We have this recording. Okay before we get into the meat of things, we are now recording. So we renewed the 1200-Z per federal regulations we have to renew every five years all NPDES permits must be renewed every five years. We renewed the current permit in August of 2017 and then shortly thereafter we had we received a lawsuit to reconsider the permit and then a reconsideration petition and those parties intervened together and we went through about seven I think it was seven months or ten months of settlement talks with the parties and we came to a settlement agreement on August 17th of 2018. The settlement agreement had short-term conditions that we had to re-issue the 2017 permit and include all these short-term conditions which we did in October of 2018 and then there were long-term conditions that we had to consider and so we began our rulemaking in February of 2019 to consider all the long-term changes to the industrial permit based on a consent decree and the settlement terms.
The settlement terms included timelines for us to re-issue the permit early so the draft permit had to be issued by October 2020 and we needed to issue or adopt a final permit by March 2021. So the rule making timelines we have authority under our administrative rules to adopt these permits by rule or order. The agency decided to issue this iteration of the permit by rule which means a very long process of advisory committee meetings and Environmental Commission adoption so we started our meetings in May of 2019 and we ended in June of 2020. We started the public hearing a little before the consent decrees deadline for us to submit a draft permit for public notice due to the March date deadline of having a final permit in order to address the comments and in order to make the timeline of issuing by the March 30th, we issued the draft permit early on August 17th and we held the public notice period open until October 30th 2020. Permit was adopted by our Environmental Quality Commission on March 21st and in order to have great webinars like this and to get assignment letters out and in order to start the permit at the beginning of a monitoring year, we decided to make the permits effective date July 1 2021. These are the members that served on our advisory committee. Really appreciate all
their efforts and input. Each meeting was about six, six and a half hours and our last few meetings because of the pandemic did go virtual so we used Microsoft Teams and Zoom. I will pause here because there is another question about eligibility for the permit. I will let Blair read at this time. Sure. Once again another anonymous attendee asks if stormwater industrial wastewater and community runoff all combined into a holding structure prior to discharge can the facility have an individual permit instead of a 1200-Z permit to deal with all discharges That's a great question and yes uh if you do have industrial wastewater you are ineligible for the 1200-Z the 1200-Z is strictly for stormwater discharge industrial storm water discharge. And even if you have a construction activity you must get the 1200-C for construction stormwater discharge so again the 1200-Z is uh is for industrial discharge with some authorized non-storm water discharges that are listed in the permit such as groundwater but not industrial wastewater.
We have a couple more questions that we will hold until we get to those slides one about mass reduction and one about monitoring letters and impairment assignment. So again we had six meetings focused on the settlement terms so the settlement terms required DEQ to review the national academies of science report on the EPA's permit so prior to our lawsuit and our settlement terms EPA issued the federal permit which is an industrial stormwater permit that applies to pretty small area in our nation most uh most states have been delegated the authority and most states write their own iteration of the stormwater industrial permit. However the MSGP which is the multi-sector general permit is EPA's overarching federal industrial stormwater permit and they had their own lawsuit and under their settlement terms they were required to pay for and consider many conditions in their permit and to solicit and to take the recommendations from this very um this it was a consensus report and it was very very robust so this national academy is a science report again was on the federal permit and we were required in our settlement to consider many of the conditions and recommendations in in that report we also were required to consider Washington State Ecology's methodology for water quality numeric effluent limits so Washington State does have some water quality numeric limits also applicable to 303 d listed or category 5 impaired waters and um we had some good conversations and uh presented on their methodology and the way that they came about um putting those limits into their permit we were required to consider numeric effluent limits both water quality and technology limits for water quality limits we were required to look at the 303-d listed impaired waters and for technology-based limits we were required to consider copper lead zinc and total suspended solids.
Also um once we were able to kind of hone down the where we were going to land in the 1200-Z applicable to these we were required to draft related monitoring and reporting requirements based on benchmarks or limits. So the rulemaking record can be found at this link. This is our industrial stormwater discharge permit rulemaking webpage. You can see there is the draft permit there, there is presentations that we presented an informational presentation we had during the public notice period we had a couple present we had an informational presentation and we also had a couple presentations we gave to the Environmental Commission so those are there and then we have the whole rule packet and the staff report which is staff report just includes a bunch of background and really good information on how we got to where we are these are drop downs here so the 1200-Z permit rulemaking advisory meetings you'll find all the meeting presentations all the meeting summaries and just a whole bunch of information if you would like to dig into where we've been and how we got here we also have an industrial stormwater permits page hopefully most of you have seen this and there we include the permit that was renewed on March 25th by rule becoming effective on July 1st 2021.
