Developers to Legislature: Save us from runoff rules
Environmentalists are appalled at a possible end run of long-awaited Department of Ecology rules. But cities and developers say it's too much, too soon.
Rita Hibbard/InvestigateWest
Just as state environmental officials are getting close to issuing long-awaited, court-ordered rules to rein in the largest source of toxic pollution of Puget Sound, developers and business interests are appealing to the Legislature to delay the process or make it entirely voluntary.
Members of the public have until Friday to tell Department of Ecology officials their views about controlling polluted rainwater runoff, which fouls waterways statewide. It’s an effort that would take years under Ecology’s current proposal, but that could get delayed even more under legislation pushed by the Association of Washington Business, the Building Industry Association of Washington, and the Washington Association of Cities.
At issue is the toxic mix that washes off roads, parking lots, and other hard surfaces in the rain, carrying with it the detritus of modern life: oil, grease, pet waste, and metals such as copper, which can kill salmon, along with myriad other pollutants.
Ecology has calculated that the runoff is the leading source of toxic pollution of Puget Sound, and it’s an extremely common reason why water bodies in Washington are in violation of the Clean Water Act. It’s also a leading reason for closing shellfish beds and it can make swimmers sick.
The agency’s proposed rules contemplate controlling the polluted stormwater by changing development codes in 110 local governments in Washington so that the landscape does a better job of slurping up the dirty rainwater before it reaches waterways.
Under Ecology’s proposal, these local governments would have until Dec. 31, 2016 to revise development codes to encourage “low-impact development.” Ecology is tracking four pieces of legislation, two of which would delay the process by another two years. That would be on top of the one-year delay the Legislature ordered last year.
“It’s fair to say we’re under siege,” said Bruce Wishart, lobbyist for the environmental group People for Puget Sound. “It’s really disappointing after spending literally years at the table negotiating to encourage green building techniques and to move forward with what we considered some pretty modest proposals.”
One of the proposals, HB 2641, would make it optional for local governments to adopt the low-impact building rules, and would instead offer incentives to cities and developers.
“We are simply continuing an ongoing effort to find a way to lessen the burden, streamline our local governments, make them more efficient and help them weather the budget crisis they are facing,” said the measure’s chief sponsor, Rep. Larry Springer, D-Kirkland, in legislative testimony. Springer serves as deputy majority leader for jobs and economic development.
The local governments that are the subject of the debate are those whose sewer and storm-drain systems serve fewer than 100,000 people. The state’s six largest local governments — King, Pierce, Snohomish and Clark counties and Seattle and Tacoma — already have started developing low-impact-development codes that are due to be finished by the end of 2013.
Environmentalists say the low-impact building techniques can actually save money in some circumstances, a point developers do not dispute, and are critical of Ecology for proposing to allow cities to pick their own techniques.
“Ecology was unwilling to step up to the plate,” said low-impact advocate Tom Holz, who has written low-impact-development codes for several local governments. “Ecology has told the local jurisdictions ‘We’ll go along with whatever you want. … Here’s [a] check list of things you might impose and you get to choose, and then the Department of Ecology is OK with that.' "
Bill Moore, Ecology’s lead stormwater strategist, said the agency wanted to make sure local governments could have flexibility to make sure the techniques selected would work, given local conditions. Rulings by the state’s pollution court, the Pollution Control Hearings Board, require the low-impact building methods to be used where they are “feasible.”
Such techniques include installation of “rain gardens” that soak up excess stormwater, porous pavement that allows rainwater to seep into the ground, and vegetated roofs, also known as “green roofs.”
In a few instances, these techniques have gone awry, most famously in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, where rushed planning — necessitated by a bid to land some federal stimulus money — led to rain gardens that overflowed, becoming unsightly pools that one resident compared to bathtubs without drains.
“We’ve provided a framework in which the local governments should be making those decisions” about which techniques are suitable, Moore said. “The last thing we want is to require an LID [low impact development] and find out it’s not working — it’s flooding the neighbor’s basement or something else that defeats its purpose.”
