan. They are provided on the pages which follow for your information and use.
As reported in last Friday's FaxAlert, AMSA has made arrangements for representation at upcoming field hearings in the following locations; members in the vicinity of the hearings are encouraged to attend.
Atlanta, Georgia
Nov. 20
2:00 - 5:00 pm
Atlanta Federal Center, Conference Center, Room D, 61 Forsythe St., SW.
Columbia, Missouri
Nov. 21
1:00 - 4:00 pm
Holiday Inn Executive Center, Interstate 70 and Stadium Drive.
Sacramento, California
Nov. 25
2:30 - 6:00 pm
State Employee Development Dept. Auditorium, 722 Capitol Mall.
Members unable to attend the field hearings are reminded that public comment is being accepted via the joint EPA/USDA web site - http://www.epa.gov/cleanwater/.
Thank you for your thoughtful attention to this matter.
AMSA Recommendations for
Federal Agency "Action Plan" Items Identified in
the Vice President's October 18, 1997
Clean Water Initiatives
November 17, 1997
The Association of Metropolitan Sewerage Agencies (AMSA) represents the interests of more than 175 of the country's publicly-owned wastewater treatment agencies, which collectively serve the majority of the sewered population in the United States, and treat and reclaim more than 18 billion gallons of wastewater each day. Over the past 27 years, AMSA has maintained a close working relationship with both Congress and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the development of environmental legislation and policymaking. In addition to their primary responsibility for treating the Nation's domestic and industrial wastewater, AMSA member agencies play a major role in their local communities, often leading watershed management efforts, promoting industrial/household pollution prevention and water conservation, and developing urban stormwater management programs.
AMSA strongly supports the goals of the Vice President's October 18, 1997 memorandum, including the development of an interagency Action Plan to address public health protection, increase emphasis on nonpoint source runoff controls, and promote community-based watershed management. While AMSA agrees with the Vice President that the first twenty-five years of Clean Water Act (CWA) implementation have been a huge success, we also recognize that much more needs to be done, and that significant challenges remain to reach the ultimate goal of the Act to protect our Nation's waters. AMSA has been a long-time advocate of watershed management concepts, and has previously pressed for action which would implement a nationwide framework for watershed management. AMSA also believes that increased emphasis and accountability is needed for sources of nonpoint runoff, which is a critical component to ensuring that watershed-based solutions will be developed and implemented to solve the remaining problems in our Nation's waters.
The Vice President's initiatives offer the opportunity to make some progress within current legislative authorities and budgetary constraints; however, legislative amendments to the Clean Water Act will be essential to ensure that water quality nationwide will be protected and improved. A reauthorized Clean Water Act must ensure accountability for nonpoint sources of pollution and emphasize watershed-based solutions to our Nation's remaining water quality problems. A reauthorized Act must also provide states with the authority and funding to effectively address nonpoint sources of pollution.
AMSA urges that the Action Plan, and its resulting commitments, include an Administration effort to do everything within its power to ensure Congressional passage of a reauthorized Clean Water Act, encompassing the objectives of the initiatives, by the year 2000.
AMSA has reviewed the Action Plan elements detailed in the Vice President's memorandum and has the following specific recommendations for federal agency consideration.
Ensuring Community-Based Watershed Management
The CWA's historic focus on technologybased standards, endofpipe treatment, aggressive compliance schedules and significant federal funding has achieved enormous reductions in the pollutants discharged into our nation's waters. While this approach has produced substantial progress and important benefits with respect to point sources, the recent emphasis on water qualitybased standards requires a new approach. Sitespecific conditions, a new focus on nonpoint sources, rising capital costs and limited funding make it imperative that we employ costeffective, comprehensive strategies that address priority problems on a watershedspecific basis. AMSA recognizes EPA's current efforts to promote watershed-based strategies and encourages EPA to continue these efforts. AMSA recommends several activities for the Action Plan which could progress watershed management efforts further including:
- EPA, USDA, and other federal agencies, in cooperation with state and local communities should jointly assess the adequacy of current ambient water quality data to define the sources of pollution and accurately describe: 1) impacts on ambient water quality; 2) effects on beneficial uses; and 3) variability. Recognizing that current data may not be adequate to meet the above criteria, a plan which sets targets for collecting adequate data should be developed. Also, under Action Item #9, it is recommended that "enhancing partnerships" include partnerships with other federal agencies to ensure integration of water quality data collection, monitoring efforts, and public data access, on a watershed basis.
- The Action Plan should include a monitoring program for nonpoint source control implementation efforts. The monitoring program would include development of a suite of "performance measures," a baseline monitoring effort and followup monitoring to measure progress of "voluntary" programs. Monitoring should be performed by federal or state agencies, or be such that federal agencies and states can adequately assess progress.
- Under Action Item #10, USDA will give preference for technical and financial assistance to those states with "mechanisms in place to ensure effective cooperation." EPA should similarly, promote state implementation mechanisms by providing additional funding (e.g., 10-20% "bonus" or "add-on" funding to Performance Partnership Grants) for those states with enforceable nonpoint programs in-place which can meet a certain minimum set of criteria.
Additional programmatic activities to promote watershed concepts which EPA can undertake include:
- EPA should incorporate the "proportionate-share responsibility" concept into all of its water programs and only allocate loading reductions to point sources based upon proportionate share contribution.
