Report 2012-120 Recommendations

If Caltrans believes that responding to the monitoring requirements and enforcement actions related to the certification program is too costly, it should begin to gather and track these costs using its accounting system. Once it has tracked these costs for a period of time, Caltrans should analyze whether these monitoring and enforcement activities are, in fact, too costly and work with the state and regional water boards to resolve how these costs might be better contained.

To ensure that regional water boards, as well as the state water board itself, follow a more consistent process when reviewing water quality applications and issuing certifications, and to comply with state and federal requirements, the state water board should remind regional water boards of required application processing time frames and notifications.

The state water board should also continue with its effort to adopt a single application form for the certification program.

To ensure that applicants pay the correct fee amounts for the certification program, the state water board should direct North Coast as well as the other regional water boards to verify the accuracy of fees that applicants submit to them.

North Coast should continue with its plans to collect from Caltrans the underpayment of application fees and to reimburse the overpayment of application fees that we identified. It should also consider reviewing a selection of past application fees it received from Caltrans to determine if other errors exist.

The state water board should direct regional water boards to more consistently monitor compliance with water quality certifications and use the water quality database to track their monitoring efforts.

When regional water boards include staff enforcement costs in the penalty actions they issue, the state water board should require that they use a systematic method for tracking the hours staff spend on enforcement activities related to penalty actions and maintain documentary support for these staff enforcement cost calculations.

If regional water boards continue to include staff enforcement costs in the penalty actions they issue, the state water board should revise its staff cost rate to reflect actual staff salaries and overhead cost for the certification program.

To ensure that it accurately records and uses fines it collects for violations of water quality certifications, the state water board should maintain a regular accounting of these fines.

To improve its ability to allocate adequate resources to the certification program and better assess whether its budget is sufficient for program operations, the state water board should instruct regional water boards to accurately track staff time spent on the certification program.

Because the water quality database is the primary system for meeting statutory reporting obligations for the certification program, the state water board should resolve its data entry backlog and ensure that the regional water boards enter all relevant information into the system, including information about the applications received, the certifications issued, monitoring activities, water quality violations, and enforcement actions.