Arizona Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ) Clean Water Act § 404 Assumption

In 2018, the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ) began a collaborative stakeholder process to draft a roadmap for Arizona to assume the Clean Water Act Section 404 Permitting program. Almost 500 people engaged by attending stakeholder meetings, participating in work groups and providing over 2,100 comments. I had the privilege to be a member of the Permit Process technical working group (TWG). Our TWG was focused on preparation of recommendations for ADEQ's assumption of the Clean Water Act Section 404 (Section 404) program. Our TWG was charged with analyzing seven topics: permit transition, permit types,licensing time frames, forms and online tools, public process, federal nexus projects, and Environmenta lProtection Agency's (EPA) role. Where group consensus was not reached, multiple options are provided for consideration by ADEQ. We submitted a White Paper on this in March 2019.

Not surprisingly, the majority of stakeholder input ADEQ received supported retaining the current process. As a result of that, ADEQ has decided not to continue pursuing state assumption of the 404 permitting program. Additional information can be found below:

http://azdeq.gov/cwa-404