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A New Enforcement Policy

Perpetrators of an illegal spill in San Diego might get a notice of violation but never pay a fine; the same spill in San Francisco could slap them with a simple $100 ticket or a $200,000 bill payable to the state's Cleanup and Abatement Fund. In the past, what the penalty would be for breaking a water quality law has been entirely up to the discretion of the state's nine regional boards. While the regional approach is one of the water quality program's greatest strengths, in terms of its ability to respond to local specifics, enforcement actions have been sufficiently inconsistent from region to region to be "troubling," according to the S.F. Bay Regional Board's Larry Kolb. "You have to wonder how much is due to differences in water quality situations, versus how much is due to different enforcement philosophies," says Kolb. Boards are governor appointed and political in nature.

Protecting that regional power while imposing some consistency statewide was the challenge before the State Water Resources Control Board - the parent of the nine regional boards - when it set out to develop a new statewide enforcement policy. According to the State Board's Mark Bradley, the thrust was to create a policy framework rather than strict protocols dictating types of penalties for types of violations.

Luckily for the state, the S.F. Board had already gone through the drills. "We had so many unwritten rules of thumb around here that it wasn't automatic that we ourselves would keep them straight," says Kolb, whose agency put those rules on paper in 1993 in the form of a regional-level enforcement policy.

That regional policy, plus a lot of feedback from other regional boards, created the shape of the draft statewide policy to be considered at a public hearing on June 29. The new policy targets two main areas of consistency: first, what degree and type of violation should trigger an immediate enforcement action on the part of a regional board; and second, what factors should be considered, and how much weight should they be given, in calculating an ACL (administrative civil liability penalty). The new policy also describes types of penalties ranging from cash fines to cease-and-desist orders to clean up and environmental restoration - the enforcement action of choice these days among regional boards. "It's the first time that details on all these kinds of actions are showing up in one place on paper," says Bradley.

The long-term issue is whether the State Board will have the backbone to make the do-nothing regional boards do some enforcement. Bradley says the policy offers many more avenues for regional board accountability, both to the state and to the public.

Contacts: Mark Bradley (916)654-6498 or Larry Kolb (510)286-1307

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