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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Eye On Boise

Idaho DEQ moving forward with plans to take over water pollution permitting from the EPA

Idaho’s Department of Environmental Quality is proposing to add nine new employees next year as part of the phase-in of Idaho’s effort to achieve state primacy on the National Pollution Discharge Elimination System, though which Idaho would take over permitting and enforcement of discharges of pollutants into surface waters in the state from the EPA. Idaho is currently one of just four states that doesn’t have primacy for the NPDES program, meaning the EPA handles it in their states; the others are New Mexico, New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

“Our plan is to phase in our assumption of the administrative duties of that law,” DEQ Director John Tippets told the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee this morning. “We won’t actually start issuing permits until the middle of next year.”

Since the Legislature directed the DEQ to seek state primacy for the NPDES program in 2014, it has brought on 10 state-funded staffers plus two who are federally funded. “At whole buildout, we will need 29 employees,” Tippets told lawmakers. “We’ve been saying that all along, and the cost will be about $3.1 million” a year. That will come from a combination of state general funds, fees, and “a small amount of federal dollars.”

Tippets said when Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1970, it gave enforcement authority to the EPA, but called on states to be the primary administrators of the program. The same approach followed with the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. “States were required to demonstrate they had the resources, including the financial resources, the employees, the expertise, the process and the statutes and rules in place to fully implement the programs,” he said. “If a state chose not to administer a particular law, that responsibility remained then with the EPA.”

Tippets said, “With few exceptions, states have chosen to obtain primacy to administer these laws within the borders of their states, and Idaho is no exception.”

He said, “Honestly, we think that we do it better than the EPA would if we didn’t have primacy. We know that we work for the people of Idaho. … We know environmental laws can be hard to understand, so we try to help businesses, local governments and citizens to understand and comply with the law, and we try to help them understand the benefits of complying. Sometimes we have to use our enforcement authority, and it’s important to have the ability to do so, but we enjoy it most when we can work with the regulated community to achieve positive outcomes. And we believe that our approach of working with Idahoans to help them understand and comply with the law reaps long-term benefits.”

With the EPA administering the pollutant discharge program in Idaho, Idaho’s permit-holders have long complained about big backlogs in issuing permits. About half of Idaho’s permit holders are cities or other municipalities, while the rest are industrial users from mines to fish farms and confined animal feeding operations. The 2014 legislation was strongly backed by Idaho industries.

Tippets told legislative budget writers that the 2014 legislation directed the DEQ to submit its application for primacy on the program to the EPA’s Region X by Sept. 1 of this year. “We submitted that application one day early, I’m proud to say,” he said. “We had lots of folks that put a lot of effort into that.”

There’s also a request for one additional deputy attorney general in Idaho Attorney General Lawrence Wasden’s budget as part of the new program, which will be called the Idaho Pollution Discharge Elimination System, or IPDES. The attorney position, to work on permitting and enforcement, is recommended for funding in Gov. Butch Otter’s budget proposal.

Said Tippets, “We’re expecting approval for that program by July 1 of 2018.”



Betsy Z. Russell
Betsy Z. Russell joined The Spokesman-Review in 1991. She currently is a reporter in the Boise Bureau covering Idaho state government and politics, and other news from Idaho's state capital.

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