June 20, 2025

Good afternoon, Chair Gennaro and members of the Environmental Protection Committee. I am Deputy Commissioner of Sustainability Angela Licata from the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) and I am here today to discuss the pre-considered intro T2025-3757, which relates to maintenance easements for post-construction stormwater management facilities and civil penalties for violations of the water pollution control code.

I want to start by thanking Chair Gennaro for sponsoring this bill and the committee for hearing it today. I also want to thank the Council staff we have been working with on this legislation. The pre-considered bill would make two straight-forward changes to improve the stormwater management permitting process and strengthen DEP’s enforcement of water pollution controls.

As the Deputy Commissioner of Sustainability, I oversee the teams that provide planning, design, construction and operations and maintenance of much of the distributed nature-based stormwater control around the city, including DEP’s rain gardens and other green infrastructure. Commissioner Aggarwala and I have discussed this work at several recent Council hearings, so I will not go into great detail here, but anyone who wants to learn more about our green infrastructure work should look at our 2024 Green Infrastructure Annual Report, which can be found on the green infrastructure page of DEP’s website.

Green infrastructure is a powerful tool for stormwater management that improves the health of our waterbodies, enhances our sewer operations, and distributes important co-benefits that come along with an increase in our green spaces like urban heat island mitigation or diverse habitat for wildlife. We’ve been building green infrastructure for stormwater control since 2011 and have invested more than $1.4 billion, with much of that investment happening within the public right of way. But more than 70% of the city is comprised of public or privately held lots and capturing stormwater on these lots and doing so as they redevelop is a cost-effective strategy for enhancing flood resilience through stormwater management and improving water quality through stormwater treatment. This is why we also develop and implement stormwater regulations, including the Stormwater Construction and Maintenance Permitting Program, which is the focus of the legislation being considered today.

DEP launched the Stormwater Construction and Maintenance Permitting Program in 2019, as required under the NYC Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System (MS4) Permit issued to the City by NYS Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC). This program existed prior to 2019, but it was implemented by NYSDEC and had been since the 90’s when the Clean Water Act was amended to include regulatory requirements for MS4s. Under the MS4 permit, we were required to make program enhancements to include more development sites than NYSDEC was regulating. For example, the qualifying soil disturbance threshold was reduced from 1-acre to 20,000 square feet, to account for the more typical redevelopment projects in NYC.

In 2022, the City program was further expanded to apply to combined sewer areas, to help meet both combined sewer overflow (CSO) goals and sewer operations goals. This change is known as the Unified Stormwater Rule, because it created a uniform stormwater policy across sewer capacity and water quality goals and provided more upfront clarity for calculating the requirements. Anyone developing sites must adhere to these rules, including DEP and other city agencies. These regulations have been essential as we evaluate the impacts on our infrastructure of new growth through rezonings and other major redevelopments. In fact, these regulations were so important that they were expedited to meet the Gowanus rezoning schedule so that we could ensure that all redeveloped sites would comply with the enhanced on-site stormwater retention and detention requirements, allowing for a net-zero CSO outlook for the Gowanus Canal and reducing wet weather impacts to our sewers. We are just seeing some of these green infrastructure practices come online now, three years later.

While the benefits of this permitting program are tremendous, we acknowledge that we have work to do to ease the burden on the developer community. We want to support the work that developers do. Our requirements are in place because the opportunity to establish stormwater management upon reconstruction is so great. We have to have management systems on private land, not just public space, so we have to seize these opportunities for on-site controls.

We want the permitting program process to be as smooth as possible, so we have been assessing the process and for the past 18 months we have been intensely workshopping process improvements with developer representatives and the architecture and engineering firms preparing their applications, or Stormwater Pollution Prevention Plans (SWPPPs). Legislative change is one of the steps that we hope to take to ease the process for applicants.

This legislation facilitates rule changes that will streamline parts of the process. Other improvements to the program will include building out and enhancing our Stormwater Permit Tracking System (SWPTS), which was not fully completed when the program was expanded and is cumbersome for applicants and DEP review staff alike. We look forward to continuing working with Council on this legislation to ensure that it implements the changes in a way that best complements our other improvements and that benefits all stakeholders, including DEP, developers, and all residents of the city.

In closing, I want to reiterate DEP’s thanks for your partnership on this issue, and for the opportunity to testify about this legislation today. My colleagues and I look forward to continuing our partnership on this. I am happy to answer any questions that you have.