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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released its 2012 recreational water quality criteria (RWQC) November 26, updating the existing criteria that were last revised in 1986.  While the numeric criteria values have changed little since 1986, other changes, including several since the December 2011 proposal, will make the criteria more difficult to meet.  NACWA has actively tracked and commented on EPA’s efforts to develop and publish these criteria since the Association intervened in litigation over the Agency’s failure to comply with the Beaches Environmental Assessment and Coastal Health (BEACH) Act of 2000 (Natural Resources Defense Council v. EPA).

This Advocacy Alert provides a brief summary of the revised RWQC and initial reactions regarding the potential impacts for the clean water community.  NACWA will continue to review the final RWQC and welcomes input from the membership on potential impacts.  Please contact Chris Hornback at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it with any thoughts on the criteria.  EPA has committed to developing implementation guidance on the criteria and NACWA will have an opportunity to provide input to the Agency on where additional guidance is needed.

What are the New RWQC?

Though the BEACH Act required EPA to update its RWQC for coastal recreation waters only, EPA’s 2012 RWQC revision applies to all waters in the U.S., including marine, estuarine, Great Lakes, and inland waters that are designated for primary contact recreation.  This will have potentially widespread impacts for the clean water community.  In a departure from the 2011 proposed RWQC, EPA has published two recommended sets of criteria and encourages states to make a risk management decision regarding illness rate to determine which set of criteria values are most appropriate for their waters.  EPA states that the designated use of primary contact recreation would be protected if either set of criteria shown below are adopted by a state.  Option A represents a level of water quality equivalent to the 1986 criteria, while Option B, according to EPA, represents an “incremental improvement in water quality.”

NACWA understands that EPA included both of these recommendations in response to concerns raised by states that had already adopted water quality standards similar to Option A.  The amount of incremental improvement from moving to Option B from Option A is minimal – reflected in the fact that EPA believes both options will adequately protect primary contact recreation – that it would not be worth revising a state’s standards to make the change.  EPA will likely encourage states that have not yet adopted standards similar to Option A, to adopt the more stringent Option B.

EPA’s December 2011 proposal included geometric mean (GM) values identical to Option A, but the proposed statistical threshold values (STVs) corresponded to the 75th percentile of the expected water quality sampling distribution.  The final RWQC use STV values based on the less conservative 90th percentile, with the 75th percentile values being used for the new Beach Action Values (BAV) (discussed below).  NACWA had recommended that EPA maintain the GM values proposed in December 2011 and had encouraged EPA to use the less conservative 90th percentile for the STV.

Another, more significant change from the 2011 proposal, is the required 30-day duration interval for evaluating the criteria.  In the proposal, EPA considered using 30 to 90 days as the duration component, but has now limited it to a 30-day average.  There is conflicting text in the RWQC document on whether this is a static or rolling 30-day period.  Either way, the 30-day period will prove problematic for waters, especially inland waters, where sampling is less frequent.  EPA acknowledges that more samples will improve the accuracy of the GM and STV, and recommends that states “consider the number of samples evaluated” when developing their monitoring plans.  EPA further recommends that states should conduct at least weekly sampling to evaluate the GM and STV over a 30-day period.  Where states are not able to conduct this monitoring due to resource restrictions, GM and STV calculations could be based on as few as one sample.

Information Provided as a Supplement to the Criteria

Beyond the criteria recommendations, EPA also provides two key pieces of supplemental information for consideration and possible use by the states.  The first is a new beach screening level – the Beach Action Value (BAV).  EPA suggests that states use a BAV, corresponding to the 75th percentile of the same distribution used to establish the criteria, as a conservative, precautionary tool for making beach notification decisions.  In the proposal, EPA had indicated that the STV, then set at the 75th percentile, should be used for beach notification purposes.  NACWA raised concerns that using the STV or results from a qPCR test (discussed further below) to close beaches could have unintended Clean Water Act (CWA) implications.  In the final RWQC, EPA stresses that the BAVs are not components of the recommended criteria – they are tools that a state may choose to use – and that they should not be incorporated into the state’s standards as “do not exceed” values.  As discussed below, however, these BAVs may still have CWA implications.

One of the main drivers for the lawsuit that drove the RWQC development process was the desire to have more rapid results on beach water quality.  With the final RWQC, EPA is also announcing the availability of a qPCR test method to detect and quantify enterococci more rapidly than the existing culture methods for ambient waters.  EPA, however, has limited experience with the performance of the method, and only included the method and example criteria values based on qPCR as supplemental information.  This was a top concern for NACWA throughout the criteria development process.  NACWA members with experience using qPCR and similar methods raised significant concerns during the comment period over potential interference with the qPCR test resulting in erroneous results.  NACWA stressed that qPCR should not be used for assessing compliance with the CWA.  While EPA encourages states to consider using qPCR after conducting site-specific analyses of the method, the Agency stresses that the method is not currently suggested for CWA permitting or effluent-related monitoring.

Other Issues and Ongoing Implementation Challenges

While NACWA and members of its Water Quality Committee continue to assess the impacts of the revised RWQC, the Association will continue to raise concerns about the complexity of implementing the criteria.  The addition of Option B to the RWQC will only serve to further complicate implementation.  NACWA has stressed the need for implementation guidance since EPA initiated work on the criteria.  While EPA has committed to a schedule for developing some implementation guidance, key information on how to establish permit limits based on the RWQC currently has no timetable for development.  EPA never developed implementation guidance for the 1986 criteria, and NACWA will continue to make additional guidance for the states and permittees a priority.

Beyond the issues outlined above, NACWA members have identified the following areas of interest or concern with the final RWQC:

1. EPA has declared that upstream inland waters “should have” standards based on the same illness rate as downstream waters, to protect the downstream waters.
2. EPA has eliminated tiered “use intensity” as a basis for recommending multiple single sample values (e.g., STV) with different levels of protection.  Instead, EPA is recommending that states adopt both the GM and STV for all primary contact recreation waters regardless of how frequently the waters are used for recreation.  State regulators have already expressed concern that this will have major impacts on their programs.
3. EPA “expects” that impairment decisions will include information regarding beach closures and advisories, so exceedances of the new BAVs, which could lead to beach closures, could then in turn lead to impairment decisions, even if water quality standards are being met.
4. EPA “encourages” or “recommends” a site-specific analysis before adopting qPCR thresholds, but does not require one.

Next Steps

Little if any of EPA’s RWQC will have impacts on the clean water community until the states decide to incorporate them into their water quality standards.  This next phase will be critical to see what issues arise as states work to make sense of EPA’s recommendations.  NACWA will be working closely with the Association of Clean Water Administrators throughout this process.

With the publication of the RWQC, EPA has now met all of the major requirements in the consent decree and settlement agreement stemming from the BEACH Act litigation.  The reaction of the environmental NGO community that initiated the lawsuit will also be important.  There was negative reaction to EPA’s proposal, but EPA has made some significant concessions to address these concerns.  NACWA will be closely tracking any efforts to reactivate the NRDC v. EPA BEACH Act lawsuit or to file a new challenge to what EPA has released.

NACWA will be discussing the final RWQC during the upcoming meeting of its Water Quality Committee at the 2013 Winter Conference in Miami to determine what the Association’s next steps will be.  Again, contact Chris Hornback at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it with any further thoughts on EPA’s revised RWQC.