NACWA met with Assistant Administrator Susan Bodine, head of EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance (OECA), on October 9 to discuss how NACWA members can best work with OECA to accomplish the shared goal of protecting water quality.
Representatives from seven NACWA public member agencies participated in the October 15 EPA Stakeholder Roundtable on peak wet weather flow blending, with additional representatives attending as observers. The Agency held the invitation-only Roundtable to gather input for developing a proposed rule on blending.
Consistent with NACWA’s recommendations, an EPA rule that will finalize only some of the less controversial provisions from a May 2016 proposed update to the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permitting program is currently under review by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
Last week, the Senate passed the 2018 Water Resources Development Act (WRDA), S.3021, by a vote of 99-1. The bill, entitled America’s Water Infrastructure Act of 2018, previously passed the House by a unanimous vote and now awaits President Trump’s signature to become law.
Reps. Kilmer (D-WA), Heck (D-WA), and Kaptur (D-MI) recently introduced H.R. 7041, the Preventing Pollution through Partnership (P3) Act, which aims to increase green infrastructure investment to improve water quality by providing a new financing tool for green infrastructure projects. Specifically, the bill would amend federal tax code to include green infrastructure in the definition of eligible uses of private activity bonds (PABs), allowing for PABs to be issued for projects where 95 percent or more of bond proceeds will be used to develop, carry out, or certify green infrastructure projects.
NACWA was busy last week sharing its clean water perspective across the country, speaking at both the Southeast Stormwater Association’s (SESWA) 13th Annual Regional Stormwater Conference in Hilton Head, SC and at the National Association of Water Company’s (NAWC) conference in San Antonio, TX.