BOARD00585

• Board Meeting Date: 11/23/1998
• Description: Federal "Clean Water Action Plan" and EPA's Advance Notice of Proposed Rule Making - Status Report
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Memo

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Colorado Water Conservation Board
Department of Natural Resources
721 Centennial Building
1313 Sherman Street
Denver, Colorado 80203
Phone: [phone]
fAX: [phone]

STATE OF COLORI\DO *20

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MEMORANDUM

Roy Romer
Governor

James S. Lochhead
Executive Director, DNR

Dariese. Lire, P.E.
Director, eweB

Peter H. Evans
Acting Director, eweB

TO:

Colorado Water Conservation Board Members

peterEvans?~~ -'_~

FROM:

DATE: November 18, 1998

SUBJECT: Agenda Item 20, November 23-24, 1998, Board Meeting
Federal "Clean Water Action Plan" and
EPA's Advance Notice of Proposed Rule Making - Status Report

This information is provided as a supplement to the September memo provided to you for
your meeting in La Junta (Agenda Item #11) and it is partly based on the discussions that took
place in the Water Quality Control Commission's (WQCC) workshop of October 14th. Alan
Hamel, Bahman Hatarni, Steve Miller and I attended this workshop_ With each exposure to these
EP A proposals, we learn more about the unusually broad range of ideas identified by EP A to
. improve the protection of water quality.

After discussing the EPA's proposals in our in-house Water Quality Team meeting, we
decided to recommend that we should send comments to the EP A representing your concerns and
interest in finding out what EP A proposes as its next steps. The attached draft is intended to
facilitate your consideration of this opportunity and clarify the concerns you may want to raise.
If you agree that a letter should be sent, we would need to fmalize it before the January 4, 1999
deadline. This draft letter we have attached is generally consistent with the letter prepared for the
WQCC, also attached.

The highlights of the proposed comments are summarized below:

. We question whether the federal regulatory framework needs a major overhaul or merely
some clarification;

. Potential implications for non-point sources of pollution (such as irrigation return flows)
could be substantial and EP A should be carefully evaluated in determining whether existing
requirements warrant revision;

. EP A should rely on existing watershed organizations before promoting the establishment of
new and potentially competing or overlapping organizations;

. The Prior Appropriation Doctrine, water rights, existing water supplies, the states' role in
water supply allocation, state instream flow laws and other important institutional factors are not
recognized as essential elements in considering the policy and program changes EP A suggests;

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