Schwarzenegger's Water Board Says It Can't Protect Water Quality in California Delta, Central Valley!

Illustrative of the Board's retreat from water quality protection is the backsliding in the more than 200 municipal waste discharge permits, issued pursuant to the federal Clean Water Act. First, federal funds were returned to USEPA so that the majority of permit writing could be out-sourced to Tetra Tech (the Regional Board Executive Director's former employer). Tetra Tech's permit writers are located throughout the nation, principally in Virginia and Colorado. These permit writers lack professional engineering registration in California, have not sworn to uphold California laws and are unfamiliar with local conditions. Outsourcing has significantly increased the backlog of unrenewed permits.

Second, the Board stopped insisting upon a complete Reports of Waste Discharge (characterization of the waste stream) before processing a permit.

Third, fundamental regulatory requirements have been ignored and permit conditions have been weakened in an effort to eliminate costly opposition by dischargers.

Fourth, permittees operating in violation of their permits have been provided with extensions of compliance schedules in order to eliminate mandatory penalties and avoid having to initiate enforcement actions. Over the last year, CSPA has appealed some 30 permits to the State Water Board for violations of the most fundamental regulatory requirements of the Clean Water Act.

Without adequate staff, the Regional Board has turned to largely voluntary and predictably less effective alternatives to traditional regulation. For example, the Central Valley Region has over 45% of the state's harvested timber. With only 9 individuals to cover thousands of timber harvest projects, the Board had no alternative but to turn to conditional waivers of waste discharge requirements and voluntary compliance to address the adverse impacts of logging.

Similarly, waivers were adopted to address waste discharges from irrigated lands. Under the agricultural waiver, coalitions of farmers oversee implementation of waiver conditions. These legally fictitious coalitions have no enforcement authority and cannot require an individual discharger to take any specific action. The Regional Board doesn't know who is actually discharging, where the discharges are occurring, the constituents being discharged, the volume and concentration of discharged pollutants, whether management measures have been implemented or whether implemented measures are effective. Regulation of the largest source of pollution to Central Valley waterways has effectively been delegated to the voluntary goodwill of groups of dischargers. And the result is that virtually every agricultural dominated waterway is seriously polluted.

When the State Legislature eliminated funding of core regulatory functions from the General Fund, they expressly provided the State Water Board with the authority to assess fees to support necessary regulatory activities. However, the Schwarzenegger administration has refused to establish a fee schedule sufficient to comply with the law and protect water quality. Consequently, the water boards are increasingly relying upon inadequate cookie-cutter permits that ignore regulatory requirements and self-regulatory "stakeholder" driven programs that have never previously been successful in protecting water quality.

The Governor proclaims himself to globally environmentally concerned but we're seeing a major retreat by his Administration's day-to-day implementation of environmental laws and regulations. Rhetoric is meaningless without effective compliance.

The California Sportfishing Protection Alliance is a public benefit conservation and research organization established in 1983 for the purpose of conserving, restoring, and enhancing the state's water quality and fishery resources and their aquatic ecosystems and associated riparian habitats. CSPA has actively promoted the protection of water quality and fisheries throughout California before state and federal agencies, the State Legislature and Congress and regularly participates in administrative and judicial proceedings on behalf of its members to protect, enhance, and restore California's water quality and fisheries.