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
State Board Issues Tentative Ruling on CSPA's Appeal of Sonora and Jamestown Discharge Permit: Remands permit to Regional Board
by Bill Jennings, Executive Director, CSPA
August 6, 2009 -- The State Water Resources Control Board (State Board) issued a tentative decision on the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance's (CSPA) appeal of the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board's (Regional Board) wastewater discharge permit for the Tuolumne Utilities District's (TUD) Sonora Regional Wastewater Treatment Plant and Jamestown Sanitary District (JSD) on August 4, 2009. JSD operates the JSD Wastewater Treatment Plan but has no facilities for effluent disposal and contracts with TUD for disposal of their effluent. The tentative order agrees with a number of CSPA's objections to the permit and remands the permit back to the Regional Board to revise in compliance with state and federal law.
The Sonora treatment plant has a design capacity of 2.6 million gallons of treated effluent a day (MGD). The Jamestown facility has a capacity of 0.2 MGD. Treated effluent is discharged to Quartz Reservoir, which in turn, discharges to Woods Creek thence to the Tuolumne River.
The identified beneficial uses of the receiving waters include: municipal and domestic supply, commercial and sport fishing, contact and noncontact recreation, agricultural supply, warm and cold freshwater habitat and wildlife habitat.
The Regional Board adopted the permit on 24 October 2008 and CSPA filed an appeal with the State Board alleging that the permit was illegal, failed to comply with mandated regulations and was not protective of the receiving waters.
Among a number of CSPA's allegations were that the permit contains effluent limitations for chlorine residual that are less stringent than the previous permit, in violation of anti-backsliding requirements of the Clean Water Act. Chlorine is highly toxic to aquatic life. The State Board agreed with CSPA on this issue and directs the Regional Board to:
1. Amend the 2008 permit to retain the chlorine residual effluent limitations of the 2001 permit; or
2. Amend to 2008 permit to convert the chlorine residual effluent limitations to an AMEL and MDEL by using TSD procedures, current effluent data, and by including the frequency of daily monitoring into the equation.
Unfortunately, a number of issues CSPA raised were not addressed in the Order, including: allowance of a mixing zone in violation of regulatory requirements, failure to protect groundwater, absence of effluent limits for manganese, nitrate plus nitrite, copper, zinc and oil & grease, failure to include mass limits, inadequate reasonable potential and antidegradation analyses and the improper use of hardness in computing effluent limits. Interestingly, the State Board, in its review of previous CSPA appeals, satisfactorily addressed several of these issues but, inexplicably, ignored these earlier precedential decisions in this order. CSPA will seek to have the State Board resolve these issues in the scheduled workshop but, if necessary, may need to litigate to resolve our concerns.
Comments on the tentative order are due by noon on 3 September 2009 and a workshop is scheduled for 15 September 2009. The State Board will make a final decision at a later date.
The decision represents the seventh time in little more than a year that the State Board has remanded a CSPA appealed permit back to the Regional Board with direction to comply with basic regulations. CSPA has some 50 appeals still pending before the State Board of Regional Board actions that do not comply with the law and are not protective of water quality. CSPA is the only organization routinely reviewing and commenting on proposed waste discharge permits throughout the Central Valley.