Setting Watershed Goals: Water Quality Standards

Under the Clean Water Act, states are required to establish water quality standards that define the goals and pollution limits for all waters within their jurisdictions. Water quality standards give the Act much of its meaning — and its force. They determine which healthy waters need protection, which waters must be restored and how much they must be restored. Understanding water quality standards will help you apply all parts of the Clean Water Act to improve the health of your watershed.

Standards are water body-specific. In other words, different standards may be assigned to different water bodies depending on how those water bodies are used. If your state water quality agency doesn’t properly assign the standards for your river, stream, lake, wetland or estuary, your work to protect or restore it will be harder than necessary.

In watersheds where standards are weak, harmful activities can be perfectly legal. This is why it’s important to address weak standards in your watershed before specific harmful activities are proposed.

At first glance, water quality standards may seem to be of interest only to scientists, bureaucrats and policy analysts, but water quality standards can be a matter of life or death for each and every stream. Nearly every Clean Water Act provision depends on them.

Major components of water quality standards

In establishing water quality standards, states must take three major, interrelated actions. They must 1) designate uses (such as swimming or fishing); 2) establish water quality criteria (such as the maximum levels of bacteria allowed); and 3) develop and implement antidegradation policies and procedures.

State implementation and enforcement of these three interrelated components of the Clean Water Act is fundamental to the nation’s clean water system.

Setting water quality standards

All fifty states, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Territories, and a growing number of Native American tribes have been authorized to administer water quality standards programs. In Clean Water Act parlance, and thus in this chapter, the term “states” is commonly used as shorthand to refer to all these political entities.

In some states, water quality standards are adopted by the state legislative body and signed into law by the governor. In other states, standards are adopted through an administrative agency’s rulemaking procedures and then submitted to EPA for approval. For Native American tribes, the governing tribal body or authority is responsible for adopting water quality standards. The adopted tribal standards may be submitted to EPA in order to receive federal authority to implement them. Tribal water quality standards may exist even if they have not been formally approved by EPA.

Regional EPA offices must disapprove (and may promulgate other) standards if they do not meet five factors spelled out in regulations. All EPA-promulgated state standards can be found at 40CFR131.31-42.

The public role

Fortunately, the Clean Water Act allows citizens to play a significant role in getting standards right by requiring states to provide regular opportunities for public involvement. Interested citizens have the right and responsibility to weigh in regularly on water quality standards issues in their state. The public involvement procedures that apply to all water quality standards are described in the last section of this lesson.

Because the Act requires the EPA to oversee each state’s water quality standards decisions and public involvement processes, regional EPA staff must step in if state standards do not meet minimum requirements or if states fail to involve the public in all the necessary ways. One of the key ways that citizens can help assure proper water quality standards is to inform EPA about existing and emerging water quality issues.