Local governments are spared from additional permitting requirements as a result of the Supreme Court decision in Decker v. Northwest Environmental Defense Center and in Georgia-Pacific West v. Northwest Environmental Defense Center, two cases in which ICMA had co-signed an amicus curiae brief. The Court was deciding whether National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permits have to be obtained for channeled stormwater runoff from logging roads.  

Since 1973, one year after the Clean Water Act was passed, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has issued regulations exempting silvicultural (logging) activity from federal permitting requirements.  Yet, the Ninth Circuit held that state forest agencies and a county were required to obtain EPA permits for stormwater runoff flowing from logging roads into ditches, culverts, and channels.  The State and Local Legal Centers’s amicus brief points out that obtaining EPA permits for every ditch and channel on every logging road in the United States would be extremely costly and burdensome for state and local governments that are already regulating such stormwater runoff.

The Supreme Court held that discharges of stormwater that ran off logging roads into ditches, culverts, and channels did not require a permit under the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System and reversed a Ninth Circuit Court decision by a vote of 7-1. The Court held that the old version of the EPA Industrial Stormwater Rule governed past discharges and might be a basis for imposing penalties, even if those types of discharges would not require a permit going forward.