Community Effort to Provide Regulatory Certainty for Combined Sewer Overflow Communities

Late last year, a number of Indiana communities petitioned the Indiana Environmental Rules Board to implement rules that would provide combined sewer overflow (CSO) communities a path to regulatory certainty as it relates to their CSO control efforts. If implemented, once CSO communities have completed historic expenditures to reduce CSO’s (and verified that they met the criteria established at the outset of their efforts), they will have regulatory certainty that they have complied with Indiana’s CSO policy.  

Without this rule change, Indiana CSO communities will be forced to live with expensive and complex Use Attainability Analysis submissions every five years or have CSO’s designated as “prohibited discharges” with “enforcement discretion” applied by the agency.  Neither path provides CSO communities with regulatory certainty that their effort will ever be good enough to provide long term compliance with Indiana’s CSO policy. We believe that this is contrary to EPA CSO Long Term Control Guidance, as well as non-rule policies developed by IDEM, and provides the agency a never-ending ability to impose additional controls on communities.

In November 2019, The Environmental Rules Board heard our petition and ruled that it met the threshold to officially be heard and acted upon by the ERB. The ERB set the date for this hearing to be in the spring of 2020, but Indiana’s response to COVID-19 delayed this hearing. IDEM has set a date for the virtual hearing on this matter, October 28, starting at 1:30P.

Regardless of the path your community has taken to try to comply with Indiana’s CSO control policy, we are asking that you participate in this hearing by signing on to the Zoom meeting or calling in to show your interest in this matter.