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7 Page 1 NPDES Permit No. CAS612008 (the "MRP,,)2. Petitioner is not seeking immediate review of this 2 Petition and instead requests that it be held in abeyance pending further notice by Petitioner to the 3 State Water Board in the event that Petitioner wishes to request that the review process be activated. 4 Petitioner is one of 76 cities, towns, counties and other public entities subject to the MRP. As such, it 5 is aggrieved by the procedural and substantive legal defects in the MRP described below. 6 After several iterations and nearly five years of work by its staft permittees, and other 7 stakeholders, the Regional Water Board inexplicably and abruptly cut short Petitioner's rights to 8 meaningful public participation in the permitting process. On September 24, 2009-less than three 9 weeks before the meeting at which the full Regional Water Board adopted the MRP-the Regional 10 Water Board staff published what it then termed a "Final Tentative Order.,,3 In addition, the Fact 11 Sheet (98 pages) was not released until October 7,2009, and Response to Comments Received on the 12 December 2007 Tentative Order (451 pages) and Response to Comments Received on the February 13 2008 Tentative Order (676 pages) were not released until October 5, 2009. The Final Tentative 14 Order imposed numerous new substantive requirements that had not appeared in the last version 15 made available for public comment in February 2009. 16 The changes were significant. Indeed, one witness advocating for the new provisions at the 17 October 14, 2009 hearing described their addition to the MRP as "historic." The new terms- 18 including the far-reaching so-called "low impact development" or "LID" provisions and extensive 19 new requirements for trash capture-are heavily prescriptive, impose substantial new financial 20 burdens on Petitioner and other local governments that are subject to the MRP, and could even entail 21 temporal, longer term and or cumulative consequences that adversely affect the environment on the 22 whole. Yet the Regional Water Board did not adequately address these and other issues and didn't 23 24 25 26 27 28 2 A copy of Order R2-2009-0074 may be accessed via the internet at htm:/ /www.waterboards.ca. gov/sanfranciscobavlboard decisions/adopted orders/2009/R2-2009- 0074.odf. As the Order and its attachments are 279 pages, a hardcopy is not being provided concurrently with this Petition but will be provided to the State Water Board upon its further request should that be deemed necessary. 3 The final actually-adopted version of the MRP, containing additional changes in text, was not made available until the day before the hearing. sf-2748053 2 PETITION FOR REviEW