Enforcement
BASELINE ENFORCEMENT REPORT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2006-2007
In late 2007, Governor Schwarzenegger directed the State Water Board to “develop a baseline of regulatory functions by all water boards and establish performance metrics to measure the effectiveness of [the Water Boards’] actions” and to “develop a comprehensive report on enforcement priorities, performance measures and targets.” This Baseline Report addresses the Governor’s direction about Water Board enforcement activities.
Separate from the Governor’s directive, the State Water Board had intended to prepare a baseline enforcement report using fiscal year 2006-2007 as the basis for evaluating the resources, outputs and outcomes of the Water boards’ enforcement efforts. While the Water Boards have issued previous enforcement-related reports, none addressed all of the Water Boards core regulatory programs and none provided a comprehensive picture of the Water Boards’ enforcement activities for these programs. In this report, the staff has endeavored to compile a baseline of information against which to measure the effectiveness of future enforcement initiatives and strategies.
The Baseline Report has five main purposes:
- Identify the resources available for core regulatory enforcement and the enforcement actions achieved with those resources.
- Illustrate the challenges faced by the Water Boards in bringing appropriate enforcement to ensure compliance.
- Recommend metrics to measure the future effectiveness of the Water Boards’ enforcement functions.
- Recommend improvements to the Water Boards’ enforcement capabilities
- Provide statistics on rates of compliance for the core regulatory programs
The information presented in this report highlights the significant ongoing data and resource challenges of the Water Boards. For many of the core regulatory programs covered by this report, key data elements are either missing or incomplete. Variation in data entry is apparent from region to region and a lack of data should not be interpreted as inactivity by individual Regional Water Boards. An outcome of the broader Water Board initiative to make the California Integrated Water Quality System (CIWQS) functional to meet internal and external data management needs is to provide useful data on compliance and enforcement activities. This report recommends that CIWQS be required to maintain the data to support 10 specific measures of performance. These recommended performance measures will assist the Water Boards to monitor, manage and improve the Water Boards’ enforcement activities.
The State Water Board staff proposes to publish regular, comprehensive enforcement reports which evaluate the Water Boards’ progress in the enforcement arena.