The final permit evaluation report which is the rationale and some in the background of how we came to the permit conditions you'll find the response to comments and a summary of changes we also created a map to help people figure out what geo region you're in and which impaired and and if you discharge to an impaired waterway and then there's the 2021 revised checklist so you will need to fill that out and submit that with your revised plan which is due the end of August. I will pause here for a minute to see how we're doing on questions. Blair yeah I'm glad you did we're getting quite a few I think one that is uh relevant to what you're talking about currently is from an anonymous attendee why are changes to the 1200-Z permit program being driven by judicial action other than legislative action by lawmakers in Salem it seems that any environmental group can bring a lawsuit against DEQ to change and influence regulatory programs. Yes great question. It's just the nature of how permitting and federal and state regulations go. Like i mentioned um the federal regulations which are mandated by Clean Water Act and federal legislation on and congress's authority on the federal side those come down to the states to to implement so there is a lot of uh there's a lot of um I guess participation on the federal level as far as Clean Water Act and federal regulations as far as the state mandating how we regulate facilities. There's less of that because we
are a delegated authority we are a delegated state agency that implements federal rules that are are made on more you know executive levels so um I will say us doing this by rulemaking has enhanced hopefully people participated in the rulemaking process they were the all the advisory committee meetings are open to the public obviously the litigants participated and were part of the advisory committee and having this permit adopted in to our administrative rules Oregon's administrative rules um limits the litigation that can happen going forward because our policy board our Environmental Quality Commission adopted this permit. Great thanks Chris uh we're getting a few more questions about guidance and fact sheets so I'll ask those and we have quite a few questions about tier two requirements and checklists so we can hold off on those until we hit the appropriate slide but Maul Foster, someone an employee from there would like to know will DEQ issue a fact sheet or guidance outlining the details of the methodology of the evaluation so um that is available in the permit evaluation report we do talk about how we came to uh include water quality-based effluent limits in the permit in addition the rules the rulemaking webpage. We discussed technology based and water quality based limits in you know very complete or you know we went very deep into federal rules and state rules and Oregon's water quality standards and how to implement these and how to regulate affluent limits in a general industrial stormwater permit so all that is also available to you in the rulemaking record. The meeting three and four were kind of the meat of the methodology and the limit discussion and this is not really a question but Justine Miller had a comment about the previous question about environmental groups being able to bring forth a lawsuit and she says it's because of the structural design of administrative law and the role of agencies being a quasi branch of government environmental groups can have the privilege of participation under the terms of standing at hand so that might augment the answer to the previous question um let me look quickly for more in this particular area.
Will a red line of the permit be issued, wants to be known by an anonymous attendee. Unfortunately due to the structural changes all the monitoring tables have been moved to Schedule B and there were just too many changes to make an a red line that would really not be a complete mess plus as any of you that have worked in a word doc document template of sorts when you do a track changes even if you do it at the end of the final documents it just really didn't show well and it was just extremely messy and not something that we'll be able to provide at this time. Hopefully, if you you know if you can do a compare your yourself if you've ever been able to do that you know if you have Adobe you can convert the pdfs to Word and do a compare through the word function. It's just it's just not something we'll be able to provide because of the multiple changes in the structural changes to the permit.
And with that Krista the rest of the questions are general that we can pretty much answer at the end I think or very specific to pollutant parameters benchmarks numeric limits and tier twos as I said so we can hold off on those until you hit the appropriate slide. Perfect thank you Blair. Sure. Right so the draft permit went out we received 390 comments from 37 different entities. We made
modifications from the draft to the final permit based on 143 comments of course all comments were considered one of the advantages of doing the rulemaking is we are bound by the administrative procedures acts so there are um besides all the federal rules for NPDES permitting and federal regulations we are also during this process were bound by a whole rule making set of rules rules and guidelines and again like I said all the advisory committees were open under public meetings law and all the comments needed to be considered which we do all the time anyway but there was another set of factors that we considered under the administrative procedures act. Of course some of the proposed permit conditions that were in that draft were not finalized and one of the factors that played into that were some of the conditions in the 1200-Z draft were based on the EPA's draft multi-sector general permit and as the timing of their renewal and the timing of our renewal we were able to have a final federal permit prior to excuse me prior to our final permit so some of the conditions that were in the draft permit were based on the draft federal permit and when they didn't finalize some of those conditions we also did not finalize some of those conditions. Some of the conditions that were not finalized in the permit that was adopted at the end of March was tier 1.5 and Appendix B so those no longer are in the permit and were a couple of the conditions that were formulated after EPA's permit and they didn't finalize their it was called Appendix Q and therefore we also did not finalize Appendix B which was a checklist of many source and operational controls based on certain industrial sectors.
Another item that was in the draft permit that didn't make it into the final permit was changing the sampling frequency in between when you take a sample to 72 hours that continues to be in the permit at a 14 day. 14 days between sample collection there was also based on the federal permit additional sector specific benchmarks for Sector O which is the oil and gas industry Sector P which is let's see I have my permit here, why can't I just, transportation come on. And Sector R which is the ship building sector um those at this time don't have any additional sector specific benchmarks. Sector P is the land transportation
and warehousing sector so in the draft permit there were some additional sector-specific benchmarks for those but those were not finalized because EPA did not finalize those and our Schedule E our sector-specific section of the permit which is pretty much the bulk of our permit it starts on page 46 and continues to page 144. Those pages of the permit are adopted directly from EPA from the multi-sector permits so we have yet to expand on any additional benchmarks that are not in EPA's federal permits. And then again the federal permit was adopted in between our draft and final permit so that was nice to have that finalized and we could adjust our 1200-C accordingly. So I'm just going to go through quickly kind of how the assignment procedures differ this time because we have issued a permit sooner than the five-year term so everyone that is an existing permit holder got a letter that basically said you'll continue to operate under the 2018 permit until July 1st when the new permit is effective and this is basically just a little bit of the letter so hopefully everyone received that and that is your formal coverage letter that says you are covered under the new iteration of the permit which goes from July 1 2021 to June 30 2026. You will not receive the first page of the permit that you're used to with your specific facility information on it. There was no renewal application required again because the current permit didn't expire so therefore the federal rules that require a renewal application are based on you know prior to expiration so because we issued early there was no renewal application and you will not receive a formal first page of the letter saying that you're covered under the permit. I will pause here Blair before I go into
the assignment letters which we will still be identifying all the monitoring requirements specific to each existing facility. All right Sarah asks how do we update our facility contact information since there is no renewal application. Good question Sarah. Of course, everyone's question is a good question. But, in the letters that everyone received shortly after the permit was adopted by the Environmental quality Commission there was my email and my cell phone number and I have been getting emails and calls from facilities saying that the contact information was incorrect so we did update when I got those you know I updated them all in our database we are using the same database obviously to do mailing for the monitoring assignment to identify what your monitoring will be for the next five years and hopefully those have been those of you that have asked me to change the database hopefully those will be corrected you can contact either your local regional office or your agent you should certainly contact if you're in an agent jurisdiction you could contact your agent but even the agents facilities information is held within our database so just contact me either by email or phone and I will get that changed.
