Water quality: mandatory minimum civil penalties.

(1) Under existing law, the State Water Resources Control Board and the California regional water quality control boards prescribe waste discharge requirements in accordance with the federal Clean Water Act and the Porter-Cologne Water Quality Control Act (state act) . The state act, with certain exceptions, imposes a mandatory minimum penalty of $3,000 for each serious waste discharge violation or for certain other described violations if those violations occur 4 or more times in any period of 6 consecutive months, as prescribed. For purposes of the mandatory minimum penalty, a serious waste discharge violation includes a failure to file a specified discharge monitoring report for each complete period of 30 days following the deadline for submitting the report. Civil liability may be imposed administratively by the state board or a regional board, or those boards may request the Attorney General to petition the superior court to impose the liability. This bill would provide that a failure to file a discharge monitoring report is not a serious waste discharge violation if the discharger submits a specified statement to the state board or the regional board. The bill, until January 1, 2014, would require, with respect to certain violations involving the failure to file a discharge monitoring report, the mandatory minimum penalty of $3,000 to be assessed only for each required report that is not timely filed, and not for each 30-day period following the deadline for submitting the report. (2) The state act includes within the exceptions to the imposition of those mandatory minimum penalties a violation of an effluent limitation if the waste discharge complies with a certain time schedule order and other requirements are met. The act prohibits, for the purposes of that exception, a time schedule order from exceeding 5 years in length, except as otherwise provided. This bill, with a specified exception, would authorize a regional board, following a public hearing and upon a showing that the discharger is making diligent progress toward bringing the waste discharge into compliance with the effluent limitation, to extend the time schedule for an additional period not exceeding 5 years in length, under specified conditions.