EPA Withdraws Significant Portion of Storm Water Regulations in Court Case
The US EPA was forced to withdraw a portion of its proposed storm water management regulations in the context of a pending court challenge by the National Association of Homebuilders (NAHB) and other parties. In the pending appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, the EPA filed an unopposed motion to vacate part of its final rule regarding "Effluent Limitations Guidelines and Standards for the Construction and Development Point Source Category".
The rule proposed to establish a numeric effluent limitation on pollutants from construction and development. The rule limited turbidity to an average daily level of 280 "nephelometric turbidity units" (NTUs). EPA concedes in its motion that, "[T]he Agency has concluded that it improperly interpreted the data and, as a result, the calculations in the existing administrative record are no longer adequate to support ..." the rule.
While we are not in a technical position to evaluate engineering and cost impacts of these regulations, NAHB has quoted, and ABC has supported, an estimate of up to $10 billion in cost annually to meet the overall national regulations as proposed by EPA. We just commented on the regulations generally last week and we believe this is a very significant issue for the construction and development industry. Ann Cosby at Sand Anderson's Environmental Law blog has a nice summary post of the negotiations in Virginia over sediment limits for the Chesapeake Bay Watershed.
By agreement, the motion requested that the case be held in abeyance for 18 months until February 15, 2012, to allow EPA to address the flaw. It will be quite interested to see whether the partial retreat by EPA sets off a chain reaction of challenges or delays in other aspects of the pending regulations.
Total BS. While the EPA may have performed a computing error. The 10 million addition monies reported by the NAHB is a crock. Listen - most all of the engineering computations for stormwater are already being met and paid for by the builder, developer etc. There is only minimal cost associated with the additional requirement. But because most in the industry who are jumpping on the thwart band wagon dont know the real issues they are even fighting against, have no earthly idea that the NAHB sidelines regulations with complete lies and misdirected and mis quoted BS. I worked for one of the largest homebuilders in the Nation for 2.5 years. I know what they do. And all of them are guilty of it. These numbers produced by the NAHB are real. However, it reports a dollar amount which is already being paid for. They just use it as an excuse. The building arena is so savy, they have programs which crunch out all the figures, opstacles, environmental impacts, eveything which gives them a percentage to determine if a project is feasible. The magic number is about 23-26% profit on the back end. These guys are not stupid. And they know how to throw figures out to make everyone feel great or get nervous. Just depends what the MO of the week is.