Draft Report Confirms Idaho Water Monitoring Failures
As required by the Clean Water Act, the Department of Environmental Quality has just issued its draft “Integrated Report” on the state of water quality in the State of Idaho. The utter failure of Idaho to do necessary water quality monitoring is probably the most glaring finding.
According to the draft report, of 5747 distinct waterways in Idaho, 2108 have insufficient data to determine the threshhold question of whether Clean Water Act standards are being met. That corresponds to 33,523 miles of rivers and 186,677 acres of freshwater lakes that have insufficient monitoring data or any other information on which to determine what measures, if any, are needed to protect those waterways. The new report seems to show no improvement whatsoever from the 2008 report in which 37% of state waterways had not been assessed. Meanwhile, some 900 waterways — another 16,659 miles of rivers and 208,102 acres of freshwater lakes — are impaired but do not yet have a cleanup plan.
To put it more plainly, more than half of Idaho’s waterways are suffering from Idaho DEQ’s failure to properly administer the Clean Water Act.
But that’s not all. What about the other half? The report indicates that 1,242 waterways are, in fact, impaired and need cleanup actions to restore water quality. In this category, there are 20,004 miles of rivers and 148,257 acres of freshwater lakes that have an approved TMDL cleanup plan. But very little in the way of TMDL implementation is evident.
We know that Idahoans care deeply about water quality. The failure of DEQ to accomplish the very basic minimum requirements of the Clean Water Act should be unacceptable. The legislature, which has zeroed the water monitoring budget for two consecutive years, needs to provide the resources to DEQ to do its work before the U.S. EPA, or a federal court, is forced to step in.
All one has to do is to read the data from EPA that states how much toxic material is in the CDA watershe. It is impossible NOT to know the CWA standards are not being met. As IDEQ is heavily funded by EPA it makes it clear they will do all they can to secure and maintain funding, even if it means failing their mandate and ignoring the public. This IS a statewide issue.
In the 90s, I was in CWA 402/NPDES enforcement at EPA. This was during the Clinton era “reinventing govt” push, and EPA was starting to delegate the program to the states. We were still handling most of the states in our Region directly, but the delegating push had started and a couple of states had already taken on the duties with EPA in an oversight/advisory role. And now we’re seeing the end result, states that cannot, or are not willing to (due to either budgetary realities, or political views), administer the programs.
But beyond the specific CWA issue, there is trend of delegating the federal regulatory programs to the states and we’re now seeing it in the transportation sector via FHWA’s NEPA process. The California Dept of Transportation has been in a pilot project for the last couple of years to take on the NEPA responsibilities of their projects receiving FHWA funding. I participated in the first audit of the process by FHWA last year. The idea is that once Caltrans gives them “proof of concept” through a “successful” pilot program, they will delegate it down to all the states. And we’ll likely see more issues of inadequacy, just as we’re seeing in the CWA delegation, particularly in lower income or hard “red” states.
It’s a broad and growing problem unfortunately…less so in states lik CA, since the CA state version of NEPA (CEQA) and the state ESA are more restrictive than the fed equivalent. Most states don’t have that luxury (for lack of a better word) of relying on more restrictive state regs.
[...] KEA Blog Kootenai Environmental Alliance Skip to content HomeAbout ← Draft Report Confirms Idaho Water Monitoring Failures [...]