I can't guarantee that the next mailing will have the correct information but every mailing from here on out should and we're actually moving to electronic reporting so everything will change once that happens. And Tabitha would like to know if the new permit requires an updated stormwater control plan that can be done by someone from our company can they make those updates or do they need to be done by an engineer anyone can update your stormwater pollution control plan and yes every existing facility must update your plan to include um the new provisions in the permit we will go through that in a little more detail later a couple more questions before we move on anonymous would like to know if they lease property at the Aalem airport and fall under the city of Salem's 1200-Z permit is there a list of responsibilities available for leases? There's a little information in the permit if you search for the word tenet there's some specifics around specific to these type of facilities, airports or large industrial parks, it is the responsibility of the permit holder to ensure they are compliant with the permit conditions so you would just coordinate with them and you know ensure that you're controlling industrial storm water and any materials that you have on site. And Johnny Levy would like to know he's curious to know that if flows through an industrial site are rerouted around the facility through a joining an industry-owned property but they do not come into contact with industrial activities is a 1200-Z still required And I can repeat that or I don't know if you have access to that Krista. I see it and no you don't need to repeat it. The industrial storm water permit is again for storm water that
comes into contact with industrial activity that discharges into any surface waters and origins so if there is no industrial activity coming in contact with the stormwater leaving your site you do not need an industrial stormwater permit there are if you do have the applicable SIC codes so the standard industrial classification code like I talked about those 29 larger sectors and those again are listed in schedule e of our permit from federal coming down from federal regulations starting at page 46. So if you do have one of those industrial standard codes and your stormwater, Ii mean there is a provision called no exposure certification that allows you to certify every five years that your industrial site that has an industrial code that's eligible for the 1200-Z has no industrial stormwater exposure to materials or contaminants and then you fill out the no exposure certification every five years that certifies that your site doesn't need an industrial permit and that you're certifying that there is no industrial exposure so that's what would be required if you do have a standard industrial code as required under the 1200-C. So we have it's not really a question it's a statement that the map does not seem to be working right it does not list the impairments in the waterways from the legend and I guess I could say that obviously DEQ will correct any broken links but would you like to add anything to that Krista about the impairment or impaired waterway map.
Sure yeah I spent about a month determining impairments and you know on this slide you can see the arrow there for the new assessment unit id this is a new identifier a new code of your receiving stream based on the new methodology and changes that went into the 2018-2020 integrated report which outlines the impaired waters in Oregon and so we and we know that the maps are not working completely well and we are working on it we just updated our memory and our IT team is working really hard to get those to function better. Great and a couple more just came in and we'll answer these and I think we have about 10 that are with tier 2 triggers or benchmarks or certain pollutant parameters so we can hold off on those but anonymous would like to know when will assignment letters be issued. Those should be going out very shortly for DEQ sites most of them have been drafted and it varies on what which region you're in all the agent sites I believe have already sent all their letters but you should get them very soon. Okay and anonymous again when should we expect to receive our permit letter with monitoring requirements if we do not receive it by a certain date how can we get another copy? How can we get another copy? Correct. So again hopefully most of the existing facility folks know maybe the regional person you can always contact me however I will be gone most of June so u your letters should be coming should be you know being mailed out there is a way to contact the regional facilities from our industrial web page. There's contacts on the right-hand side so you can use that if you don't know your regional contact but certainly contacting your regional staff is the best way.