- EPA should identify outdated regulatory approaches and rules, and recommend steps to improve them (e.g., integration of wet weather programs). Examples of such approaches are separately targeted pollution source programs instead of comprehensive, basin-wide approaches. For instance, current emphasis on municipal stormwater requirements is directed towards permitting and monitoring rather than implementing programs to meet specific stormwater management and water quality improvementobjectives. Stormwater management programs must be geared to overall wet weather impacts experienced on a watershed basis, and management objectives need to be specifically tailored to address the unique characteristics of the watershed. This includes flexibility in balancing limited funding to address issues associated with CSOs, SSOs, and stormwater. This flexibility to develop watershedbased approaches to the multiple sources is very important, so that funding can be targeted to address areas that will improve water quality on a watershed basis.
- EPA should reevaluate current law for applicability in watershed planning. The CWA contains programs that are no longer fully utilized that could be revived and be given priority. For instance, the Section 303(e) planning processes may provide a means for reviewing water quality standards and implementation plans in a watershed context.
- EPA should finalize its "Draft Framework for Watershed-Based Trading."
Preventing Polluted Runoff
AMSA believes that all wet weather flows should be managed on a watershed basis, enabling resources to be targeted at priority wet weather problems. AMSA further believes that these efforts should include all significant contributors to water quality impairment in the assessment and solution of problems. Clearly, one of the major impediments to this process is the lack of enforceable minimum requirements for nonpoint sources of runoff. AMSA recommends that EPA continue to "push the envelope" of its authorities on nonpoint source pollution, and explore all available mechanisms to control nonpoint sources including:
- EPA should continue efforts to revise and adequately implement animal feedlot regulations to establish controls for any size of facility which affects water quality (Action Item #3). Animal waste is a significant source of pollution that has been ignored by federal and state regulatory agencies. Frequently waste from feeding operations receives less than primary treatment and is disposed of through irrigation on cropland. In eastern North Carolina alone, the hog population (east of I95) generates waste equivalent to a population of 70 to 100 million people. Treatment and disposal of animal waste needs to be aggressively addressed through CWA and other regulatory programs to protect surface and ground waters from pollution.
- EPA should provide additional funding for a followup study to the Environmental Law Institute report on "Enforceable State Mechanisms for the Control of Nonpoint Source Water Pollution." The followup study should focus on the level of current state implementation of these mechanisms. In addition, EPA should actively disseminate the current study to illustrate the many alternatives which would facilitate the regulatory community, and the regulated dischargers, identifying approaches that may improve the success of their own programs (e.g., post on EPA Website).
In addition to increasing emphasis on nonpoint source control requirements, AMSA believes that EPA and USDA need to provide appropriate levels of technical assistance to the nonpoint source community through the National Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) to ensure that water quality concerns are highlighted.
It is also important to note that in order to restore the quality of waters impacted by runoff, restoration activities must address more than the pollution present in runoff. The vast majority of "polluted runoff" impacts are not from the pollution present in runoff but are attributable to a degradation of aquatic habitat integrity. This degradation can be attributable to changes in watershed hydrology as a result of land use changes or other factors, and/or may be the result of destruction of riparian corridors adjacent to our waters. Protection and restoration of waters from these types of impacts goes beyond the traditional pollution controls for both point and nonpoint sources of pollution and is best addressed through locally-led communitybased watershed management activities. Incentives or other activities necessary to protect aquatic habitat integrity from the impacts of flow must be addressed in cooperation with local land-use authorities, water quality planners, and government officials.
Protecting Public Health
Treating sewage to ensure the protection of public health and the environment is the main goal of all AMSA member agencies. For a majority of Americans, the services provided by wastewater treatment agencies remain out of sight and out of mind, and provide a valuable service to keeping our waters clean. Accurate assessment of our Nation's waters is an essential part of this public service which is provided by the federal, state, and local governments. These assessments must be developed based upon good science and data, and use criteria which are deserving of public concerns. In its development of water quality criteria, AMSA has the following recommendations for EPA:
- EPA should ensure that a criteria system for nitrogen and phosphorus (Action Item #2) be geographically specific and consider a range of factors which contribute to nutrient enrichment-related water quality problems. Nutrient enrichment is a highly site-specific problem. Nutrient impacts can be affected by a variety of site specific factors such as temperature, salinity, suspended sediment, filtering capacity of living resources (e.g., oysters), and other factors. EPA must ensure that any nutrient criteria system accounts for these factors, as well as the ambient levels of nutrients in waters. EPA should also consider that when a waterbody's natural state has been irreparably altered (due to urbanization, unalterable changes in living resources, etc.), designated uses and related criteria need to be modified as well.
- EPA should provide an appropriate level of effort to expedite and finalize revisions to existing chemical aquatic life water quality criteria to improve the handling of duration, frequency, and variance factors. Criteria which express allowable pollutant levels using these variables and which are based on the most advanced kinetic-based modeling techniques, are more representative of the variability found in natural settings, and more accurately reflect ecological impacts to aquatic life from intermittent discharges.
In addition to improving the criteria setting and assessment process, education is also a major element in ensuring protection of public health. EPA should continue to improve partnering outside of federal government on projects which provide for public education, better science (i.e., risk assessment).
In closing, we reiterate our hope that these Initiatives will offer more opportunities to make progress towards solving our Nation's remaining water quality problems. AMSA appreciates the opportunity to comment and remains ready to assist as the development of the Action Plan progresses.