SANTA FE, NM – In a completely unexpected and last-minute announcement, the New Mexico Environment Department announced on Tuesday that it was withdrawing its proposed definition of "discharge permit amendment" and related proposed changes from its petition with the Water Quality Control Commission (WQCC) seeking changes to ground and surface water quality regulations.

Amigos Bravos, and Gila Resources Information Project (GRIP), represented by the New Mexico Environmental Law Center, opposed NMED's discharge amendment language and had submitted technical testimony in opposition to it.

"We are pleased that NMED recognized the problems with its discharge permit amendment proposal and chose not to move forward with it at this week's WQCC hearing," stated Allyson Siwik, Gila Resources Information Project Executive Director. "NMED's proposal would have allowed the Department to approve significant changes to discharge permits without public oversight. With nine out of ten New Mexicans reliant on groundwater for drinking water, we can't afford to weaken our state's water quality protections."

The Department stated in its letter announcing the withdrawal that they had "no idea" the proposal for "discharge permit amendments" would be so contentious. A discharge permit "amendment" would allow a permittee to request changes to almost any requirement in a discharge permit with little or no investigation by the Department and without meaningful public input.

The Department admitted in its petition and technical testimony that issuing permit amendments was part of the agency's "historical and current practice" that had been going on for 24 years. This led Amigos Bravos and GRIP to submit a half-dozen requests under the Inspection of Public Records Act (IPRA), in which we discovered hundreds of examples of these amendments across every industry, the scope and scale of which was beyond anything the general public had been aware of over the years.

There is no provision in the Water Quality Act allowing the Water Quality Control Commission to grant the Department the ability to create a new discharge permit process and the idea that some changes in requirements are "minor" is questionable. There are many components of a permit that don't directly involve the quantity and quality of the discharge being permitted – what the Department would consider a "significant" permit modification. Changes to the number and location of monitoring wells, requirements regarding discharge flow meters, backflow prevention, and reporting and compliance schedules are all examples of potential changes that could have been made under NMED's original proposal.

The Water Quality Control Commission hearing on the NM Environment Department's petition to change the Water Quality Act regulations continues this week in Santa Fe. A webcast of the proceeding is available at https://www.env.nm.gov/water-quality-control-commission/wqcc/