October, 2013
The Honorable Gina McCarthy, Administrator
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Ariel Rios Building, 1200 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20460
Re:
Please Act Now to Protect Clean Water
Dear Administrator McCarthy:
We write to express our strong support for two actions EPA can take to help make our nation’s water
resources safe and clean. Please modernize the national stormwater regulations and use your existing authority
to ensure that sites contributing to current water quality problems are controlled.
EPA can reduce pollution and flooding while creating new, green economy jobs and business
opportunities for companies and organizations like ours. As operators of small businesses and associations that
design, manufacture, install, and maintain green roofs, we understand the benefits that both an updated set of
stormwater regulations and a requirement to reduce uncontrolled discharges from already built areas in our
communities will provide. As we have realized through numerous projects around the country, these benefits
are environmental and economic in nature.
Enacting modernized, consistent stormwater standards will lead to more widespread use of our effective
and affordable practices, greening our communities while minimizing the harmful impacts of runoff. In areas
where similar standards already exist, our businesses have helped property owners, developers, and
communities meet water quality goals while contributing to economic growth. With nationwide standards,
collectively, our professions will be able to create more jobs for local residents in designing, building, installing
and maintaining these controls. This is an opportunity to demonstrate how improved regulations can drive
innovation and investment in stormwater infrastructure, creating both economic growth and healthier waters.
We understand that EPA is developing rules that will require new and redeveloped sources of stormwater to be
designed to retain the vast majority of runoff that would otherwise occur. Such safeguards would be an
enormous step forward to achieving water quality and economic goals.
But addressing new and redeveloped areas alone will not clean up already-polluted waterways. That’s
why we also support the recent initiative insisting that EPA require certain stormwater sources in polluted
watersheds to obtain pollution-limiting permits. These petitions present an important opportunity to reduce the
currently uncontrolled, permanent discharges from already built areas in our communities, discharges which if
left unabated will continue to undermine environmental health and economic prosperity.
These complementary efforts will not only help restore our water bodies and provide new business
opportunities. Requiring stormwater dischargers to retain runoff on-site will also help municipalities required
to control urban pollution to meet their clean water obligations by ensuring that responsibility for runoff
pollution is shared between the public and private sectors.
We appreciate EPA’s efforts to promote cost-effective, job-creating responses to stormwater challenges
and look forward to contributing further to this important effort.
Sincerely,