TO:
Honorable Mayor Powell and Members of the City Council
THROUGH:
David N. Carmany, City Manager
FROM:
Jim Arndt, Public Works Director
Clay Curtin, Management Analyst
SUBJECT: Title
Status Update on the Pending Adoption of a New Municipal Stormwater Permit
RECEIVE AND FILE
Body
____________________________________________________________________
RECOMMENDATION:
Staff recommends that the City Council receive and file this report.
FISCAL IMPLICATIONS:
None.
BACKGROUND:
Municipalities in Los Angeles County must, as required under the federal Clean Water Act, obtain a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System Permit (NPDES Permit) for urban runoff from the municipality’s drainage system. The NPDES permit is issued by the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board and identifies conditions and requirements that the municipalities must comply with in order to protect the area’s water resources (including beaches, lakes and streams).
DISCUSSION:
On June 6, 2012, the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board posted for public comment the first complete draft of the next municipal stormwater permit for LA County and the incorporated cities therein (except Long Beach which has a separate stormwater permit). The Regional Board will consider the permit for adoption at a two-day hearing scheduled for October 4-5, 2012, at the offices of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, located in Los Angeles, CA.
This draft municipal stormwater permit represents a paradigm shift in the approach to permitting of municipal stormwater. The draft permit is over 500 pages long incorporating provisions for a host of new water body/pollutant specific limits, restructuring of the permit centered on a watershed management approach, extensive new requirements for water quality monitoring and storm drain discharge monitoring, and a myriad of new provisions throughout the permit including significant new administrative requirements. By contrast, the current municipal stormwater permit is 120 pages long.
The forty-five (45) day review period for providing written comments did not provide staff sufficient time to fully review and digest all the interrelated parts of this permit, to consider the cost implications, and provide complete and comprehensive comments. We did use the limited time as best we could, working with our sister cities in the South Santa Monica Bay and consultants as well as the LA Permit Group to submit a substantial list of comments by the deadline.
Key areas of concern with respect to the draft municipal stormwater permit are centered on the need to:
1. Prioritize Most Cost Effective Solutions
The permit proposes an extensive list of substantial new requirements without regard for the need to prioritize water quality objectives and municipal resources, without consideration for individuality and variability of land use and geology among the cities, and without credible scientific evidence that the additional requirements will actually achieve a set of prioritized water quality objectives.
2. Adopt “Good Faith” Language
The Receiving Water Limitations language in the draft permit is unacceptable as written because permittees can be deemed in violation of the permit and become vulnerable to costly citizen suits even if they are fully implementing the permit provisions and acting in good faith to correct exceedances of water quality standards. This was a serious defect in the last permit and is an issue being considered at the statewide level as the State Water Resources Control Board considers comments on Receiving Water Limitations language in the context of the proposed draft Caltrans Stormwater Permit and the Phase II Municipal Stormwater Permit (see attached article in the July issue of Western City Magazine).
3. Rely on Available & Effective Science
The draft stormwater permit requires adherence to strict numeric water quality limits for compliance with final water quality objectives without acknowledging the scientific uncertainty and limitations in the data and models used to adopt the objectives in the first place, and does not address the difficulties inherent in developing cost-effective measures for achieving the limits.
4. Integrate and Focus on Relevant Monitoring Requirements
The draft permit proposes extensive new monitoring provisions that go far beyond what we had expected to be the focus of this next permit-monitoring for pollutants causing known impairments of beneficial uses of specific water bodies, e.g., the Santa Monica Bay Bacteria impairment for recreational use. We fully anticipated that the monitoring requirements in the next permit would allow us to continue that focus by amending our monitoring programs to incorporate the new pollutant limits, which have been promulgated for Santa Monica Bay for debris/trash and DDT/PCBs, as we believed those were the high priority focus of the Regional Board. Instead, the 72-page monitoring section of the draft permit introduces a myriad of new monitoring requirements completely outside the monitoring requirements in the adopted water body/pollutant-specific limits (a.k.a., TMDLs).
5. Provide Time for Adequate Review
To date Regional Board staff have rebuffed our requests submitted in concert with a majority of the other cities for additional time to review and comment and for the issuance of another complete, second draft municipal stormwater permit with an additional review period to allow time resolve the many significant issues and to correct the many inconsistencies and errors within the draft.
City staff through its consultant has been participating in the LA Permit Group that has been working at the Regional Board staff level to head off some of the most troublesome issues and to recommend reasonable and workable elements leading up to the issuance of this draft permit. However there are limitations in what can be done with staff influence alone, and so it may be important to involve elected officials in the proceedings at the permit hearing.
Attachments:
1. LA Permit Group Fact Sheet
2. Article: "Draft Stormwater Permit Draws Cities Together in New Coalition"