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Waiver Challenged

Sixty-seven groups supported a petition late last year demanding that farms discharging pesticide-laden irrigation water into Central Valley rivers and streams no longer be let off the regulatory hook. This January regulators agreed to consider their petition and research its merits, baby steps toward a possible major shift in direction in how the state holds agriculture accountable for its impacts on water quality.

The petition — filed by DeltaKeeper and CALPIRG — seeks to terminate a waiver granted by the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board in 1982, exempting dischargers of irrigation return waters from meeting state waste discharge reporting requirements.

"Agriculture is responsible for at least half, if not more, of pollutant loads to our waterways, and it’s time to regulate them," says DeltaKeeper’s Bill Jennings. According to the petition, the regional board, State Board and U.S. EPA identified 480,000 acres of Delta waterways as impaired by chlorpyrifos, DDT, diazinon and other pesticides in 1999. Another 565 miles of rivers, sloughs and creeks in the Central Valley are also identified as impaired by chemicals used to kill crop pests.

According to the Farm Bureau’s Tess Dunham, the petition is "frivolous and unnecessary" because Senate Bill 390, passed in 1999, requires the review and renewal by 2003 of all waivers anyway.

Regardless of how it might happen, termination of the waiver would free the Board to apply any number of controls from its regulatory toolbox, ranging from waste discharge permits for irrigators to mandatory BMPs and monitoring.

The Farm Bureau’s position is that the waiver should be maintained, and that any control of farm discharges should be done through California’s 1999 Non-Point Source Management Plan. "We’re not point-source polluters, "says Dunham, "we’re on the ground, in the rain, in the dirt. Without the waiver, individual farmers could be liable for waste discharge requirements designed for point sources."

"We will examine the whole issue, not just focus on the points of the petition," says the Board’s Rudy Schnagl. "If we decide to directly regulate irrigators, this will be a major change in our whole approach from the past."

Removing the waiver would touch on current Board initiatives to curb (through TMDLs) not only pesticides, but also other pollutants found in irrigation water, among them salt, boron, selenium and nutrients contributing to dissolved oxygen problems. Board staff research and public workshops on the waiver are expected to be complete by mid-summer.

Contact: Bill Jennings (209)464-5090

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