VANCOUVER, Wash. - Developers are supposed to deal with stormwater runoff in their construction plans, but a lawsuit filed on Monday alleges that Clark County allows local builders to put off these plans for up to three years after a project is built. Attorney Jan Hasselman of Earthjustice says last month, the Washington Department of Ecology agreed that the county could keep its weaker stormwater standards for new construction, as long as it promised to fund and implement runoff control as needed. He says taxpayers thus are fixing the stormwater problems caused by builders.

"Those folks have pushed for relaxed development standards, relaxed fees for permits, effectively transferring those kinds of burdens from private development onto the public at large."

Hasselman says counties are supposed to meet the federal Clean Water Act standards, and the suit charges that Clark County does not do so. He says that sets a precedent for other towns and counties to delay their own stormwater mitigation projects.

"The way that the Department of Ecology implements the Clean Water Act program, any smaller jurisdiction can model its program on an approach that has been approved for use in one of the larger jurisdictions."

Earthjustice is representing the Rosemere Neighborhood Association, Columbia Riverkeeper, and the Northwest Environmental Defense Center in the case. The groups are asking that Clark County play by the same stormwater runoff rules as the rest of the state.

Runoff is a costly pollution problem for communities, full of pesticides and heavy metals that end up in waterways and are toxic to fish. Clark County has said new development is not nearly as big a problem as existing buildings, and that its current agreement with the state gives it the flexibility to fix stormwater problems wherever they occur.