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<br />Western States Water Council <br />Water Quality Committee <br /> <br />Sheridan, Wyoming <br />October 5, 2006 <br /> <br />. <br /> <br />years up to 2012 to fully evaluate them. In working with EPA's staff, there seems to be a serious <br />lack of understanding on how watershed management really works and there's a social learning curve <br />that has to be covered before you can start realizing environmental benefits. <br /> <br />Another issue is the concept of the degree to which limits have to be imposed on wastewater <br />lagoons. We typically feel that they are strong technology-based controls that have been very <br />effective, particularly in small demographic areas in serving populations of 500-1 ,000. One thing <br />that has come out in our region among the four states, is that everyone has a different vision and <br />definition of what a lagoon is. So we can understand EP A being a little confounded by trying to <br />develop a uniform policy on how to address these. It's an ongoing effort on our part to try move us a <br />little bit further down the path in both permitting and on TMDL programs. <br /> <br />Colorado: <br /> <br />Colorado has significant coal bed methane development, although not to the scale of that in <br />Wyoming. We are having a lot of these same debates internally. We have ranchers that want the <br />water and irrigators that don't. There has been a lot of debate on how to apply existing narrative <br />standards, whether we should have numerical standards, etc. One issue we have come across has to <br />do with the quantity of the discharge and the physical damage that is being caused by the quantity of <br />the discharge. This is discharge of produced waters. I'm just curious, what other states, ifany, have . <br />experience with that issue? <br /> <br />Arizona: <br /> <br />Arizona's issue was municipal wastewater facilities popping up and creating streams in the <br />desert where there had not been streams before. The main issue has been tribes objecting to effluent <br />reaching reservation boundaries. In fact, we have central Arizona tribes who've passed resolutions, <br />their own water quality standards, ordinances or laws that prohibits the discharge of effluent within <br />the tribal boundary. There is no real obvious authority in Arizona law to not permit the discharge. <br />We've had to broker deals in cons~ltations with tribes and dischargers, but no legal resolution. <br /> <br />Again, we're talking about a very immediate impact where there's a volume of water coming <br />out the pipe and it just washed away a bunch of streambed and then pushed 70 pounds of sediment <br />downstream. So it's an interestin~ issue in terms of water quality. The sediments aren't in the <br />discharge, but it's clearly causing sediment-related damage downstream. <br /> <br />Washin~ton: <br /> <br />Washington had a stormwater manual and basically the premise is that unless you do a basin <br />plan for storm water that identifies a target, you assume the condition is a predevelopment condition. <br />Basically, stormwater ponds need to be put in and taken back to the hydrologic flow. That's how we . <br />deal with the whole issue. <br /> <br />8 <br />