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Dull Point or Nonpoint?
Jim Pachl says he's "thoroughly disgusted" with the coastal nonpoint pollution control plans the State Water Board turned in to the feds this fall in fulfillment of requirements in a 1990 Coastal Zone Management Act amendment, and he's not the only one.
The Sierra Club's Pachl says he and other disgruntled folk devoted mega- time and energy to the subject of how to better control coastal agricultural, urban, mine and marina runoff into coastal waters as members of 10 multi- interest technical advisory committees (TACs) to the state. After months of meetings, the committees produced 150 highly specific recommendations and hundreds of pages of consensus language on the subject. But what the Board produced in turn is a slim, gray, 12-page booklet labeled Initiatives in Nonpoint Source Management that critics are calling vague and unclear and that some TAC members say in no way reflects the painstakingly negotiated recommendations of their committees.
"They threw 95% of our work in the trash can," says Pachl.
"The initiatives document is unspecific, unmeasurable and unenforceable," says coastal watchdog Warner Chabot of the Center for Marine Conservation.
There is one thing in the report, however, that everyone's happy about - a commitment to a watershed approach emphasizing the cooperative, voluntary development of pollution control measures and watershed management plans by stakeholders and state regulators.
"We can't go out and hang a permit on every developer, farmer and landowner," says the State Board's John Norton. "Aside from being politically unpopular, it'd be a bureaucratic nightmare."
Instead, the report focuses on five common themes drawn from the TAC reports: a preference for voluntary cooperation over prescriptive measures, public education to encourage individuals and landowners to take more responsibility, management on a watershed scale where local stewardship and specific problem-responsive measures can be devised through comprehensive watershed protection plans, more technical assistance to local groups and individuals, and better resource management agency coordination.
"We're happy that it recognizes the value of education," says Jim Haussener, whose Marinas and Recreational Boating TAC also saw three of its dozens of boater-specific recommendations make it into the initiatives report. These were diver certification for potentially polluting hull cleaning practices, development of an indicator test more specific to the pathogens introduced by human (boaters) versus animal fecal matter and shared responsibility (with local health departments) for inspections of dockside boat sewage pumpout facilities.
Earle Cummings' TAC was not so lucky. "It's embarrassing. They did a gloss on our work, then substituted some of the governor's policy language on wetlands," says Cummings, who works for the State Department of Water Resources. "Their lack of active leadership makes it harder for those of us doing flood control and restoration work to press local jurisdictions into action."
Norton says the document reflects the Board's shortage of staff and dollars to expand state programs and its caution with adopting a slew of recommended actions before they can be proven in the field. To this end, the report suggests that pilot watersheds be used to test the feasibility of some of the TACs most innovative recommendations, including the development of a model stormwater program for small cities, the use of self-hazard and risk assessment worksheets by farmers applying potentially polluting nutrients to croplands and the creation of watershed-wide riparian and wetland development and protection plans.
Norton says more meat and potatoes may come out of parallel work on a new statewide plan for protecting water quality in inland bays and estuaries and from his agency's regional boards.
"They're not punting this into a vacuum," says the S.F. Regional Board's Tom Mumley, who cites his agency's ongoing work to com-plete watershed management plans in Napa and Sonoma. Mumley says he plans to use the new TAC reports as "lists of already screened tools." But not all of the state's nine regional boards are likely to take the same initiative.
In the meantime, critics hope the U.S. EPA and NOAA, which are now reviewing the state's nonpoint documents, will put some conditions on their approval, such as triggers and timetables to make the watershed approach more enforceable (comments should be directed to the EPA within the next few months). Even the harshest critics don't want the feds to turn the state's submittal down outright and risk losing California's share of federal coastal nonpoint source pollution control grants.
Contact: John Norton, State Board (916)657-0522 or Sam Ziegler, U.S. EPA (415)744-1990
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