Final @ABAEnvLaw conference session of the week is a fun one: Clean Water Act! WOTUS, post-Maui legal landscape & more

Ex-EPAer Anna Wildeman says timing of Supreme Court's Maui decision was challenging: agency had just finished WOTUS rule in yearslong effort to apply Rapanos decision on other CWA issue. Maui again affected major program "w/o much guidance from the court on how to implement it"

"I don't think that the Maui decision warrants widespread changes ... to how the NPDES program is administered," she says but maybe "some new monitoring or permits" to account for "functionally equivalent" standard

Will EPA update Maui guidance issued at end of Trump administration? Ken Kopocis (who was on Biden transition team) says it's likely to look at system design issue raised, will likely do a rulemaking if it has bandwidth

Says it's such narrow circumstances, but unlikely to create big increase in enforcement or change in priorities

Julia Anastasio of Association of Clean Water Administrators, says some states don't see any need to change programs in light of Maui ruling, others are considering updates to groundwater rules

"The guidance actually didn't provide a lot of detail ... the states have a lot of questions," she says of Trump-era guidance

Wildeman responds that she understands desire for more information but says "we kept running into ... we were working within the confines of agency guidance and guidance docs can't be used to modify regs" or set bright line limitations or requirements

A guidance doc that went further would have been taken to court, she said.

Kopocis expects "a bit of an uptick" in citizen suits focused on Maui-type pollution. "Now you've created a roadmap for people"