CIAO DATE: 02/04

Understand What States Need To Protect Water Quality

Summary

The scope of water quality programs has grown tremendously since the Clean Water Act (CWA) was first enacted in 1972. But federal funding to the states-which are responsible for most of the day-to-day implementation of these programs-has not kept pace. While it has been widely recognized that state water programs lacked sufficient resources to carry out their responsibilities, the size of the funding gap has been unknown.

In 1998, experienced water program officials formed a State Task Force and began collaborating with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on the Water Quality Management Resource Analysis (Resource Analysis) project. They designed the Resource Analysis project to develop a common framework for collecting information about state water programs that would produce a reasonable estimate of the gap between the resources states need and the resources currently available to them for implementing water quality programs under the Clean Water Act.

Through a survey of state expenditures, the State Task Force collected information from states on what they are currently spending for water quality programs. To enable states to estimate the resources they would need to implement the various elements of the Clean Water Act, the Task Force developed an extensive workload model (Needs Model). Using this new tool, states made systematic projections of their workloads and costs for fully implementing water programs. Because not all states submitted data, the Task Force used various estimation techniques to calculate estimates for the missing states, then combined these estimates with the submitted state data to develop the national estimates. Based on these data, the Task Force concluded that the gap between the funding states now have and what they need to fully implement Clean Water Act programs is between $735 million to $960 million.

Full text (PDF format, 126 pages, 2.75 MB)