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The 404 Pilot

Outfalls, culverts, shoreline utility lines, creek-crossing roads - these are all facilities where builders would most likely have to apply for a "nationwide permit" for maintenance or construction activities involving the discharge of dredged or fill material into wetlands. Under section 404 of the Clean Water Act there are 35 categories of these small projects, considered - among the three types of 404 permits (individual, regional and nationwide) - to be those with the most negligible environmental impacts and thus worthy of expedited permitting. Sometime this summer, that permitting will become even more expedited when the Army Corps gives over primary responsibility for Bay Area nationwides to the S.F. Regional Board.

The delegation is a first phase, 12-month pilot designed to test efforts to streamline the local permit review process, a process which many business interests have long complained involves too many agencies and too much paperwork. But the Board sees other larger benefits to the takeover. According to the Board's Michael Carlin, it's a chance to integrate a variety of regulatory and planning programs in one fell swoop, as his agency is involved on a daily basis with a host of watershed-impacting programs outside the Corps' purview - toxic clean up, stormwater management and sewage discharges to name only a few. "The current nationwide permit system is a blanket national policy for administering small fills of 10 acres or less," says Carlin. "Through the pilot, we'll be able to review these supposedly minimal impact projects in the context of our local regional perspective on environmental protection. A lot of activities in a small watershed can have a big impact."

His agency's careful tracking of the nationwide permits, says Carlin, will give everyone a better handle on just how detrimental these small projects are to individual watersheds. From there, the Regional Board will be able to evaluate whether these types of permits should continue to be expedited or should go back to a more rigorous agency-by-agency review.

Carlin plans to load the new data on the nationwide permit projects into his GIS computer maps of regional watersheds. Once the information does a digital merge into the watershedwide picture, problem areas will be easier to pinpoint and highlight to local governments for land use planning purposes. As ESTUARY went to press, Carlin and Corps counterparts were busy drafting a Memorandum of Agreement for the pilot. Carlin says a joint public notice should follow in July and that the experiment will run for at least 12 months before it's evaluated in a December 1996 final report.

Contact: Michael Carlin (510)286-1325 or Calvin Fong (Corps) (415)744-3036

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