Last week’s post argued that municipal stormwater NPDES permits are social policy, not water quality policy. Because there is no reliable way to demonstrate that control measures are effective or ineffective, permit writers can and do select measures based on convention, consensus, and individual belief.
Here are four examples where social values and beliefs play out in the Tentative Order (TO) for the San Francisco Bay Area Municipal Regional Stormwater Permit.
1. Disproportionate impacts. The most expensive and challenging new requirements disproportionately affect disadvantaged communities. Low-income areas struggle to accommodate the unsheltered homeless and to reduce trash. Their streets are older and require more reconstruction. Old industrial areas have higher amounts of PCBs in street grit. The 669-page TO seems targeted to burden the municipal governments serving these areas. Municipal representatives raised this concern throughout the 3-year process leading to the Tentative Order. The permit writers–five white men with limited work experience outside the insular bureaucracy in which they have spent their careers–never acknowledged it.
2. Climate Action and Smart Growth. The current permit allows high-density Transit Oriented Developments (TODs) to use compact and underground facilities to treat runoff. Promoting TODs is a key strategy in municipalities’ Climate Action Plans. During negotiations, permit writers said “the lowest impact development is no development at all” and rejected a key precept of Plan Bay Area–that redevelopment in core areas can effectively reduce sprawl at the periphery. The TO eliminates the TOD allowance.
3. Multi-Modal Transportation. In 2019, municipalities prepared Green Infrastructure Plans that leverage private redevelopment and federal funds to retrofit arterial streets with runoff-cleaning bioretention facilities. The idea was to incorporate runoff treatment as urban revitalization happens. Two years later, the permit writers would toss aside these Plans and mandate a minimum acreage of Green Infrastructure within five years. Municipalities will have to retrofit residential and low-use streets just to meet this bureaucratic requirement. The resulting funding crunch could compromise Complete Streets improvements in Priority Development Areas.
4. Trash and Public Participation. For years, municipal stormwater programs funded and assisted volunteer creek cleanups. The massive amounts of trash collected counted toward NPDES permit requirements. However, the permit privileges a strategy of leaving the trash on the street and using proprietary devices to catch it as it enters the pipes. Now the creek cleanup credit will end, eliminating the Public Works departments’ budget justification for assisting local volunteers in urban beautification efforts.
These are just four examples of the social values and beliefs reflected in the TO–values and beliefs at odds with the Bay Area’s progressive milieu.