CSPA |
| Your 501(c)(3) tax deductible cash donations are desperately needed if the fight for our fisheries is to continue. Read how you can donate! |
 Enter your Email address to sign up for our Weekly Newsletter  For Email Marketing you can trust |
More News
City of Tracy Continues Fight Against Protecting Fish and Water Quality: CSPA submits comments supporting Regional Board
by Bill Jennings, Executive Director, CSPA
June 27, 2009 -- The Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board issued an NPDES permit (wastewater discharge permit) to the City of Tracy for discharges from its municipal treatment plant in 2007. The California Sportfishing Protection Alliance (CSPA) promptly appealed the permit to the State Water Resources Control Board (State Board) as non-protective of fish and water quality. The State Board found merit in a number of CSPA's allegations and, on 19 May 2009, remanded the permit back to the Regional Board with explicit directions to eliminate dilution credits, include legally adequate salinity and ammonia effluent limits and add a narrative chronic toxicity limit to the permit (Final Order attached). The decision, as far as it went, was a victory for fisheries and water quality.
However, the State Board failed to address CSPA's major claims regarding the absence of a defensible antidegradation analysis in the permit (CSPA website story, 11 May 2009). Consequently, CSPA filed a lawsuit against the Regional Board on 18 June 2009 (CSPA Press Release, 18 June 2009).
In response, the City of Tracy reactivated a petition it had also filed over the 2007 permit. The City's allegations focused on daily maximum effluent limitations, mass limits, the reasonable potential analyses, effluent limits for aluminum, copper and nitrate/nitrite and their assertion that compliance schedules should be in the permit and not in a time schedule order. The City had requested that its petition be placed into abeyance. Placing a petition into abeyance reserves the right to have the issues heard at a latter date, if necessary.
The City's petition related to old issues that had been previously addressed and was little more than a message (i.e., threat) to the State Board that they would again raise these issues if the Board agreed with CSPA and remanded the permit back to the Regional Board.
CSPA believes Tracy's allegations lack merit, have been previously decided and that the Regional Board properly addressed these issues in the 2007 permit. CSPA has now submitted comments in support of the Regional Board.