Alaska wants primacy for water

Petroleum News

Alaska Commissioner of Environmental Conservation Ernesta Ballard asked the Resource Development Council for help Sept. 16 in achieving state primacy for regulating state waters under the Clean Water Act.

Forty-five other states have that primacy, Ballard said, with benefits that include “efficiency, coverage, timeliness and local control.” She cited Maine, which assumed wastewater permitting primacy in 2001. When the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was issuing permits, a staff of three issued 15 permits a year. “Today,” she said, “Maine issues about 100 permits a year with five staff.” And the turnaround time for permit issuance is about nine months. Washington, which also has state primacy, averages eight months.

In Alaska, where EPA runs the Clean Water Act program, “if an applicant is lucky enough to have a permit file opened, the average time to issue a NPDES industrial permit is 31 months.” And, she said, “EPA recently told one industrial applicant that they would not even start to process his permit for three years.”

The Clean Water Act is a partnership, Ballard said, with EPA setting tough national standards and the states putting those standards to work protecting state waters. But Alaskans don’t have the benefit of state primacy, she said, but “instead experience a cumbersome federal program burdened with consultations and interagency reviews that can add months and years without achieving any additional protection.” What is required? First, the Alaska Legislature needs to authorize the department to enter negotiations with EPA and to spend money. Then the department would “develop each of the regulatory pieces required by EPA and submit them to notice and comment rule making.” If step one were authorized in the upcoming session, the entire process could be complete in the summer of 2007.

But, she said, without strong “stakeholder champions” behind primacy, it “is too easily portrayed as little more than a turf battle between state and federal governments.”

And, she said, state primacy will be opposed by “those who prefer a litigable and unyielding federal regulatory framework.”

“With your help, we will proceed. Without your help, we will simply reoccupy our niche behind EPA and the Corps of Engineers.”