Planning without the planners: South Carolina’s Section 319 local watershed planning process

Abstract The need to address water quality via land use planning is increasingly evident despite institutional and legal silos, as nonpoint source (NPS) pollution is now the dominant obstacle in accomplishing the federal Clean Water Act (CWA)’s fishable and swimmable standards in U.S. surface waters. Quality attainment has been elusive given the numerous and diffuse land use-based pollution sources, forcing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to adopt a new “total maximum daily load” (TMDL) rule in 2000 that is focused on the receiving water body rather than controlling the contaminant at its source. Simultaneously, there was a policy shift that devolved water quality implementation authority onto states and municipalities (Gerlak, 2006). Consequently, states variably interpret and allocate the federal CWA Section 319 grants to local watershed groups for watershed-based planning to reduce NPS pollution. Several scholars have assessed the product of this devolution, particularly the character, process and outcomes of the NPS programs and collaborative watershed groups. While their research shows decided difference in the watershed groups’ composition, formalization, and water quality typology, the unifying component is the use of collaborative, place-based process to address watershed protection. And the efficacy of the collaborative approach—both in implementation of the watershed plans, and in the removal of the pollution load itself—is still in question. Arguably, trained planners’ roles in this watershed planning would foster and maintain the collaborative process, quality plan generation, and its implementation (with horizontal consistency between land use and watershed plans). And yet, no one has directly examined the planner’s role in the Section 319 watershed planning process. As part of a larger, comparative study of Kansas, Ohio, and South Carolina to answer this question, this work focuses on South Carolina as a case study to address NPSs. The state is predominantly rural, with increasing urbanization high in the watershed and in the coastal zone. The primary NPS contaminant is bacterial (fecal coliform and E. coli), originating from both agricultural uses and heavy reliance on septic systems, which suggests that a watershed-based planning approach would be the most viable to address pollution. The paper uses two data sources to examine the extent of SC planners’ roles in the state’s Section 319 planning. A survey administered through the state APA chapter in Summer 2014 revealed South Carolina planners’ familiarity with water quality protection, TMDL setting, and 319-funded watershed-based planning, as well as the extent of their role in the latter. Its results are contrasted with those for the remainder of the states to reveal broader trends. Semi-structured interviews with the state 319 program coordinators (n = 3) clarified the processes by which the state addresses NPS issues, following federal guidance, and perceived an appreciable impact on the few watershed-based plans in which planners played a role. The results reveal a substantial absence, for the most part, of professional impetus for the planners’ involvement in the local watershed planning process, which explains some of the outcome ambiguity noted in the existing collaborative process literature. It also identifies the impediments to planners’ watershed planning participation in South Carolina, as compared to the broader set of states, and notes both the willingness and potential avenues for new planner participation in an integral nonpoint source control planning process.