Last Wednesday at StormCon in Anaheim, a USEPA official provided an overview of the stormwater rule the agency plans to unveil in September. Jeremy Bauer, an environmental scientist with USEPA’s Office of Wastewater Management, Water Permits Division, gave a presentation outlining the rule and fielded audience questions afterward.
Elements of the New Stormwater Rule
Among the rule’s key provisions:
• It will quantify performance standards for new development and redeveloped sites, based on a specific storm (the 95th percentile storm, for example). Recognizing that there may be site constraints on redevelopment site, and also that redevelopment has environmental benefits compared to developing greenfield sites, the rule will hold redevelopment sites to a lesser standard (a lower percentile storm). Credits may be available for incorporating smart growth principles.
• It will require MS4s to develop plans to address discharge from existing sites—in other words, retrofits. This requirement applies to municipal, not private, property.
• It will extend the protection of the MS4 program, possibly to include areas not now included such as arterial roads connecting urbanized areas.
Once the rule is presented to Congress in September, there will be a public comment period; EPA will respond to comments and can make modifications to the rule. The final rule is expected to be issued on November 19, 2012.
The presentation did not address the status of EPA’s effluent limitation guidelines for construction sites (on August 12, the agency withdrew the proposed rule that would have revised the numeric effluent limit, saying it needed to collect more data before reaching a final decision), but we will have updates on those guidelines here when they’re available.
More information on the proposed stormwater rule is available on EPA’s site at http://www.epa.gov/npdes/stormwater/rulemaking.