Water Quality Standards Attainability Act

Who is affected and how:

• State environmental agencies: Directly required to conduct reviews of water quality standards for waters receiving combined sewer discharges and to evaluate cost‑effectiveness of CSO controls. This creates additional workload and reporting obligations.
• Municipal governments and publicly owned treatment works (POTWs): Face greater scrutiny of CSO controls and may need to justify or re-evaluate planned or existing control measures based on cost‑effectiveness assessments. Potentially could delay or alter investments in CSO infrastructure.
• EPA and the Administrator: Must incorporate assessments of treatment cost and commercial availability into the technical development and revision of water quality criteria, changing the agency’s criteria-setting process.
• Wastewater technology manufacturers and suppliers: Commercial availability of treatment options becomes a factor in EPA criteria, which could advantage widely available technologies and influence market demand.
• Local communities and water quality advocates: Outcomes may affect the level of environmental protection in water bodies that receive combined sewer discharges; considering costs could lead to less stringent criteria in some cases, which may raise concerns among environmental and public‑health stakeholders.

Practical effects and tradeoffs:

• The requirement promotes transparency by making state review results available to EPA.
• Considering cost and availability could lead EPA to set or revise criteria with an emphasis on feasible, deployable technologies, potentially reducing recommendations that rely on costly or experimental treatments.
• Because the bill does not provide funding or timelines, states and local governments may bear additional unfunded administrative burdens to complete reviews and compile reports.
• The rule may shift some programmatic emphasis from strictly health/ecological endpoints toward economically and technically practicable solutions, affecting compliance strategies and investment priorities.