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2.1 USEPAs Phased Approach

Return to Phase II Storm Water Management Plan

To carry out the congressional mandate of the 1987 amendment to the Clean Water Act, USEPA developed a phased approach to permitting storm water discharges and requiring controls to address the adverse impact of such discharges.  Phase I involved the submittal of National/State Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (N/SPDES) permit applications to cover certain municipal and industrial storm water discharges by 1992 and 1993, depending on the specific nature of the discharge.  Phase II involves the submittal of N/SPDES permit applications for all other discharges by March 10, 2003.

USEPAs phased approach included five types of storm water discharges under Phase I, which it issued in regulation form in 1990. These discharges included:

  • Dischargers with N/SPDES permits;
  • Dischargers engaged in 11 different types of industrial activities;
  • Large municipal separate storm sewer systems (referred to as MS4s) with populations greater than 250,000;
  • Medium separate storm sewer systems (MS4s) with populations between 100,000 and 250,000; and
  • Storm water discharges that USEPA or a state determined to be contributing to a water quality violation.

To ease the burden on the N/SPDES authority for the hundreds of thousands of Phase I permit applications, USEPA allowed for three types of permits:  individual, group and general, with general permits providing the vast majority of the coverage for Phase I discharges.

Although USEPA was able to develop the Phase I approach into a final regulation within 2 to 3~years of the 1987 Clean Water Act, it took approximately 10~years to develop the Phase~II approach into a final regulation due to the complexities associated with the numerous interests and concern of the thousands of small communities that Phase II would cover.

To allow for their input in the development of the Phase II regulation, USEPA created a federal interagency review panel that included the Office of Management and Budget, and the Small Business Administration.  It also included the participation of the Storm Water Federal Advisory Subcommittee of the Urban Wet Weather Federal Advisory Committee, and it solicited comments on its various drafts of the Phase II approach from a number of professional organizations such as the Association of Municipal Sewerage Agencies.

After years of development, including legal action by outside groups, resulting in a court-issued consent decree, USEPA issued the Phase II program as a draft rule in January 1998 and eventually as a final rule in December 1999.  The final rule affects more than 5,000 small communities, as well as hundreds of thousands of small construction sites, all of which must have obtained N/SPDES permit coverage as of March 10, 2003.