Water boards launch a new “waiver permit” process aimed at reducing water quality impacts from activities on federal lands in California

      Imagine an important plan that could create new regulations that would potentially improve water quality across nearly 30 million acres of federal lands in California.

       Such a plan is in the works, and it could affect more than 46,000 square miles of conifer forest, desert, oak woodland, chaparral, riparian areas, and other diverse habitats.

       Two Regional Water Boards have jointly begun a process to develop a Waiver Permit that would require actions to reduce “non-point source” pollution that degrades water quality on lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. The permit will affect 16 national forests and 13 BLM administrative units. The development of the permit will take at least 3 years, and the challenges are formidable. Livestock interests, the timber industry, off-road-vehicle groups, and others are likely to resist new regulations that might infringe on their activities.

      Because of the importance of this plan, CSERC met with water board staff to share photos and descriptions of the water quality impacts that we observe each year while doing our watchdog monitoring. We have also provided detailed water sampling data to the water boards -- both to inform this permit process and for a separate process to identify polluted streams.

       At a public meeting that was held by the regional water boards, CSERC staff raised strong concern about “Best Management Practices” (BMPs) that are intended to be the basis for the plan. BMPs are weakly worded measures that are supposed to prevent water contamination caused by logging, mining, livestock grazing, recreation, and roads on federal lands. But as CSERC pointed out, most BMPs are so nebulous and non-measurable, there is no way to know if activities on USFS or BLM lands actually contaminate water or not. Almost no sampling is done to detect pollution.

       CSERC will be committing extensive staff time and resources to engage in this important regulatory planning process. Our hope is to end up with effective, measurable permit requirements that truly protect water quality.