Other examples of potential problems caused by putting water into the ground, Moore said, include landslides on steep slopes and spreading around underground contamination at old industrial sites.
Wishart, the environmental lobbyist, said such failures have been limited to a handful of instances. In fact, his environmental group and others are promoting a campaign by Washington State University’s Puyallup stormwater-research arm and the nonprofit Stewardship Partners to have residents of the Puget Sound region install 12,000 rain gardens by 2016.
Carl Schroeder, a lobbyist for the Association of Cities, said Ecology is asking too much of local governments at a time when their finances are severely pinched.
“What we have heard from the cities who have been reviewing the proposed (rules) is that, especially on (low-impact development), they tried to do too much too fast,” Schroeder said. “We have folks who are not sure they can move that aggressively.”
Instead, the municipalities are advocating making the transition to low-impact development optional and offering a series of incentives for cities and developers.
Schroeder offered an example of how this could work for local governments: Right now cities must inspect catch basins every five years to make sure they are not contributing to stormwater pollution. New rules will make that once every two and a half years. But cities that adopt the voluntary low-impact building rules could stay on the more-relaxed inspection schedule.
For developers, those proposing to use the low-impact techniques might be entitled to expedited review of their permits by the city, or might be granted height or setback variances. Or perhaps they would enjoy reduced permit fees, Schroeder said.
“It would allow folks where it makes sense in their communities to move forward,” Schroeder said. “Others who don’t feel it’s appropriate for their communities could move forward more slowly.”
There’s just one problem with that approach, said Ecology’s Moore: It doesn’t pass legal muster. The Pollution Control Hearings Board made it clear that the next time the rules were tightened – as is happening now with the rules that are the subject of the comment period ending Friday – Ecology was to make low-impact development mandatory.
Wishart, of People for Puget Sound, also says low-impact development can’t be optional: “There are great advantages to this approach, but because it is new, there is also great resistance. If we could rely on a voluntary approach, we’d be there by now.”
One person who has crusaded tirelessly in favor of low-impact development is Art Castle. Yet he says Washington just isn’t prepared to go whole-hog right now. He’s against mandating the very methods he helped popularize as head of a Kitsap County builders' association before he moved to Olympia to serve as executive vice president of the Building Industry Association of Washington. But he’s always been against making low-impact development the law.
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Comments:
Posted Wed, Feb 1, 7:36 a.m. Inappropriate
“At issue,” McClure writes, “is the toxic mix that washes off roads, parking lots, and other hard surfaces in the rain, carrying with it the detritus of modern life: oil, grease, pet waste, and metals such as copper, which can kill salmon, along with myriad other pollutants.”
Another approach to what’s at issue in the politics of water quality is to ask whether the forgoing is a sound formulation of “fact” on which to which to premise a massive spending and regulatory program that may (or may not) deliver cost-commensurate value to the long-term goal of protecting water and habitat quality and species health in the Puget Sound basin. It really is time to deconstruct such statements to scrutinize them for their rhetoric rather than their sense or science as the money commitments are made.
To raise the question this way is not to doubt the importance of stormwater impacts. Rather, it is to test the linkage between the elements of the stormwater problem we actually understand, the supposed benefits of the solutions of the hour, and the gaps in what should be our policy objectives from which these solutions, in some instances and locations, distract us.
Those other policy objectives have names, by the way. One is source reduction of toxics, the only sure approach in the long run that really pays off (as we know from decades of excellent experience under the Clean Water Act in better protecting water quality from industrial pollutants once routinely discharged into the sewers). And the other is habitat conservation that can only be achieved by restraint in the location of new development. Without a serious commitment to habitat conservation, you can’t save Puget Sound. “Low impact development” has its uses. But it is anything but the cure-all environmental protection panacea for water and species in Puget Sound, and it shouldn’t be marketed as such.
Posted Wed, Feb 1, 8:18 a.m. Inappropriate
Not all the water is coming off of roads and buildings. Septic systems are leaching dirty water into the sound. Grazing lands and agricultural lands cover vastly more area than roads and buildings and contribute dirty water and sediment load as well.
