By James Laughlin
Environmental Protection Agency administrator G. Tracy Mehan recently wrote a memo to agency staff restating EPA's commitment to the watershed approach for protecting the nation's water. He called for the creation of a Watershed Management Council (WMC) to identify and explore ways to advance the watershed approach.
"We face many complex and challenging environmental problems related to the water environment. Unlike the problems of the past, today's problems are often subtle, chronic, and inter-related," he wrote. "Addressing 21st century problems like polluted runoff, suburban growth, drinking water security, ground water/surface water interactions, invasive species, microbes in drinking water, and atmospheric deposition demands a modern approach to environmental protection - an approach grounded in sound science, innovative solutions, and broad public involvement."
EPA for more than a decade has encouraged a watershed approach to address water quality problems. Although that effort has resulted in a general awareness within the agency of the need for watershed management, recent evaluations show substantial gaps in actual implementation, Mehan said.
"The watershed approach should not be seen as merely a special initiative, targeted at just a selected set of places or involving a relatively small group of EPA or state staff. Rather, it should be the fulcrum of our restoration and protection efforts, and those of our many stakeholders, private and public. Failure to fully incorporate the watershed approach into program implementation will result in failure to achieve our environmental objectives in many of our nation's waters."
A recent study by an EPA Program Integration Team found a need for better coordination of programs on a watershed basis. One area cited by Mehan was the need to better integrate Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act implementation efforts.
EPA's Watershed Initiative, if ever funded by Congress, could fund projects in up to 20 selected watersheds in 2003. Mehan said he would like EPA to make these places "laboratories" for integration of EPA and other federal programs.
Mehan noted that local partnerships are finding it challenging to fund the implementation of holistic watershed strategies because of narrowly-defined, balkanized grants and loans. He would like the WMC to explore ways to address this by identifying "best practices" and models for streamlining processes and other barriers to watershed funding.
He also called on the agency to bolster the efforts of academia, nonprofits, local governments, and businesses to assist local watershed partnerships with training and technical assistance. Possible assistance could include expanding support to third-party providers and increasing direct EPA involvement in training and technical assistance.
Fostering innovation will also be key to supporting new watershed initiatives, Mehan said.
"Watersheds are ideal for experimenting with market-based incentives and trading, and for devising new, non-traditional methods to provide data and information in ways that allow stakeholders at the local level to better assess and address their own unique problems," he said.
Innovative approaches cited by Mehan include using an integrated approach to TMDL development in watersheds; and using the watershed approach to attain water quality standards, possibly obviating the need for TMDLs in a number of watersheds. He also wants to promote the use of watershed plans to guide greater investment of SRF funds to protect source water, wetlands, and address nonpoint sources.
As part of his watershed push, he called on the Office of Wastewater Management to accelerate efforts to develop and issue NPDES permits on a watershed basis. To accomplish this, he directed the office to issue, in final form, a watershed-based permitting policy statement.
James Laughlin, Editor