Right we answered quite a few so we can move on if you'd like and then answer the rest at the relevant time. Great thanks so much Blair. So as we did in the last couple iterations of the permit ever since we've required impairment monitoring we will be sending you each of you the tables of your required monitoring this is what they will look like and because we've expanded the geo regions again that's another um granularity that we will you know certainly help you identify which geo region you're in um there are some nuance to the permit that um are a little different than what we had last time and that is um if you do have impaired waters if you do discharge into a 303 d impaired receiving water for copper lead zinc or pH because those also are statewide benchmarks you will only be assigned impairment concentrations and impairment monitoring for any of those pollutants so in the past we have assigned statewide benchmarks sector specific benchmarks and impairment monitoring for the same parameters and we will not be doing that this time around so again if you have an impairment for those pollutants those four pollutants you will not also be sampling on a statewide benchmark you will follow kind of the corrective action for any exceedance under the impairments in the permit which we'll go through in depth later but I just want to point out that very important fact and um excuse me you can read the specifics of that in um schedule b six I believe um in the permit that talks about um pollutant parameters that section schedule b6 kind of outlines when and uh when you'll get a kind of the hierarchy of when you'll get assigned certain benchmark or impairment monitoring if it's the same pollutant so again for the sector specific if you have been identified under the sector requirements to have a benchmark that's the same as your statewide benchmark you will just be sampling under the statewide benchmark and then under the impairment tables we are now identifying again that assessment unit id which we'll go through later as well but when you have kind of an idea and figure out how to use the maps or the new assessment database which is the database that outlines the category 5 pollutants based on our EPA approved 2018-2020 integrated report again the integrated report is the um is is our is the way that we um outline the impaired waters and their status throughout the state so um you will have on your letters and in your monitoring tables a sixth digit assessment unit ID and that six digit which the assessment unit IDs are much longer than that but the sixth digit is how you can search the database the assessment database and how you can search the maps and hopefully that will help you determine you know your impairments you can double check on those uh we did our best with the tools available to us to accurately um identify impairments based on your receiving stream for those of you that have more than one receiving stream or sector specific co-located co-located industrial classification codes so more than one sic code these monitoring tables won't won't identify more than one receiving stream or more than one standard industrial code but we do we do talk about the co-located industrial codes if you've identified those for us but we won't break out the co-located monitoring per monitoring location so that's what the tables don't do so there is more information needed and and um we will get those letters out soon and hopefully you'll have um around a month to to um identify any discrepancies that might be in the letter and and the letters will give you your regional uh contact and you can contact those people and we can revise any of the monitoring tables that we need to but hopefully most of them will be accurate. I'll pause there. Blair do you have any questions on monitoring assignments? We do and specific to impaired water bodies. Jason would like to know please verify that only category 5
303 d listed parameters for a water body trigger impairment monitoring for example sorry if copper is a cat four for a water body then no impairment monitoring. Correct, correct. Great and there's another one actually our first question somebody uh was prophetic and asking this quite a while ago does a letter outlining monitoring requirements in form as to whether discharge is to a 303 d listed water body for an impairment parameter. Yes so again it will be that third table down there it will list your receiving water your llid which is just a different identifier your auid which is the uh consistent identifier for the effective assessment database and map so you'll use that six digit instead of your llid to search the map in the assessment database and again the receiving water is based on your facility's location and the nearest receiving water so if you co-mingle and you discharge to through ms4 you know there could be some errors in your receiving water um so it's important that you really look at these tables and verify that they are accurate when you get them and like i said hopefully you'll have them at least by June or so um so you'll have you know at least a few weeks before the permit is effective to um to identify and remedy any discrepancies and one more krista specific to this topic by anonymous so if a facility isn't paired for copper a tier one report would not be required for one exceedance as it would be if it were a statewide statewide benchmark is that correct that's correct no more tier one for impairment exceedance right here ones do apply to statewide and sector specific benchmark accedences here's another one from somebody's galaxy phone also have the amount of impairment monitoring concentration pollutants been reduced from sampling yes and we'll go into that in depth later okay so i think that is it for this particular topic we can move on great so let's move on from kind of this assignment procedural stuff into where we are today so existing facilities um are currently operating under the uh permit that was reissued based on those short term settlement agreements in October 22nd 2018 and um will begin to be regulated under the reissued permit on July 1 2021 so this expiration date of July 31 2022 um doesn't have any relevance anymore again that was the five-year term expiration based on the effective date august 1 2027 2017 and a lot has happened since then and we have reissued the current permit a year early so the existing permit will cease to you will cease to be regulated under that starting July 1, 2021. So moving into the specifics of the new permit um we're going to go through the different kinds of monitoring and what's changed um and I will again pause after um each of the slides or every couple slides to make sure we're addressing any applicable questions so the statewide benchmarks we expanded the geo regions in the 2018 permit there was the Columbia River geo region the Columbia Slough region and the Portland Harbour region and and the rest of the state we've expanded those to be in line with our water quality standards that has has basically determined geo regions which is a which are developed from again EPA's eco regions so these are based on geography and um and topographic and ecosystems and all sorts of determinations to to assess the five main geo regions throughout the state of Oregon. So um we in the 1200 z have seven geo regions because the Columbia Slough has a TMDL for industrial water and the Portland Harbor is under a Superfund site based on contamination so that's why our permit has expanded to seven geo regions we decided to ensure that the seven geo regions uh were used this permit cycle because of um you know you can see in the benchmarks if you have those open there's a lot of differences when we do the modeling based on the ambient the actual water quality in the geo regions so that's how we do the benchmark work we look at the monitoring stations and all the water quality data that is available to us and we run those through models and we develop different benchmarks based on the different water quality throughout those geo regions so since we are expanding to have water quality impairment water quality possibly water quality based effluent limits based on water quality and the impairment concentrations we wanted to make sure that the concentrations um were applicable to these geo regions so that was one reason why we kind of expanded into the seven geo regions to make sure that the concentrations were as accurate as possible we removed oil and grease from the statewide benchmarks we recalculated the metals including um including uh creating marine waters geo regions so that actually made eight geo regions and we developed regional translators these are um is are are done by using the dissolved to total ambient again water quality data in the receiving streams and comparing those and then coming up with a translator that is more representative of the receiving stream and the aquatic life in it so basically when you compare dissolve to total you can translate from water quality to a benchmark by using these regional translators that are still protective of the aquatic life and develop a translator that is that shows how the dissolve fraction of of the discharge will will impact the water quality so it's a little complicated and I certainly am able to go into any details on that if you would like but we did that evaluation so again the monitoring table for the statewide benchmarks indicates which areas and which pollutant we calculated a we use the calculation for a regional translator backing up I will state why a translator is needed federal regulations require our permit monitoring to be in total and our water quality standards is in dissolved so again when we model the modeled values that come out for the benchmarks are in dissolved and EPA has created or has developed translators to help permitting authorities to translate from that dissolved either in a water quality or your modeled output into total which are required to be sampled for in an NPDES permit so you need that translator the the EPA translators have been used in the past and they are certainly fairly conservative they're almost one to one so therefore we have where the paired data was robust enough and we had enough data we did evaluate regional translators and use those when we were calculating from dissolve to total to create the benchmarks in those areas we also moved E-coli for the treatment works and the landfill sectors those benchmarks we move those into sector e so those are no longer statewide benchmarks for those two industrial sectors there are some chats are you seeing those Blair there's anything we need to address um a couple of questions in the Q&A that are pertinent to this.
