The Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board announced Tuesday that it has adopted the nation’s first permit requiring large commercial properties to reduce stormwater pollution flowing into some of the region’s most contaminated waterways.
Officials said the permit applies to privately owned commercial, industrial and institutional properties with at least five acres of impervious surfaces, including shopping centers, warehouses, distribution centers and office parks, in the Dominguez Channel/Greater Los Angeles and Long Beach Inner Harbor watersheds and the Los Cerritos Channel/Alamitos Bay watershed.
According to Los Angeles Waterkeeper and the California Coastkeeper Alliance, the permit closes a long-standing regulatory gap by requiring large commercial property owners to address polluted runoff carrying contaminants such as copper and zinc into local waterways.
“For too long, cities and taxpayers have shouldered the entire cost of cleaning up pollution that comes from these large commercial properties,” Los Angeles Waterkeeper Executive Director Bruce Reznik said in a statement. “With this new permit in place, the Regional Board can do what should have done thirty years ago: telling commercial property owners that if their land is polluting our rivers and our harbor, they’re responsible for fixing it.”
Environmental groups said the permit is the first in the nation to regulate commercial properties as a category under the federal Clean Water Act’s stormwater program. They said it follows years of advocacy, including petitions filed with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2015 and a residual designation issued by EPA Region 9 in 2024.
“Los Angeles just showed the rest of California how this gets done,” said Sean Bothwell, executive director of California Coastkeeper Alliance. “The corporations that own warehouses, fulfillment centers, and shopping malls have had a free ride for thirty years while the public paid to clean up their mess. That era is ending.”
Covered property owners will be able to comply in one of three ways: funding regional stormwater capture and green infrastructure projects, retrofitting their own properties to capture and treat runoff or meeting numeric pollutant limits at discharge points, officials said.
The organizations said they recently filed similar petitions with six other California regional water boards seeking comparable stormwater permits for additional watersheds.