BILL ANALYSIS
Senate Appropriations Committee Fiscal Summary
Senator Christine Kehoe, Chair
1284 (Ducheny)
Hearing Date: 05/27/2010 Amended: 04/26/2010
Consultant: Brendan McCarthy Policy Vote: EQ 7-0
SB 1284 (Ducheny), Page 2
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BILL SUMMARY: SB 1284 exempts certain violations of waste
discharge reporting requirements from existing mandatory minimum
penalties. The bill also extends the time limit under which
dischargers must come into compliance with a permit requirement
from five years to ten years.
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Fiscal Impact (in thousands)
Major Provisions 2010-11 2011-12 2012-13 Fund
Reduced penalty revenueUnknown, potentially in the hundreds of
Special **
thousands
Additional enforcement cost Minor costs Special
*
* Waste Discharge Permit Fund.
** Waste Discharge Permit Fund and Cleanup and Abatement Fund.
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STAFF COMMENTS: SUSPENSE FILE. AS PROPOSED TO BE AMENDED.
Under current law, parties that discharge waste into rivers and
streams must meet waste discharge requirements set by the State
Water Resources Control Board or a regional water quality
control board. Dischargers are required to file periodic reports
documenting the amount and characteristics of their discharges.
Current law establishes mandatory minimum penalties of $3,000
for several specified violations of the law, including failure
to report on discharges. There are several exceptions to the
mandatory minimum penalty requirements. For instance, a regional
board may make an exception if the discharger has a plan for
coming into compliance within five years (or ten years if the
discharger is in the process of upgrading its facilities to meet
specified federal requirements).
SB 1284 exempts certain violations of reporting requirements
from mandatory minimum penalties. Specifically, the bill exempts
violations for a failure to file a discharge monitoring report
when the State Water Board or a regional water board has not
SB 1284 (Ducheny), Page 2
notified the discharger of the violation within 90 days. The
bill exempts violations for a failure to file a discharge
monitoring report for any period when there was no discharge.
The bill exempts violations for a failure to file a discharge
monitoring report for any period in which discharges did not
violate the effluent limitations in the waste discharge
requirement.
SB 1284 also allows the Water Board or regional water boards to
avoid assessing a minimum mandatory penalty if the discharger
has adopted a plan to come into compliance that will take not
more than ten years.
Dischargers are currently required to provide reports to
regional water board and/or the State Water Board. However, the
water boards do not have a system in place to systematically
record the receipt of these reports. Thus the water boards often
do not realize that required reports are overdue. In some
instances, dischargers have failed to file reports for several
years and were never notified of this violation. Upon later
review, these dischargers have been assessed very large fines
for ongoing violations of the reporting requirement.
The State Water Board indicates that, in order to provide timely
notification to dischargers of late reports, it will need to
upgrade its tracking system. The State Water Board indicates
that it will need about $360,000 in additional staff and
contract funds to upgrade their systems.
Because the bill exempts some violations from mandatory minimum
penalties, the bill is likely to reduce future penalty revenues.
The amount of any potential penalty revenue loss is unknown.
Staff notes that by eliminating penalties for non-reporting when
no discharge has occurred or when no violations of waste
discharge requirements have occurred, some dischargers may elect
not to file reports under these circumstances. However, because
the water boards may not know why dischargers have stopped
reporting, the water boards may incur additional enforcement
costs to follow up with dischargers that have stopped filing
reports. The extent of this impact is unknown.
AB 25 (Gilmore) provides alternative penalties for public school
districts that violate waste discharge requirements. That bill
is in the Senate Environmental Quality Committee.
SB 1284 (Ducheny), Page 2
As proposed to be amended by the author, the bill would make the
failure to file a report subject to discretionary penalties, but
not mandatory minimum penalties, if there were no discharges
during the time period covered by the report. The amendments
also change the penalty for failure to file a report to $3,000
for a first time failure to report, providing the discharger did
not violate effluent limits. The bill would apply to violations
that have not been finally imposed as of the date of enactment
of the bill.