So Kelly would like to know does this mean that the Portland Harbor geo region is remaining the same area as before that's correct okay the boundaries for the Portland Harbor the Columbia Slough and the Columbia River geo regions have not changed and since you mentioned e coli here's a question about e coli from lance if a water body like akina bay did i say that right is listed for e coli and you require testing but the site can show that it is a natural issue such as goal goals defecating on the surface what do you require to get a waiver um will you repeat that um if a water body is listed for e coli and you require testing but the site can show that is that it is a natural issue such as goals defecating on the surface what does DEQ or what do you require to get a waiver. So that's um we're talking about statewide benchmarks right now we'll go into great depth of impairment monitoring but I will address that question right now and for impairment monitoring we did a rule making water quality rule making in 2011 for bacteria so our bacteria standard does include wildlife so regardless if it is um if the if the contaminant of E-coli is discharging from some industrial activity operation or from birds on your site those are regulated the same under our water quality standards to protect our receiving waters so the waiver condition would be based on your sample results meaning that 406 organisms per 100 milliliters and it would be based on the monitoring waiver condition for impairment monitoring and another question for this slide has oil and grease been removed to be sampled in the new permit our facility does not have to sample for this compared to the current permit that's correct no more sampling of oil and grease under a statewide benchmark great i think there's one more question or a couple that maybe were answered earlier so we should answer those now again um so what is the next permit expiration date if not 2022 so the current permit will no longer be the permit existing facilities are registered under starting July 1 2021 so that expiration date of 2022 no longer has any relevance because we have reissued the permit early the permit that will be in effect in July 1 of 2021 all existing facilities will become regulated under that on that date you don't have to do anything you are you will continue to be um to you know have industrial storm water permitting regulation or um coverage you will continue to have coverage and the existing permit expires June 30 2026 another five-year term we've never had to cut a permit term short this is the first time so we're working through this the best we can and again the reason we cut it short was due to the lawsuit and the consent decree filed in Multnomah court requiring DEQ to issue early and another question from anonymous having to do with the permit being issued early would we be able to waiver out based on prior years numbers because of this permit being changed early no and I have some slides on monitoring waivers coming up but all monitoring waivers will be revoked and the federal regulations that we implement as a delegated state require that every permit cycle monitoring must begin until you're eligible for a waiver under that reissued permit and that should cover this portion of the presentation so you can move on Krista. Great thanks Blair. Thanks for all the thoughtful questions so here's the statewide benchmarks um again uh the two footnote there is um well the two superscript superscript i think is a footnote in the current permanent that I didn't include but that shows you when there was a regional translator used and then for the Columbia Slough E-coli has a statewide benchmark monitoring requirement and that footnote 1 refers to an error we identified in the integrated report for the Columbia Slough assessment units so basically the Columbia Slough is broken up into two assessment units and one had no e coli impairment for category 5 303 on the real 3d list no impairment for e coli the other assessment unit did have e coli identified as a 303 d listed parameter however that was an error so since that was um identified prior to the permit being issued we were able to catch that and um denote it in the actual permit that Columbia Slough dischargers will only be sampling for e coli as a statewide benchmark and will not be assigned any impairment monitoring for e coli so now I'll kind of go through this tiered system here of what happens if you have a statewide benchmark exceedance so again um talking about if your sample results come in over your benchmark so the statewide benchmarks include copper lead zinc pH and total suspended solids and then the Columbia Slough have the additional benchmarks of biological oxygen demand phosphorus and e coli based on the total daily maximum load or the TMDL so your exceedance response for a statewide benchmark is a tier one or and or uh or I guess not or sorry and the industrial specific checklist so these industrial specific checklists are mentioned in the permit they are not on the website yet we are still working on them and they are similar to the draft permits appendix b i talked about earlier and EPA's appendix q that was in their draft permit but was not finalized so uh EPA did a lot of work to identify certain source and operational controls specific to each sector we wanted to you know use that or build on that as a technical assistance tool for facilities that trigger tier one so we're still working on it and it will get up on the website hopefully prior to anyone sampling and receiving monitoring results and and needing to do a tier one corrective action so what that's going to look like is excuse me still a checklist it's it's in the checklist format and it will have universal source control and and and as operational control um bmps so things you can look at to help a facility that in doing their tier one investigation any of you that looked at appendix b it was 630 some pages i think it was over 600 pages based on EPA's checklists so and a lot of those were repeat throughout the sectors so what we've done is we've we've made one universal checklist for all sectors so it is up it is a facility's choice if they would like to use the checklist that will be made available to help them maybe determine some bmps to uh you know reduce their pollutant loading and get the next sample of industrial storm water under the benchmarks and then in addition you will do the universal and you will do the sector specific that is applicable to your standard industrial classification codes so that's what this industrial checklist is it's just we didn't want to just trash the whole idea of having a additional technical assistance document to help people identify pollutant sources so we're continuing with that but it is an optional checklist so a tier one report will be required and the checklist is optional continue to monitor at least for one full year which is july 1 through june 30 until eligible for a waiver and then each year you need to evaluate your tier 2 