Vermont ANR tells Senate panel it will ramp up CAFO permitting after EPA found gaps

Julie Moore, secretary of the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources, told the Senate Natural Resources Committee that ANR submitted a corrective action plan to U.S. EPA in December and received follow-up feedback Jan. 17 requiring more detail. The agency plans to begin joint inspections with the Agency of Agriculture this spring, with ANR staff taking the lead on determinations about whether farms are discharging and therefore need NPDES CAFO permits.

The matter began after the Conservation Law Foundation filed a de‑delegation petition with EPA in March 2022 alleging that Vermont was not meeting its Clean Water Act obligations for concentrated animal feeding operations. "If there's a discharge, it needs a discharge permit," Moore said, summarizing EPA's legal position that any observed discharge from a farm is subject to NPDES permitting regardless of how long the event lasted.

The petition prompted an EPA Region 1 letter dated Sept. 9, 2024 that identified seven programmatic deficiencies, ANR officials said. Key items EPA asked ANR to address include: inspecting potentially jurisdictional farms, reviewing nutrient management plans for adequacy, building a permit-and‑inspection tracking system, taking enforcement where farms discharge without required permits, obtaining sufficient personnel to implement the program, and proposing necessary statutory and regulatory authority and a timeline with milestones.

Pete Laflamme, director of the Watershed Management Division at the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation, described CAFO (CAPO in the testimony) permits as federal NPDES documents that cover direct discharges — for example, a production‑area pipe that routes waste straight to a stream — and in some cases…