Posted Wed, Feb 1, 8:32 a.m. Inappropriate
Source reduction of toxics? In order to protect water quality from pollutants routinely discharging into stormwater, we will have to ban automobiles.
In addition to LID requirements, the author also ought to investigate the stormwater quality monitoring permit requirements proposed for cities by Ecology. In an attempt to be "flexible", Bill Moore and his colleagues are calling for a bloated, redundant, expensive consultant-driven program funded by permitted jurisdictions that will do nothing to inform us of stormwater pollution sources. Under this scenario, Stormwater managers will be all too happy to spend taxpayer’s money to generate years of useless data just to proclaim that their programs are participating in a monitoring effort. It’s a crime.
Posted Wed, Feb 1, 9:21 a.m. Inappropriate
I always learn a lot from the comments.
In this case, I'd rather err on the side of doing something which is known to be beneficial, instead of doing nothing because the proposal is not perfect. If the structure or monitoring process is sub-optimal, by all means suggest improvements; but our environment impact will not be ameliorated as we wait for a "silver bullet" (the perfect solution) to appear.
The crime is not inefficiency as we try to figure out how to best live in the world; the crime is the damage we are inflicting on our heritage - the world that we'll leave to future generations.
Posted Wed, Feb 1, 10:03 a.m. Inappropriate
The idea seems ironic to postpone doing something that is good sense just because the 'economy' isn't very good right now. With the historic stand taken by the Building Industry, no new regulations would ever be passed or implemented, particularly if developers are required to pay their 'fair share' of costs borne by all citizens, abide by required rules, or spend time explaining what is planned in return for a permit. That mentality is what got us into the present situation where the very quality of our own habitat is severely threatened!
DOE has a big responsibility and limited authority -or will- to act reasonably and in a timely manner to actually address solving the non-source pollution problem that is so problematic, yet its wings are repeatedly clipped by the slightest resistance to tighter and more effective regulations. Ecology has now developed such a reputation for wimping out and continual delay that, unfortunately, this behavior is no longer a surprise, but a frustration. Can you imagine any caring professional working for an organization like that? It's an unfunny joke, and a gross disservice to the public, which pays for reasonable services to help protect the air, water and soil we all depend upon.
Granted, that DOE can excel at its job if given necessary support from municipalities and the State Legislature, but without that support you can see what happens, repeatedly. The problem is that after-the-fact mitigation is always less effective and more expensive than getting things right from the first; which is why more delay won't help at all, but the observed problems worse! Of course developers will play the deny, decry, delay game! That simply takes them off the hook and defers liability onto the home owner and municipality -at a higher environmental and social cost.
Several years ago, Bellingham was able to make its Surface & Storm Water Utility more effective by implementing the latest DOE/EPA rules and raising rates to pay for them. That was an understandably painful process, but it now seems to have worked. Guess who led the fight against that change? If you guessed the Building Industry, you'd be right -and that was during an economic boom period of record levels!
In fairness, the Storm Water permitting is often the most difficult to do, and the most expensive and time-intensive. Largely, this difficulty was due to several logical factors, among others; topography becomes more important, interfacing with the already-built infrastructure can require ingenuity and expense, treating the storm water for pollutants is necessary, codifying new guidelines takes time and one size doesn't fit every situation. But, what is the excuse for not using the new rules for new development? There one has a clean slate to actually practice the art of low-impact techniques, thereby avoiding many of the problems outlined above.
In the end, more delay of storm water improvements for the asking doesn't help anyone, except the lobbyists -like the BIA- and that is a short-term, special favor that the rest of us must pay for some day, in some way, but well people forget the linkage to undesirable consequences.
