Four months ago, this week, a host of elected officials showed up at a San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board hearing to appeal to Board members regarding the forthcoming reissuance of their Municipal Regional Stormwater Permit.
Water Board staff permit writers effectively create policies on which neighborhoods get trash abatement, what types of housing are built, and where and how municipal budgets get spent. The social policies in the permit inevitably reflect the biases inherent to the status and milieu in which the staff writers operate.
The mayors and councilmembers asked, most of all, that the Board members consider their local, real-world experience working for better water quality in our streams and the Bay/Delta. What’s effective and ineffective? Which permit requirements dovetail with the municipalities’ related efforts to combat climate change, reduce homelessness, clean up trash, pave streets, and improve air quality–and which new requirements would unnecessarily conflict with those efforts?
At the October hearing, Board members seemed to give the nod to considering this real-world experience in a forthcoming final draft of the permit.
But in the ensuing four months, their staff hasn’t set a meeting, or even inquired to clarify oral or written comments. Time has run out. Board staff has to issue the final draft within a few weeks to meet their already-long-delayed current deadline.
Real environmental progress depends on public participation, decision-making based on experience and evidence, and a fair and transparent process to continuously improve what we do and how we do it.
It’s up to Board members to require accountability to such a process. Otherwise key municipal programs and policies, intended to serve the Bay Area’s diverse public, are effectively directed by a handful of men with limited work experience outside the insular bureaucracy in which they have spent their careers.