The Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board is about to issue a storm-water permit to the cities in Ventura County that is going to hit us like an out-of-control train. Out of control because the permit will increase the annual cost of storm-water treatment from about $50 to $900 per home. This will affect every home and business in Ventura County.

The storm-water permit should adhere to the Federal Clean Water Act, which includes methods of tackling storm-water pollution: Best Management Practices and a concept of Maximum Extent Practicable. BMPs include good housekeeping practices and installed treatment devices. The MEP concept was introduced because, even when you correctly use BMPs, they don't consistently remove pollutants. This is because weather and rain events are highly variable and affect the performance of treatment devices.

So, instead of following the Clean Water Act, the board is proposing Municipal Action Levels (numeric limits), not applicable to Ventura County, to limit the concentrations of pollutants coming out the end of storm drains. Even though BMPs cannot consistently remove all of these pollutants, cities must meet those concentrations 80 percent of the time or face mandatory minimum penalties of $3,000 per exceedence.

Cities will have two years to implement BMPs for cleaning their storm water. After that, cities will be fined by the state. No excuses, no waivers. You violate, you pay, per Senate Bill 709, signed into law by former Democratic Gov. Gray Davis. For the city of Fillmore, this could mean $231,000 per day and bankruptcy.

To try to comply with the board's new approach to controlling storm-water treatment, Fillmore would have to convert at least 22 miles of the public parkway in residential neighborhoods to bioretention areas ($18 million); install storm-water treatment wetlands at the end of storm drains ($14 million); and require each existing home and business to retrofit and install onsite storm-water treatment ($3,000 per home — total, $12 million; $5,000 to $100,000 per business — total, $10 million). The city installations and maintenance would cost residents $900 per year or $75 per month. This would be in addition to their cost to install and maintain their own onsite storm-water treatment devices.

The Ventura County cities would be the first in the state and first in the nation to have to meet numeric limits and retrofit existing communities with storm-water treatment. In 2007, the State Water Quality Control Board convened a blue-ribbon panel of scientists, engineers and academic experts to consider the numeric-limit approach the board is proposing. This panel determined: "It is not feasible at this time to set enforceable numeric effluent criteria for municipal BMPs and in particular urban discharges."

The Los Angeles board has chosen to ignore the conclusions of the state board blue-ribbon panel and Environmental Protection Agency standard practice in the federal Clean Water Act and is insisting upon placing this unrealistic approach and excessive limits in the permit.

To add insult to injury, cities currently do not have any access to or methods for raising the funds to implement the desire of the board. So, there is a Grand Canyon of a divide between the requirements of the draft permit and our ability to implement them.

The cost to retrofit the existing community is so great that the Fillmore City Council is asking the board to remove these requirements from the draft Ventura County permit and consider them at a statewide level. If the state decides existing communities should be retrofitted with storm-water treatment, then the state should establish a financial mechanism to implement it.

— Bert J. Rapp, P.E., is the public works director for the city of Fillmore.