geometric mean based on the previous year's samples so in the current permit you do it one time per permit cycle during the second year of coverage in the permit that becomes effective July 1 2021 the next iteration of the permit the tier 2 evaluation is required for each discharge point based on each full monitoring year's data every year so each august 15th you will report your geometric mean based on your sample results and you will reevaluate your geometric mean annually unless you trigger tier two so if you trigger tier two then you no longer need to report the geometric mean nor do you continue to have to do any tier ones or do any additional controls above your tier two corrective action and any tier two corrective action needs to be installed something appropriate at all your substantially similar discharge points so if you're exempt from monitoring based on your discharge points being substantially similar you need to address your tier 2 corrective action for those non-monitored discharge points that are associated with the monitoring point that triggered tier two so Ii will pause again because that's a lot of information yes and a lot of questions are coming in based on that uh the first one from Johnny speaking of waivers why was the eligibility requirement for a monitoring waiver increased from four consecutive samples to five how does this increase in monitoring improve receiving water quality well uh again we looked at a lot of reports we looked at EPA's permit there was a lot that went in to the decisions that were finalized in the next iteration of the permit the national academies of sciences report recommended that four sample results are not appropriate to grant a waiver EPAs permit also increased the amount of samples needed in order to discontinue monitoring and a geometric mean really the appropriate amount of samples to evaluate a geometric mean are five so those are some reasons why we increased it to five samples again there's more information later specific to monitoring waivers and we are requiring every facility to reinstate monitoring the last year and um depending on your facilities discharge it you know it could impact water quality correct okay and Jessica would like to know do you need to monitor at substantially similar points after putting in the tier two treatment yes okay um can't or Sarah would like to know can you clarify and I think she's talking about the previous slide with the table this table indicates total zinc at fourteen hundredths of a milligram per liter but the draft permit indicates 12. and that's for the Willamette Valley. I don't know if there's a discrepancy there.
So the change for the Willamette Valley zinc was based on the regional translator being used to calculate from the modeled dissolved values to the total benchmark bruce would like to know so any waiver based on substantial similarity expires now and then what is needed to re-establish substantial similarity you're substantially similar determination that's been approved on your site based on your stormwater pollution control plan and that being reviewed by DEQ or your agent does not expire now you will continue to work off of you know you will continue to only have to monitor your monitoring points based on any substantially similar determination that's been approved based on your plan going forward if you're in tier two now the current permit requires you to address your substantially similar discharge points if you've triggered tier two in the current permit cycle or previously you were to put um appropriate treatment on all those discharge points and therefore you would be sampling those if you had triggered tier 2 and you've already installed and you need to you can discontinue sampling if that is the case once you meet the monitoring conditions so once a facility has triggered tier two for your substantially similar determination is revoked basically and you have to install treatment because the substantially similar determination is based on monitoring your discharge at one location and exempting the rest of those discharges because the site has similar bmps and similar industrial materials and you know the the determination is based on that similar effluent the similar discharge for those discharge points being similar to the monitored so under that rationale if you trigger 2 2 for the monitored point the substantially similar discharge points also need to have tier two addressed and monitoring has to resume and if you and then those substantially similar discharge points become monitoring points and are eligible to be discontinued to be sampled based on the waiver condition but no longer are eligible to be discontinued to be sampled based on the substantially similar discharge condition that was a lot let me know if you have a follow-up Bruce there are quite a few questions about waiver eligibility and conditions so i think you can refine that a little more by answering these um anonymous would like to know my company has had a waiver accepted every year since participation starting 2012 and 13. that should create enough history to justify a continuous waiver that's a question again we're required as a delegated authority to reinstate monitoring the first year of a reissued permit great um Danielle asks can we submit our five samples in one year to trigger the waiver as long as we have the 14 days in between the samples or do we have to wait until the second year to submit that fifth sample you can you can sample five times within the first full monitoring year which is July 1 through June 30. as long as you make 14 days and again well so that means you can't get it in the first six months you can't sample five times in the first six months you have to wait till the January 1 to June 36 months to get your additional samples and then you can be eligible for a waiver yes a couple more questions on waivers just to clarify waiver eligibility over consecutive years doesn't create a history of being below benchmarks it probably does and it certainly shows that you are meeting the waiver condition the waiver criteria has changed and because we're reissuing the permit you need to establish that baseline again did the requirements change from waiting 14 days to 72 hours between sample events the draft had 72 hours it did not get finalized in the permit that was adopted by the EQC the permit currently and the permit for the next five years starting July 1 2021 has 14 days in between samples thanks and the last one I see on monitoring from anonymous can you collect five samples in the same monitoring year to qualify for a waiver during that year yes again you cannot collect five samples in the first six months you can collect um you know two or three but uh you need to uh wait till the second six months to get to um apply for a waiver and we do talk about waivers i'm happy to re i'll hold off on those then um here's a more general question what is the difference between geo region and receiving water receiving water is the stream that your