The first employs a within-case method of process tracing to assess the factors that acted as drivers or limitations to the policy process. Part two, uses six evaluative criteria to assess the effectiveness of specific outcomes, such as water quality improvements and the value of monitoring data. The 1972 Clean Water Act employs a technology-based standards approach, whereby any discharger must obtain a permit that contains the limits on what an individual or industry can discharge into a given water body as well as details their monitoring and reporting requirements, all these provisions are defined and enforced by the National Pollution Discharge Elimination System permit system . This approach aims to control pollutants at the point of discharge by setting uniform discharge limitations based on the best available technology pertaining to a particular industrial category. The U.S. EPA grants states the primary responsibility of issuing NPDES permits, and monitoring and enforcing performance. When the technology-based approach does not adequately control pollution, an additional control tool, water quality-based standards, is implemented. The EPA and states use a calculation, Total Maximum Daily Load , to determine the maximum amount of a pollutant that a waterbody can receive while still meeting water quality standards. Water quality standards are set by designating a “beneficial use” for each waterbody as well as the criteria to protect the designated use of that water. The TMDL calculation is a multi-step process: first, the state lists each impaired waterbody within its jurisdiction, called the “303 list”; second,plastic planter pot using the state’s already-established “beneficial use” categories, a numeric TMDL is calculated for each waterbody; finally, a portion of the load is allocated to each discharger.
The fundamental problem of TMDLs, especially in waters polluted with non-point sources, is that they must be translated into specific numeric discharge limitations for each source of pollution . Because non-point source pollution , such as agricultural runoff, is inherently diffuse, the task of monitoring dispersed and dynamic discharges and connecting them back to their sources to identify what operation is polluting and to what extent is both expensive and complicated. However, efforts by the EPA are underway to make water quality modeling, specifically targeted at regulators implementing TMDLs and water quality standards, more easily accessible and affordable . Similar to the Clean Water Act, California’s Porter-Cologne Act gives broad authority to nine Regional Water Quality Control Boards to regulate water quality at a sub-state, localized scale. Regional Boards are responsible for water quality protection, permitting, inspection, and enforcement actions.The Regional Board issues permits on the condition that beneficial uses are protected and water quality objectives will be met. The Regional Boards also have the right to waive Waste Discharge Requirements for individuals or groups, including agriculture, if it is in the public interest . For agricultural discharges, Regional Boards have historically granted waivers rather than force growers to comply with WDRs. In October of 1999, with water quality high on the political agenda, Senate Bill 390 was passed, mandating that Regional Boards attach conditions to waivers and review them every five years .Such monitoring requirements must be adequate to verify the effectiveness of the Waiver’s conditions . In effect, the Conditional Waivers function similarly to Waste Discharge Requirements: the discharger needs to meet conditions specified in the Waiver/Permit. Each Regional Board has taken a different approach to controlling runoff from agricultural lands within their jurisdiction , but almost all have issued Conditional Waivers. In 2004, the Central Coast Region was the first to adopt a Conditional Agricultural Waiver .
The conditions attached to the 2004 Waiver required growers to enroll in the Agricultural Waiver program, complete 15 hours of water quality education, prepare a farm plan, implement water quality improvement practices, and complete individual or cooperative water quality monitoring. The 2004 Agricultural Waiver expired in July 2009, but the Order was extended five times from 2009 until 2012. After nearly three years of continued negotiation, on March 15, 2012 the Central Coast Regional Board adopted a new Conditional Agricultural Waiver, Order No. R3-2012-0011. The updated 2012 Ag Waiver places farms in one of three tiers, based on their risk to water quality . Bigger and more polluting farms are held to tougher standards. For most of the Tier 1 and 2 farms, the 2012 requirements are similar to those in the 2004 Waiver: water quality education, water quality management plans, implementation of management practices, and either cooperative or independent surface receiving water monitoring and reporting. For Tier 3 farms and a subset of Tier 2 farms, additional conditions are added, including submitting an annual compliance form, conducting individual discharge monitoring and reporting, and implementing vegetative buffers. Soon after the 2012 adoption, the State Board received petitions from five parties, representing both the agricultural community and environmental organizations, requesting a “stay” on specific provisions of the new waiver. The agricultural community argued that the Ag Waiver was too harsh, and environmentalists contended it did not go far enough . The State Board asked the Central Coast Regional Board to review and estimate the costs of the provisions of concern and further explain the environmental and public benefits that the updated Waiver would accrue from compliance . The State Board rewrote sections of the Agricultural Waiver, and released a final version in September 2013. Unsatisfied with the State Board’s revisions, a coalition of environmental groups, together with an elderly woman who could not drink water from her tap because it was contaminated with agricultural waste, filed a lawsuit in Sacramento’s Superior Court challenging the 2012 Central Coast Agricultural Waiver and the changes made by the State Board. The coalition claimed the State Board changes “cripple the already weak order,” and as it’s currently written, the Ag Waiver is “so weak, it did not comply with state law” .
