Research Idea Details

Incorporating Sustainability in NPDES Stormwater Permitting

Research Idea Scope

  1. Perform a sustainability evaluation of 3 to 5 recent NPDES stormwater permits in the State of California  
  2. Develop metrics and a simple method to rank permits from a sutainability prespective

Urgency and Payoff

Many recent NPDES stormwater permits have been contentious. Regulators feel they are not doing enough while permitees feel they are too onerous and make them vulnerable to lawsuits. Both agree that preserving the quality of our waterways is a desirable objective. Therefore if there is an accepted method to evaluate proposed regulations based sustainability criteria it will be easier to develop and enforce permits.

Suggested By:
Bhaskar Joshi, CalTrans
Submitted:
04/22/2011