State to issue new stormwater rules today
Outside the snow is melting, sending at first rivulets and then torrents of meltwater flowing across Seattle's parking lots and streets and lawns, carrying transmission fluid and oil and pesticides and the rest of a pollution stew that is the most pervasive pollution threat to Puget Sound.
Today, in what the state Department of Ecology calls a historic step, the agency will issue new rules -- years after they were legally required -- designed to take steps toward controlling this pollution-laced concoction.
"We are here today to announce one of the most important steps that this agency has taken in many years to deal with a water quality problem that has been around for a long time -- but that hasn't been regulated or managed very well," Ecology Director Jay Manning said Tuesday in a news briefing. The new rules are embodied in water-quality permits to be issued today.
But even a state document admits that the new rules include "sometime insufficient measures" to control stormwater. Federal officials also have said the new rules aren't enough to save endangered salmon.
Citing scientific studies, environmentalists and Indian tribes stand poised to challenge the new requirements as too weak to rescue pollution-pounded Puget Sound.
Builders, too, are positioned to launch legal challenges, saying the state is going too far with new measures that could cost home buyers thousands of dollars per house. Municipal officials, meanwhile, fret that a requirement to control stormwater will discourage redevelopment in cities and spur urban sprawl.
Solving the problem will require major changes in the way cities are developed and rebuilt, say scientists who've studied the problem. But the new rules don't require any change in development patterns.
Instead they rely on cleaning up the water through various means. For example, builders might choose to build a system that runs water through a pond, allowing pollutants to settle out, then feeds the water onto a swale to soak into the ground. Cities also will have to inspect and clean out catch basins more frequently.
In a critique of this approach, many of the region's leading scientists studying stormwater said late last year that what is needed is a whole new form of low-impact development. In this system, the amount of pavement is minimized with features such as narrower roads and sidewalks, and the reduced amount of stormwater soaks into the ground instead of running off to scour out nearby stream banks.
Continue reading this article from the Seattle P-I:
State to issue new stormwater rules today
