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The Laws Both national and state laws dictate that water quality be protected and pollution controlled - laws forged by the sense of urgency that discharged wastes were destroying the economic, natural and recreational value of streams, lakes and bays. In 1965, President Johnson de- clared the Potomac River as it flows through Washington, D.C.. a threat to human health. Four years later, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio caught fire. With increasing frequency, large fish kills were reported throughout the nation. And studies revealed dangerously high levels of pesticides, mercury and industriai pollutants in game fish and water suppiies. The federal legislation that followed was tech- nically a revision of a decades-old statute that had established the principle - but lifUe else - that public waters should be protected. The purpose at the CWA of 1972 was boldly specific, to "restore and maintain the chemical, physical and biological integrity of the nation's waters," ~- ~ Best Management Practices (BMPs) encourage indi\'iduals and agencies 10 take steps to pret'ent problems such as soil erosio1l, a!Jove. 14 The act's three primary goals were equally high: all of the nation's waters should be fishable and swimmable by 1983. All polluting discharges should be eliminated by 1985. And no toxic pollutants in toxic amounts should be discharged. The primary regulatory tool created by the act was the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES), a permit process intended to first reduce and eventually eliminate all discharges. In the years that followed, the states issued thousands of NPDES permits to industries and municipal sewage treatment works, and the federal government fronted more than half of the money needed by cities to meet the conditions of their permits. Section 208 at the 1972 law also required states to develop watershed-based plans for controlling nonpoint source pollution, and the federal law gave EPA the authority to set up plans for controlling polluted runoff. But both EPA and the states were slow to implement effective plans - hobbled by poor data, few financial resources, and an unresolved public debate over how compulsory EPA should be implementing what ultimately became a voluntary program. In the years that lollowed, Congress had difficulty resolving the controversy. It recognized that most non point source pollution resulted from land-use decisions - an authority usually left wifh the smallest deliberative body, not the largest. Local governments had the ability to control polluted runoff with zoning ordinances, grading and fill rules, and solid.waste and litter programs. Congress also realized that the solutions identified at the time were physically expensive and politicalty costly. In 1987, Congress added to the CWA Section 319, which encouraged states to establish plans for assessing and reducing nonpoint source pollution "to the maximum extent practicable." While the assessments gave the nalion its first detailed view of nonpoint pollution. the management efforts were not as specific or compulsory as the NPDES program lor traditional point source dis- chargers. The amendments also did not give EPA the expressed authority, as the CWA does in the NPDES provisions, to intervene in states that do not control nonpoint sources. California's non point source management plan calls for a tiered approach to implementing "Best Management Practices," or BMPs. The plan relies on voluntary actions first, then "regulatory encour- agement" of BMPs, and finally requires BMPs. The plan leaves it up to the state's nine regional water quality control boards to decide what level of imple- mentation is appropriate in individual cases. The 1987 CWA amendments also added Section 402, which reclassified as point sources the runoff from cities of 100,000 people or more. EPA was delayed by controversy in implementing the provi- sion. But ultimately states were required to issue NPDES "storm water" permits, which for the most part rely on BMPs to reduce pOllution rather than the strict effluent limits used in previous NPDES permits. In California, some counties and cities agreed to permit conditions as early as 1990 on the condition that they would have more flexibility in implementation. The 1987 amendments required similar stormwater permits for industrial sites, which also can be significant sources of polluted runoff. In 1991, the State Board adopted a general NPDES storm water permit for industrial activities. The permit requires industries to monitor storm water runoff from their