industrial storm water discharges into so depending on your facility location it's generally the nearest stream to your site just depends on your conveyance or if you are on a waterway or you your stormwater enters into a pipe system through the municipal system but your receiving stream is the water body that actually takes your industrial storm water discharge you know where it enters into the uh stream your industrial storm water enters into the stream a geo region is the larger geographic areas that DEQ uses for water quality standards and we use in this permit to distinguish like areas where we break the state up into larger areas that are the same type of ecosystem and Johnny asks what is the purpose of reestablishing baseline after permit reissuance if industrial activities have not changed substantially again we have no leeway to change federal rule as a delegated npds permit regulating authority we must follow federal regulations and federal rules federal rules require each five years facilities must reinstate monitoring so there are quite a few questions about tier 2 requirements are you going to expand on that or talk more about that Krista or would you like to hear those questions now we do go into corrective action a little later okay this is simply um you know kind of the overview of what happens if you exceed a statewide benchmark okay then we can ask a couple of those now um gwen wants to know what if they triggered a tier two this past year under the old permit and now higher marine water benchmarks have negated exceedances what do we design mass reduction to it depends when you triggered tier two so if you are still developing your tier 2 corrective action and your a pacific ocean discharger those are the facilities that will be assigned a marine water steel region you may adjust your tier 2 plan and i think this goes right in line with that if a facility has tier two exceedances in previous permit terms how does that affect monitoring and corrective action requirements for this new permit term all facilities must implement and adhere to any deadlines or tier 2 corrective action that was triggered in the 2018 permit those don't really change if you are one of the facilities that was required to submit a plan or implement or is still implementing a tier 2 corrective action and have yet to put things in the ground and your benchmarks have changed um you can talk to your regional staff and you are able to adjust your tier 2 corrective action to those benchmarks deadlines and the tier 2 corrective action that was triggered in the current permit those don't change right i have quite a few questions that were answered by that are you going to clarify which parameters are benchmarks and which are numeric limits so these are your statewide benchmarks again your monitoring tables that each facility will receive will outline if you have an impairment for the same parameters where you have a statewide benchmark you will be assigned impairment monitoring only you will not be assigned a statewide benchmark so your exceedance response will follow schedule a 13 under the permit the exceedance based on impairment monitoring and one last question before we move on it appears that if we exceed certain parameters such as ph copper lead or zinc and discharge to a cat53o3d water this would escalate to a reduced limit is this correct it could and i will go in depth in that yes okay great i think that's all i have for you now Krista thanks Blair all right so let's go over the sector specific benchmarks real quick um again we recalculated all of the sector specific benchmarks based on Oregon's water quality standards so as I mentioned at the beginning of the presentation we adopt that schedule e the sector-specific requirements from EPA therefore previously we've never we've never analyzed the benchmark concentrations um because they well they were based on federal water quality standards so we've never analyzed if our oregon's water quality standards are different um than the federal water quality standards and we did that this time so a lot of the benchmarks changed um based on that body of work so now um you know our water quality standards are our foundation for protecting our water quality and now all the benchmarks listed in schedule e are um in line and derived from oregon's water quality standards instead of the federal water quality standards as i mentioned earlier e coli was moved to schedule sector e schedule e um for the treatment works and landfills out of the statewide benchmarks we have included saltwater benchmarks in schedule e and no additional benchmarks were added based on the EPA permit discontinuing to finalize the additional benchmarks for sector o p and r so a sector specific benchmark exceedance so again many of the revised many of the concentrations have been revised um all the metals have been uh calculated based on the mean of hardness of the geo region so when we model the benchmarks we you we one of the outputs is the um the hardness for that geo-region area and we use that calculation which is needed in order to in order to calculate you need the hardness in order to calculate based on our water quality standards um you need hardness in order to calculate the metals so those were done and that is um that's at the beginning of schedule e in table 10. those medals we haven't done that in the past again you won't be assigned a sector specific benchmark for the same pollutant that has a statewide benchmark and if you exceed it's a tier one report a tier one corrective action response and again the industrial checklist is optional to you and then you continue to monitor at a minimum one full year until eligible for a waiver so let's get into impairment monitoring there was a lot of changes here and hopefully we can clear some things up so again impairment monitoring is only applicable to discharges into category 5 303t listed waters so category 5 is just another way of saying 303d list the 303d list is the list of impaired waters for parameter that has yet to develop a TMDL we narrowed the pollutant list to six pollutants copper lead zinc pH e-coli and iron and that was based on a substantial amount of work done by our contractor pg environmental pg environmental was hired to help us in the rule making with a lot of technical expertise and um and work i mean they really um they really performed a lot of technical work for us so one of the technical scopes that they performed for us was to evaluate all the monitoring data from from 2000 to 2018 and to see based on a 10 threshold what parameters were the industrial stormwater discharge exceeding and that's how we narrowed the pollutant list for impairment monitoring those pollutants showed that we were exceeding 10 or more so we recalculated the impairment concentrations again using the median hardnessIi think the last slide was incorrect so we used median not mean those are slightly different and again if you exceed going forward after July 1 2021 if you exceed sampling for an