In his ruling on August 11, 2015, Superior Court Judge Frawley agreed that the Central Coast’s Conditional Agricultural Waiver was doing an inadequate job of protecting regional water quality and needed to develop more stringent conditions.A more contextualized story of adopting the 2004 and 2012 Ag Waivers is laden with complex and contentious trade-offs, negotiations, lobbying efforts, alliance building, scientific findings, and difficult to foresee “focusing events” . This study pays special attention to assessing the effectiveness of the monitoring program and significance of data collected under the Conditional Agricultural Waiver. Monitoring data are arguably the most pressing concern for non-point source pollution control plans. This Central Coast case illustrates a common trend in non-point source pollution control and what Sunstein would mark as “regulatory failure due to information limitation.” The current monitoring data on agricultural water discharges are inadequate to allocate TMDLs and therefore implement and enforce water quality standards. In the absence of sufficient data, the Ag Waiver regulatory program cannot comply with state and federal law,30 litre plant pots and water protections are further delayed . In an attempt to comply with water quality standards, the Central Coast Regional Board has endeavored to ratchet up monitoring efforts. For example, the updated 2012 Agricultural Waiver program modestly expanded the amount of information it requires of Tier 3 growers to include some individual monitoring. Unfortunately, many are skeptical that this more “robust” monitoring program will, in practice, amount to much more in terms of useful information than the previous monitoring program, especially given the small number of growers in Tier 3. This study fills a gap in research on where monitoring efforts have succeeded and failed in the Central Coast’s agricultural NPS pollution control policies and in reaching TMDL goals. There is also a growing need to identify realistic tools for water quality agencies charged with the difficult task of regulating agricultural NPS pollution. While this study will tailor recommendations specifically to the Central Coast Region, other states and localities facing similar difficulties can utilize results from this research to better manage agricultural pollution with their jurisdiction.Though a general causal hypothesis can be made that certain independent variables have a causal effect on policy-making, process tracing allows the researcher to narrow down the list of potential influential causes as well as uncover independent variables that otherwise would have been left out . Process tracing can also identify whether or not these influential variables have a positive or negative effect on the policy outcome. Such a research design is an iterative, cyclical process—a broad hypothesis can be refined as more data are gathered. King, Keohane, and Verba explain that this type of “exploratory investigation”—selecting on the basis of variance in dependent and independent variables—generates a more precise hypothesis than that which can be made at the beginning. Process tracing requires an in-depth understanding of causal mechanisms in the policy making process in each case, relying on data from newspapers and magazine articles, websites, meeting minutes, policy documents, government reports, public comments, monitoring and enforcement data, and other archival documents.
Key informants for this part of the current research include Regional Water Board staff, university extension specialists, agricultural organizations, growers, water quality agencies, and stakeholders involved in water quality efforts. Interviews were conducted in a semi-structured manner and key informants were identified using “snowball” sampling—starting with a few identified stakeholders who then share names of additional significant individuals to interview. In this study, data from interviews are used to help contextualize events, perspectives, language or definitions and reaffirm information identified during the document analysis. Just as water quality was rising on the agenda, circumstances changed and priorities shifted. In September 2006, two years after passing the first Agricultural Waiver, an E. coli outbreak traced to the Salinas Valley killed three people and sickened more than 200 . Due to public concern, large supermarket chains including Safeway and Costco Wholesale Corporation, demanded that growers have more stringent food safety requirements . Subsequently, food safety auditors began requiring a “scorched-earth” policy including minimizing any vegetative habitat around farms that could attract wildlife. One farmer stated that the “Western Growers Association said they wouldn’t buy anything from farms with vegetative buffer strips.” Because maintaining vegetation on a field’s edge protects water quality from discharging into nearby waterbodies, calling for its removal could threaten efforts to address water pollution on the Central Coast . The E. coli “focusing event” forced the Regional Board to rethink this key provision , which was already under discussion in drafts of the updated Agricultural Waiver. Mandating vegetative buffer strips for all farms would, quite literally, compete with food safety requirements, which require farms to clear vegetation. The contradictory food safety requirement versus water quality requirement left growers confused about which policies to follow. A representative from the Farm Bureau voiced frustration on behalf of the agricultural community, “ever since E. coli there has been a series of complex overlay of regulations” . Two additional issues related to buffer implementation concerned growers: the cost and the science driving the policy. Growers worried about the price not only of installing, irrigating and maintaining the new vegetation around their farms, but also the lost revenue from taking cropland out of production and replacing it with vegetation. Moreover, some agricultural stakeholders contended that the science driving this mandate was inadequate. The improved water quality from vegetative buffers, including pollutant, nutrient and sediment retention, infiltration, sediment deposition, and absorption are well documented in the literature . However, regional agronomic research demonstrating the effectiveness of vegetative buffers is limited to only a few studies, and their results are mixed, especially in regards to the most effective width-size and vegetation . Buffer width became a cornerstone of debate since the jury was still out on exactly how wide a buffer should be to improve water quality. The results of a meta-analysis of over 80 scientific articles on vegetated buffers and sediment trapping efficacy concluded that while wider buffers provide a longer “residence” time for runoff water and thus, are more effective in reducing sediment, sediment trapping efficacy does not improve significantly when buffer width was increased beyond 10 meters . In other words, beyond 10 meters, the law of diminishing returns takes effect. The analysis by Liu and colleagues also concludes that buffer width alone only explains about one-third of retention effectiveness, and other factors, such as soil, slope and vegetation play an equally important role. Because of these competing interests, the vegetative buffer requirement was substantially weakened throughout the Agricultural Waiver deliberation process.