BATTLE GROUND — The city of Battle Ground on Monday decided to move ahead with a five-year regional stormwater agreement with the state Department of Ecology.
The agreement calls for the city to bolster water quality monitoring, at its own expense, in order to meet the terms of the Clean Water Act. The city will pool its resources with other regional partners during the next five years to stay in compliance with its National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit, extended last summer. Vancouver, Camas, Washougal, Clark County and Battle Ground all fall under the new permitting regulations.
Not all Battle Ground City Council members approved of the agreement, with Councilman Philip Johnson calling it an example of extortion perpetrated by bureaucrats in Olympia. He said the requirements act as an unfunded mandate because they force the city to pay for the new requirements.
“Shame on all those in Olympia, who don’t speak for the rest of us,” Johnson said. “We all foot the bill for unelected bureaucrats and autocrats who run us with their thumbs on us.”
By entering into a collective fund to monitor stormwater sites, the city will be on the hook for $36,680 over five years, which translates to roughly $2 per resident. Extrapolated across the state, Johnson called the requirement a “shakedown of millions of dollars.” The Association of Washington Cities has also opposed the requirements.
The other option before Battle Ground was to monitor the sites on its own, which Clark County estimated would cost $200,000 a year for five years.
Either way, the city was destined to pay for the new permitting requirements, Public Works director Scott Sawyer said. Entering into a regional fund to pay for monitoring efforts was the obvious choice, he added, because it was the cheaper of the two options.
Findings from the city’s monitoring efforts will determine whether more unfunded mandates come down the pike in the future, Sawyer said.
“This will be the thermometer to see how things are going,” he said.
Stormwater runoff is federally regulated and is considered a major source of water pollution. Increased regulations are intended to mitigate the effects of new development on the environment.
Such mandates tied to water quality are a concern for the city. If monitoring shows improvements have been made to stormwater quality, then further regulations may stop. Otherwise, more regulations may occur in the future, Sawyer said.
One change the city plans to implement, starting in 2016, will be revising the city code to emphasize low-impact development. That’s an approach to manage stormwater by preserving or re-creating landscape features to minimize the seepage of waste products.
