Join the Conversation at StormCon 2010
Mark your calendars and include in your budgets: Abstracts for presentations at StormCon are almost due. StormCon, the North American Surface Water Quality Conference & Exposition, will take place August 1–5, 2010, in San Antonio, TX. The deadline for submissions this year is Wednesday, December 2, 2009—less than a week after the Thanksgiving holiday in the US, and a busy time for many people—and, with so much happening in the stormwater arena over the next few months, this is one conference you won’t want
to miss.
StormCon 2010 will feature five conference tracks:
- BMP Case Studies
- Low-Impact Development
- Stormwater Program Management
- Water-Quality Monitoring
- Advanced Research Topics
You can see the full call for papers, with descriptions of each of the tracks, at www.stormcon.com, and you can also submit your abstract online. Presentations are 30 minutes long.
What’s so important about the conference in 2010? In addition to the many presentations and broad range of water-quality technologies you’ll find there, StormCon will also be a center of discussion and debate on some far-reaching regulatory changes. Two are being announced in the last months of 2009, and both will likely have tremendous influence over the next couple of years on the way you do business or run your municipal program.
As we’re going to press with this issue, EPA has just announced its Clean Water Act Enforcement Action Plan, drafted based on ideas the agency has received from the public. In the plan, EPA acknowledges that even though large point sources of pollution have been quite successfully brought under control, the problems of nonpoint-source pollution and uneven enforcement are still threatening water quality.
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The plan proposes, in broad terms, to target enforcement toward smaller sources of pollution such as animal feeding operations and nonpoint sources such as stormwater runoff, as well as to “intensify vigorous civil and criminal enforcement against traditional end-of-pipe pollution.” It also proposes to make sure states enforce clean water laws more evenly, and to “improve transparency and accountability” so the public is better informed about where water-quality violations are occurring and what’s being done about it. The agency hopes to take better advantage of existing information technology to identify and track problems. You can read more about the plan at www.epa.gov/compliance/civil/cwa/cwaenfplan.html.
The other long-awaited regulatory change is EPA’s construction-site effluent limitation guidelines. The final version is due to be released in December, containing the final NTU limit for certain construction sites. How to meet the new guidelines—the technological, the enforcement, and the financial aspects—will be a hot topic of discussion at StormCon. Make plans now to be in on the action!
Author's Bio: Janice Kaspersen is the editor of Stormwater magazine.
November-December 2009
Join the Conversation at StormCon 2010
Mark your calendars and include in your budgets: Abstracts for presentations at StormCon are almost due. StormCon, the North American Surface Water Quality Conference & Exposition, will take place August 1–5, 2010, in San Antonio, TX. The deadline for submissions this year is Wednesday, December 2, 2009—less than a week after the Thanksgiving holiday in the US, and a busy time for many people—and, with so much happening in the stormwater arena over the next few months, this is one conference you won’t want
to miss.
StormCon 2010 will feature five conference tracks:
- BMP Case Studies
- Low-Impact Development
- Stormwater Program Management
- Water-Quality Monitoring
- Advanced Research Topics
You can see the full call for papers, with descriptions of each of the tracks, at www.stormcon.com, and you can also submit your abstract online. Presentations are 30 minutes long.
What’s so important about the conference in 2010? In addition to the many presentations and broad range of water-quality technologies you’ll find there, StormCon will also be a center of discussion and debate on some far-reaching regulatory changes. Two are being announced in the last months of 2009, and both will likely have tremendous influence over the next couple of years on the way you do business or run your municipal program.
As we’re going to press with this issue, EPA has just announced its Clean Water Act Enforcement Action Plan, drafted based on ideas the agency has received from the public. In the plan, EPA acknowledges that even though large point sources of pollution have been quite successfully brought under control, the problems of nonpoint-source pollution and uneven enforcement are still threatening water quality.
The plan proposes, in broad terms, to target enforcement toward smaller sources of pollution such as animal feeding operations and nonpoint sources such as stormwater runoff, as well as to “intensify vigorous civil and criminal enforcement against traditional end-of-pipe pollution.” It also proposes to make sure states enforce clean water laws more evenly, and to “improve transparency and accountability” so the public is better informed about where water-quality violations are occurring and what’s being done about it. The agency hopes to take better advantage of existing information technology to identify and track problems. You can read more about the plan at www.epa.gov/compliance/civil/cwa/cwaenfplan.html.
The other long-awaited regulatory change is EPA’s construction-site effluent limitation guidelines. The final version is due to be released in December, containing the final NTU limit for certain construction sites. How to meet the new guidelines—the technological, the enforcement, and the financial aspects—will be a hot topic of discussion at StormCon. Make plans now to be in on the action!