Because we lack reliable indicators of the effectiveness of municipal stormwater programs, permit renewals are essentially social policy, not water quality policy.
In other words, permit writers can invent or select new requirements at will; the requirements may arise from convention, or consensus, or even individual beliefs, and can’t be challenged on the basis of ineffectiveness. “Maximum Extent Practicable” is typically justified by references to other permits, not by evidence that the mandated measures actually work.
By this mechanism, permit writers effectively create policies on which neighborhoods get trash abatement, what types of housing are built, and where, and how limited municipal budgets get spent.
The social policies in the NPDES permits inevitably reflect the biases inherent to the status and milieu in which the permit writers operate.
People trust in public policy because it is adopted through a participatory democratic process.
However, stormwater permit renewals make social policy under a veneer of science–which allows a bureaucratic elite to dictate social policy while claiming a scientific basis that doesn’t exist.
Which is how, in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021, key decisions about municipal policies and programs on homelessness, street paving, industrial development, housing, and a host of other economic and quality-of-life factors are being made by five white men who have limited work experience outside the insular bureaucracy in which they have spent their careers.
And the language of the MRP 3.0 Tentative Order reflects that.
