A state Superior Court judge has ruled that the Central Coast’s Regional Water Quality Control Board is dragging its feet on curbing pollution in agricultural runoff. Judge Timothy A. Frawley found rules governing wastewater with fertilizer and pesticides produced by farms to be weak enough to violate state law.
He overturned the wastewater regulations, directing the board to implement more stringent rules to monitor and reel in the worst polluters, many of whom are located in the Santa Maria Valley.
A draft waiver rolled out in 2012 changed several wastewater rules from 2010. Notably, it pivoted away from holding farmers to certain hard standards on the levels of nitrates they could discharge—instead having the farmers “report progress towards” achieving certain “milestones.” It also shrank the number of farmers in Tier 3—the heavy polluters subject to the most stringent restrictions—from 11 percent to 3 percent.
A coalition of environmental advocacy groups sued, claiming that the wavier was so weak that it violated state law. The court agreed, overturning the 2012 draft waiver.
“What the judge is saying is that the Central Coast program doesn’t comply with the state’s water quality policy, and that it’s not in the public interest that essentially sets the bar for other regions throughout the state,” said Ben Pitterle, watersheds director for Santa Barbara Channelkeeper, one of the petitioners in the case. “The state will have to develop a program that requires the agricultural industry to verify that it’s protecting water quality, with real data to back it up, for the highest-risk areas and farms.”
A 2011 report by the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board singled out the Salinas River and the lower Santa Maria watershed as some of most polluted in their regions. Santa Maria showed the highest concentrations of the pesticide class pyrethroid.
Enough pyrethroids were found in the sediment at a test site on the Bradley Channel that the water could be diluted 42 times and still kill off test organisms. That dirt was more toxic than any measured in the study. Chlorpyrifos, another pesticide class, were also found in toxic levels higher than anywhere else at that site on the Bradley Channel.
The report also declared that “we are not seeing widespread improvements in nitrate concentrations in areas that are heavily impacted, and in fact a number of sites in the lower Salinas and Santa Maria areas appear to be getting worse.” Twelve bodies of water in the Santa Maria Valley are listed as having beneficial drinking water uses impaired by nitrate pollution.
Nitrate pollution is a serious problem. Irrigated agriculture contributes about 80 percent of nitrate loading into groundwater, according to the text of the decision, and “hundreds of drinking water wells serving thousands of people through the region have nitrate levels exceeding the drinking water standard.” Nitrates provide food for bacteria; they also cause health problems when ingested in excess—the scariest of which is ‘blue baby syndrome,’ where the blood of infants can’t properly carry oxygen.
“Fertilizer from irrigated agriculture is the largest source of nitrate pollution,” Pitterle said. “This isn’t just about fish. This is about protecting public health. There are communities in the Central Coast that have had their health impacted by water supplies.”
Concerns over what to do with wastewater date back to rules set by the board in 2004. According to Pitterle, those were focused on education, not monitoring. “It did not require that farms prove that their plan is working or that they’re implementing their plan,” he said. Monitoring sites under that 2004 framework were deliberately located downstream from several different farms, so that specific farms couldn’t be singled out as heavy polluters—a compromise Pitterle said was designed to get individual farmers to “buy in” to the wavier.
Frawley’s decision said much of the same—that “the 2004 agricultural order did not include conditions that allowed for determining individual compliance with water quality standards.”
Those 2004 rules were significant in that they were an early effort to regulate wastewater runoff. Looking to the Central Coast, other regional water quality boards around the state used them as a model. The Superior Court decision sets precedent calling for those boards to revise their rules, focusing not on education or self-reporting but on specific, verifiable plans that can hold individual polluters accountable.
This article appears in Aug 27 – Sep 3, 2015.