This Week in Washington is a weekly publication of the Water Environment Federation’s Government Affairs department. It provides updates on the latest legislative and regulatory developments that affect the water and wastewater communities.

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August 11, 2006

Provided by the Water Environment Federation, Alexandria, VA

EPA Issues Memo to Regions Clarifying Phased TMDLs
This week the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) posted a memorandum sent by Benita Best-Wong, Director of EPA's Assessment and Watershed Protection Division, to Regional Water Division Directors on August 2 clarifying EPA's interpretation of the term "phased TMDL" as used in EPA guidance, and explaining the distinction between "phased TMDLs," "staged implementation," and "adaptive implementation".  In the memo, EPA explains that phased TMDLs are related to TMDL development while staged implementation and adaptive implementation are post-development implementation concepts.  EPA recommends that the term phased TMDLs only be used for TMDLs that need to be established for scheduling reasons even though there are significant data gaps and uncertainty.  In these TMDLs the State would revise the loading capacity and allocation scheme as additional information is collected.  EPA considered adaptive implementation to be an iterative implementation process, and includes water quality trading as an adaptive implementation tool.  EPA states that it doesn't anticipate adaptive implementation to lead to the re-opening of a TMDL, but does acknowledge that the Agency needs to work on clarifying how TMDLs can be written to provide for adjustments in the allocations in approved TMDLs. TMDLs with staged implementation are those in which implementation is carried out in several distinct stages.  EPA differentiates this from the adaptive implementation scenario because it does not require significant adjustments to the load and wasteload allocations.  The memo is available at http://www.epa.gov/owow/tmdl/tmdl_clarification_letter.html.  (SRT)

WEF Releases New Peak Wet Weather Management Guide
This week the Water Environment Federation (WEF) announced the release of its new electronic publication, Guide to Managing Peak Wet Weather Flows in Municipal Wastewater Collection and Treatment Systems. Developed under a Water Quality Cooperative Agreement with EPA, the document is designed to help owners, planners, designers, and operators of wastewater collection and treatment systems improve and maximize performance during peak wet weather events. Publicly owned treatment works (POTWs) - often faced with a limited ability to control highly variable wet weather flows - must propose alternatives, assess impacts, and proactively communicate with regulators and the community during wet weather events. To help address these issues, WEF's guide provides a method for POTWs to be more proactive in planning for these events and outlines a process that can be used to build support for real-world solutions to improve overall water quality. In addition, the guide supports implementation of EPA's proposed Peak Wet Weather Discharge Policy. Announced in December 2005, the policy applies the bypass standard of "no feasible alternatives" to wet weather diversions at POTWs serving sanitary sewers. If finalized, it will require a comprehensive utility analysis to identify and assess alternatives to discharges and restrict diversions when peak flows are largely due to poor collection system maintenance or lack of investment in capacity.  The guide ($10 members/$25 non-members) is available for download at www.wef.org/Marketplace. (SRT)

Please Note: This Week in Washington will not be distributed over the next 3 weeks while Congress is on recess.  The next issue will resume on September 8.

This Week in Washington is provided by the Water Environment Federation, Alexandria, VA. To receive This Week in Washington by e-mail, contact Lisa Jones, (703) 684-2400 ext. 7741, ljones@wef.org. For more information on this week's stories, please contact the WEF staff whose initials appear at the end of the item in which you are interested. TW –Tim Williams (703) 684-2437, twilliams@wef.org; SRT - Sharon Thomas, (703) 684-2423, sthomas@wef.org; SJH - Sam Hadeed (703) 684-2418, shadeed@wef.org; PS-Patricia Sinicropi (703) 684-2416, psinicropi@wef.org. This Week in Washington is available on-line at http://www.wef.org/GovernmentAffairs/TWIW/.