Posted Wed, Feb 1, 10:10 a.m. Inappropriate
Doug MacDonald makes some excellent points, as usual. First let's stipulate, though, that the sentence quoted in the comment is factual. It is not rhetoric; these things are factually provable. From there, I would be the last to suggest that the Puget Sound Partnership or anyone else has done the kind of rigorous cost-benefit analysis that really should be done to figure out where our society can best spend limited resources to resuscitate Puget Sound. That said, wouldn't it be prudent to start working on problems for which we know the solution, or at least part of the solution, as psj advocates? Clearly habitat protection, as well as restoration, are going to have to be part of the picture.
And Turk, while your point that automobiles pollute stormwater is of course true, that doesn't mean source reduction is a bad idea. For example, how about making brakes that don't shave off a tiny amount of copper every time they are tapped, especially now that we know just how minute a concentration of copper it takes to stun salmon, leaving them vulnerable to predation? And clearly there are many other opportunities to reduce toxics at ths source level (often with zero lifestyle tradeoffs; for those in which such a tradeoff is involved, wouldn't it make sense to support research to find a better alternative?)
Good conversation, folks. I can't stay with it all day but will try to check back later.
Posted Wed, Feb 1, 10:53 a.m. Inappropriate
Take a quick look at the price tag for the CSO project at Metro, 711 Million dollars, if you live in Seattle there will a double whammy surcharge. 30-40% increase in rates for this one project alone.
Posted Wed, Feb 1, 11:08 a.m. Inappropriate
The rule, told to the contractor AFTER all other permits were granted, forced the nearly one year delay in St. Helens Energy from developing the $2 BILLION natural gas fields in Grays Harbor County. They didn't want to drill the pilot well during the very long rainy season here. How many jobs that delayed is unknown, but it surely does reduce tax revenue.
Of course, the press completely ignored that story. I got it directly from one of the St. Helens' executives.
Posted Wed, Feb 1, 11:23 a.m. Inappropriate
"“Until you get that technical knowledge much more broadly (distributed) than it is today, we’ll have people who don’t understand (low-impact development) designing it, and people who don’t understand it approving it, and to me that’s a recipe for disaster,” Castle said."
So instead, don't do anything and pay a much larger bill later for retrofitting to fix the problem that shouldn't have been created in the first place.
And Doug MacDonald is right. There are four legs: source reduction, habitat conservation, development location, and stormwater control. But just because society has failed to address all of these to the extent and scale needed doesn't mean that none should be addressed. Not clearing forest is certainly better than so-called "low impact development," but just try imposing limits on the presumed "right" to convert forest to lawn and pasture.
Any dispassionate observer will acknowledge that degradation of Puget Sound is closely tracking the degradation of Chesapeake Bay, only we got started later. Remember the Puget Sound Water Quality Authority (no "Authority"), which became the Puget Sound Action Team (no "Action"), and has become the Puget Sound Partnership? Its all just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Posted Wed, Feb 1, 12:40 p.m. Inappropriate
"The local governments that are the subject of the debate are those whose sewer and storm-drain systems serve fewer than 100,000 people. The state’s six largest local governments — King, Pierce, Snohomish and Clark counties and Seattle and Tacoma — already have started developing low-impact-development codes that are due to be finished by the end of 2013."
The above clarification is buried too deep in the story, but once found, my next thought is an assumption that Seattle with its "take it all, spare all the rest" rationalization already set to be pinched by supposedly conscientuous stormwater management is not now lobbying on behalf of DOE.
Having paid some attention to the process that set the rules for Seattle, et al, my take is that crony capitalism's aim is to turn law and rule making into as much Alice in Wonderland as possible and then blame the mess on any and all serious about true "disruptive innovation."
