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1.1.3 Regulatory Programs Stormwater discharges of Florida communities are regulated by local regional/State and Federal agencies that are charged with a widely varied set of program goals and mandates. Each year brings higher standards and expectations from the environmentally active public and the regulatory agencies. Federal Programs The Federal government's influence on a community's stormwater program has, until the last 10 years, been relatively small and limited to interaction with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) with its focus on regulating of development in the 100-year floodplain and issuing of flood insurance through the Federal Insurance Program. FEMA programs tend to be a voluntary participation process that indirectly impacts a community through the rates that the citizens pay for their individual flood insurance policies. The role of the Federal government has become more pronounced in Florida since the emergence of the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Stormwater NPDES Permitting Program. Starting in 1990, EPA required many Florida counties and cities to secure Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System (MS4) Permits for their stormwater discharges to waters of the United States. The MS4 Permit focuses on the reduction of pollutant loads discharged from stormwater outfalls, and overall improvement of ambient water quality through the development of an integrated process for prevention, reduction and mitigation of pollutant discharges by citizens and governmental functions, and the education of citizens and governmental employees in the areas of stormwater management and pollution abatement. EPA's Stormwater NPDES Permitting Program is not a voluntary process -- it is mandated for designated communities -- and EPA has administrative, civil and criminal penalties for failure to apply for required permits and failure to properly implement issued permits. EPA's program directly impacts a community through the incremental costs associated with new employees for new/enhanced stormwater management programs and additional capital investments required for the modification/construction of stormwater facilities. Many smaller Florida communities were excluded in Phase 1 of the Stormwater NPDES Permitting Program that focused on communities of 100,000 or more people due to their population. However, the Phase 2 program that was implemented in 2002 by EPA includes most of these communities. Even though the Phase 2 regulations require less effort to develop the MS4 Permit application, most of Florida's smaller communities will still need to be significantly to expand their stormwater management program and staffing to respond to EPA's enhanced regulatory emphasis on water quality. Another regulatory change which will impact and benefit Florida communities is the NPDES delegation process in which EPA has delegated the operation of the NPDES program to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) with the delegation of the stormwater components in the Year 2000. Coincidentally, this delegation was completed at the onset of the renewal cycle for the initial MS4 Permits. Comments made by FDEP staff suggest that the form, direction and content of the new MS4 Permits for medium and large communities reissued by FDEP may be significantly different than the initial MS4 Permits issued by EPA in the area of unregulated discharge of pollutant loads to receiving waters. State/Regional Programs The continuing degradation of receiving waters throughout Florida has caused great concern with both Regional and State agencies. Freshwater inflows, sedimentation, excessive nutrient loading, biotic uptake and release of contaminates and some commercial and recreational activities have impacted the water and sediment quality, and delicate aquatic/estuarine/marine and terrestrial habitats of these receiving waters. Consequently, protection and renovation of these receiving waters, and their natural resources and habitats, has become a joint effort among federal, state, regional and local agencies. One of the easily identifiable sources of pollutants is stormwater runoff from adjacent cities. The attention of the Water Management Districts' Surface Water Improvement and Management (SWIM) programs has focused on the stormwater outfalls and regulatory measures designed to reduce the community's discharge of pollutants to receiving waters are becoming a daily effort for stormwater management programs of Florida's communities. Other sources of new regulations include the work of the National Estuary Programs, FDEP's statewide water quality assessment programs, the minimum flows programs of the Water Management Districts, and similar types of regional and area wide water quality management plans. These efforts are producing estimates of Total Maximum Daily Loads (TMDLs) and developing Pollutant Load Reduction Goals (PLRGs) which are finding their way into Federal, State and local permits. Perhaps the most far-reaching State regulatory program will be FDEP's Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) program that is intended to remove water quality impairments in Florida waters caused by excessive pollutant discharges. This program is developing models for impaired waters, assessing pollutant discharges, identifying necessary and possible reductions in pollutant loads, subsequently allocating these reductions to point source and nonpoint source discharges, and incorporating these reductions into discharge permits. This process will occur over a twelve-year period, and will have profound long-term effects on the stormwater management practices and annual funding requirements of most Florida Communities. TMDLs have at least five distinct aspects that will challenge cities and counties:
Local Programs Development patterns in Florida are such that most communities either discharge to or receive discharges from one or more adjacent communities. Standards for the design and regulation of stormwater systems are different between these communities, and changes in the existing runoff patterns due to development must be negotiated between the communities. Fortunately, many interconnected communities have developed working relationships due to a common lack of adequate funding and the need to work together to solve local problems. In other communities in Florida, where some local agencies have had appreciably more funding than other agencies cooperation and communication have been much more difficult due to the ability for one agency to proceed on its own. New stormwater management requirements and regulations are generated at the local level through community level planning activities and citizen mandates. Florida's Department of Community Affairs requires communities to develop, implement and update a Comprehensive Plan that includes an element specifically focusing on stormwater management. Many Florida communities have also developed new, more stringent requirements for stormwater management and maintenance based upon citizen initiatives originating from localized flooding, degradation of water quality and environmental impacts. It is evident that the increasing mandates of EPA, FDEP and the Water Management Districts, when combined with local citizen mandates for improved flood control and water quality management, will directly impact the engineering, operational and regulatory functions and related capital improvement investments of Florida's communities in a manner that was undreamed of a decade ago.
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