impairment pollutant you no longer have to perform a tier one because we have a whole new framework for exceedance based on triggering and escalating to a water quality based affluent limit then all this work was done based on the new 2018 2020 integrated report and the new 303 d list um that very large effort of evaluating and re-doing the 303-d list and all the impaired water designations throughout the state that that they went through a huge methodology change and that resulted in a lot of d listings for the metals that industrial stormwater have sampled for in the past and just a whole new way of looking at how we how we assess impaired waters and so that was a huge effort that kind of went what went um went on while we were doing the effort of renewing the permit so I'll pause there for any questions yes jean would like a clarification um your response earlier was to exceedances of tier 2 on the current permit term and what he wants to know if there are currently installed tier 2 measures in place from a previous permit can they be removed or bypassed if the facility feels it can meet the new applicable limits because a lot of the benchmarks went up due to using regional translators a lot of these questions of what we do with the treatment we have on site need to be addressed between you and your agent or your regional staff tier 2 corrective action becomes part of your stormwater pollution control plan and is enforceable um we will need to evaluate each of those type of situations between you know you'll need to evaluate that with your regional staff or your agent um i i just can't answer that on a broader scale and someone from malfoster is the tier 2 checklist required for all infiltration facilities not installed as part of the tier 2 action or is that evaluation optional to avoid having to sample overflows let me read this one for myself just a minute please it's pretty much right in the middle of the q a so um let's hold that question until we get to the new condition which is schedule a6 which is the mass reduction measures certification and um let's talk about that then Blair okay I would think the next or the top three questions would fall under the same category so we can hold off on those as well so we're probably good to move on Krista thanks again all right so again we've narrowed the list and there's a new framework in the permit for extenses based on two consecutive exceedances you your facility and based on that discharge point that discharges into a 303 d receiving stream will neat will be will escalate to a numeric water quality based effluent limit for copper lead zinc and ph or a narrative water quality based effluent limit for two consecutive exceedances of iron and e coli so we go into more detail on this this is the big big change um that i'm sure uh folks that discharged to a category 5 water have a lot of questions about again a lot of the listings and a lot of the pollutants that you may discharge now may have changed based on the 2018-2020 integrated report and um the rationale for this is an impaired water on the 303-d list has no capacity to take more pollutant that it's impaired for so if it's impaired for copper it's already degraded to the extent of having too much copper already in that water body so as a regulated entity you must not be allowed to add more of that pollutant into it already impaired water that has no more assimilating capacity for that pollutant so just some more schematics and some more information on how this will work so um you'll be identified in your uh impair you'll be notified in your monitoring table identification that you discharge to a 303 d listed water body you'll be given the assessment unit id so you'll be able to put that into the assessment database or into the map you'll be able to see what receiving water we say you discharged to if any of these seem inaccurate to you please contact us so that we can we can look at it again for you so once you've been identified that you're receiving stream is a category five receiving stream and you have a two consecutive sample exceedances then your concentration will or your type of monitoring will change from an impairment monitoring to a limit you will have up to two years to adjust your site as needed so a two-year compliance schedule is available to you to make changes and again um this is a new framework for copper lead zinc and ph i'm going to do one more slide and then i will um actually probably it's already 11. i want to take just a five minute break for the webinar um so i'm gonna do one more slide we'll answer a couple questions and we'll take a five minute break um so this is a shift too so for i i mentioned earlier about us going through rule making for water quality standards for our bacteria indicators so in conjunction with the upgra uh the changes in the methodology and the um integrated report that should have accurately used the maps and the bacteria indicators from the rule making to assess the correct bacterial impairment we are asking that facilities mostly on the coast and in the bays that have fecal coliform and enterococcus sampling we're asking that you sample that bacterial indicator there is no concentration for that you sample four times a year and report on the dmr because there's no concentration that you're eligible for a waiver for you will likely sample for the five-year term unless you have non-detects because the waiver eligibility for impairment will allow you to discontinue monitoring for fecal coliform and enterococcus if you have two years of non-detects we currently use e coli as a surrogate we're discontinuing that practice because it's not really an appropriate surrogate for the other bacterial indicators and when you're sampling these depending on your sample results you could be required to have a narrative water quality base limit similar to or the same as e coli in the permit if we identify that you know your discharge is is causing a health impact so because fecal coliform and enterococcus are related to shellfish harvesting and public recreation swimming we will look at those um as we need to for those facilities that discharge to a 303 d listed receiving water that's impaired for those in bacterial indicators but what we're really trying to do is get data for the correct bacterial indicator for the correct impairments based on these bacterias um i am going to go one more actually so here's the the list of the concentrations this is the concentrations you will monitor for based on your geo region and the concentration for your limit will be the same as for your impairment monitoring if you trigger a numeric limit and i will pause there and then we'll go through kind of the exceedance response and we will go through in depth about the compliance schedule and what that means for facilities do you want to take a couple questions krista before we pause sure okay can two consecutive exceedances of a statewide benchmark lead to a numeric limit no again if you have if you're re if your industri
2021-05-30