Clues here on how to see though the lot of em: http://www.thenewcityjournal.net/ruining_our_cities_to_save_them.htm
And here:
http://www.acfonline.org.au/uploads/res/res_atlas_main_findings.pdf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2S1mPOWRsSc (The Conundrum, David Owen, 2012)
Personally—cherish the skin of the earth, remove impervious surfaces, and garden conscientiously—
lots of help out there, more every day:
http://www.soilsforsalmon.org/pdf/Soil_BMP_Manual.pdf
http://www.pccnaturalmarkets.com/sc/1202/worries_roundup.html
http://www.pccnaturalmarkets.com/sc/1111/30year_organic_study.html
Oh, and support the PCC Farmland Trust, or any other of its kind you can find:
http://www.pccfarmlandtrust.org/pcc-farmland-trust-strategic-plan/
Posted Wed, Feb 1, 2:16 p.m. Inappropriate
In my understanding the Department of Ecology has tried to write a permit that is "performance-based" without too many prescriptive rules; developers should be free to innovatively apply many Low Impact Development techniques to achieve flow and water-quality based goals. In this context, the questions of feasibility and mandatory are almost moot: it is ironic that the Cities and Counties (Phase 2 jurisdictions) are loudest in their cry for relief, when it is their own rules, codes, and restrictions that interfere with and prevent the use of LID. In how many jurisdictions in Puget Sound--Phase 1 (larger) or Phase 2 (smaller)-- can a fully realized LID project be built that is capable of meeting stormwater runoff standards?
I know of at least two developers who have begged, pleaded and cajoled city jurisdictions (Bothell and Seattle, respectively) to allow them to fully infiltrate stormwater by building projects with narrow roads, clustered housing, rain gardens, pervious pavement, water storage, etc. Many in the development community say that they would strive to build these kinds of developments if they only could, but that governments refuse to allow them. It's one thing for jurisdictions to plead that LID not be mandatory; it's quite another to prevent LID from being practiced by outdated, irrelevant or misguided codes and regulations, or by tedious and rigid permits and processes that require extra time, money and paperwork for any variance.
A good deal of the LID education that is required is on the part of municipal building departments and City Councils who need to learn to recognize, and encourage, a good thing when they see it.
Tom P.
Posted Wed, Feb 1, 7:05 p.m. Inappropriate
Tom P -- I've definitely heard about this problem from developers, where the permitting authority won't *allow* LID, although I'm a little surprised to hear they would encounter this in Seattle, which, after all, holds itself out as on the cutting edge of this stuff. Would you mind emailing me at rmcclure@invw.org? I'd like to see if I can get in touch with those developers. Thanks!
Posted Thu, Feb 2, 5:06 p.m. Inappropriate
Amazing that no one wants to do anything that creates private sector jobs that can and does remove tangible amounts of toxic sludge from stormwater runoff if installed in a catch basin.
Instead the agencies that are paid to prevent and protect us from pollution, because we pays for it several different ways, don't do a thing. Unless you're Mr Knutson from the other crosscut article where the DOE bullied him.
For once I would like to see an article about sustainable environmental jobs that doesn't cost taxpayers another dime. keyword is sustainable
Posted Sat, Feb 4, 5:05 p.m. Inappropriate
What happens after the Senate version (SB 6372, sponsored by R. Sen. Swecker) is stripped of its stormwater section in the substitute that made the first cut, but the House version (HB2641, sponsored by Dems) still contains its stormwater section in the substitute that made the first cut. Isn't government wonderful?
http://publicola.com/2012/02/03/friday-jolt-sen-pridemore-takes-a-red-pen-to-sen-sweckers-omnibus-bill/
Posted Sun, Feb 5, 5:01 a.m. Inappropriate
wonderful or worthless?
Posted Sun, Feb 5, 5:09 p.m. Inappropriate
It is obvious what is necessary to minimize and mitigate stormwater drainage: intensification. High population density ensures that municipalities have a sufficient property tax base to be able to pay for the necessary mediation measures when it rains amongst all other municipal services. Intensification can, and should, be accomplished through the following measures: upzoning all properties to five storeys, eliminate minimum setback restrictions, decrease impact fees to zero for medium- and high-density housings, increase impact fees for low-density housing, and base property taxes on the value of the land rather than the value of the building.
Posted Mon, Feb 6, 10:15 p.m. Inappropriate
Will the Legislature gut stormwater rules? Robert McClure gave an update on KUOW's The Conversation today (around 12:20 pm or before):
http://www.kuow.washington.edu/program.php?id=25894
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