You Got a Notice of Violation from TCEQ. Now What?

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality administers construction stormwater under the TPDES program, and its construction general permit — TXR150000, effective 5 March 2023, expiring 5 March 2028 — contains the most explicit rainfall language of any permit we monitor. That clarity cuts both ways. It is easy to know what the rule is. It is also hard to argue you misunderstood it.

What the letter is

TCEQ’s enforcement process moves in stages, from an initial notice of findings through to formal enforcement. The document you are holding states which stage it represents and what it requires of you. That matters more than it sounds: the appropriate response to an early notice with a corrective window is not the appropriate response to a formal enforcement action, and the difference is written on the page.

The first 48 hours

1. Correct anything live. A control that has failed, an unstabilised area, a discharge. Photograph before and after, with dates.
2. Freeze the records. No backfilling, no re-signing, no tidying. An amended log is a much worse problem than an incomplete one.
3. Notify the parties with parallel duties. Texas sites frequently carry both a primary operator and secondary operators with distinct obligations under the same permit.
4. Pull the rainfall record for the full period — then do the exercise in the next section before concluding anything about which storms qualified.

The cumulative rule that catches people

Part III.F.8.(c) requires inspections “at least once every fourteen (14) calendar days and within 24 hours of the end of a storm event of 0.5 inches or greater”, and then spells out the part that does most of the work: “If a storm event produces 0.5 inches or more of rain within a 24-hour period (including when there are multiple, smaller storms that alone produce less than 0.5 inches but together produce 0.5 inches or more in 24 hours), you are required to conduct one inspection within 24 hours of when 0.5 inches of rain or more has fallen.”

Texas is telling you, in the permit itself, that the measurement is a rolling 24-hour accumulation and not a list of discrete named storms. Three showers of 0.2″, 0.15″ and 0.2″ across an afternoon and evening total 0.55″ and trigger the requirement. None of them individually would appear in most site logs as anything at all.

This is the single most common way a Texas site ends up with a real gap while everyone believes the program is running properly. Nobody ignored a storm. There was no storm — there was weather, three times, and the total crossed a line nobody was adding up. We have written about the general version of this in rolling 24 hours versus the calendar day; Texas is the state where the permit text removes any argument about it.

Before you respond to a Texas finding, re-derive the qualifying events from rainfall data on a rolling basis, not from your log’s list of storms. You may find the agency’s list is right and yours was incomplete. Better to know that while drafting than to assert otherwise and be corrected.

“Entirely outside” means entirely

The same clause continues: “When the 24-hour inspection time frame occurs entirely outside of normal working hours, you must conduct an inspection by no later than the end of the next business day.”

The word entirely is load-bearing, and it is routinely read as though it were not there. If 0.5″ is reached at 16:00, the 24-hour window runs to 16:00 the following day — overlapping two working days. The extension does not apply. A response that leans on the after-hours provision for a storm that finished mid-afternoon will be corrected, and it invites closer reading of everything else you filed.

Note also that Texas counts from when 0.5 inches has fallen, which is a different instant from the end of the storm. Georgia counts from the end of the storm. If you run sites in both states on one procedure, one of those two is being computed wrongly right now.

What they will ask for

• The SWPPP, current, with amendments, matching the site as built.
• Inspection reports for the period — both the 14-day cycle and every rain-triggered inspection.
• Rainfall records with a named source, sufficient to show which periods reached 0.5″ in 24 hours.
• Your site notice or permit authorisation documentation, and confirmation it is current and correctly posted.
• Corrective actions, with completion dates, and evidence of final stabilization where claimed.

Writing the response

Answer each finding in the agency’s own numbering: what you established on checking, the labelled evidence, the correction with its completion date, and the procedural change that prevents recurrence. Two things are worth doing in a Texas response specifically.

Show your accumulation working

If a finding turns on whether a period qualified, do not simply assert a total. Show the rainfall by interval, the 24-hour window you applied, the source, and the resulting total. A regulator can check that. An unsourced number in a sentence invites the question of where it came from.

Address the 14-day cycle separately

The routine cycle and the rain events are independent obligations in Texas — unlike Georgia, a rain inspection does not reset the routine cycle here. Responses that blur them together tend to leave one of the two unanswered, and it is usually the routine one.

What changes afterwards

The accumulation stops being something a person adds up. The permit describes a rolling calculation; a spreadsheet of daily totals is not that calculation, and the gap between the two is exactly where the missed events live.

The deadline stops being computed by hand. Texas counts 24 hours from when the threshold was reached, with a narrow after-hours extension and a next-business-day rule attached. Those are three interacting rules and a local timezone — and a site evaluated in UTC lands five or six hours off, which inside a 24-hour window is enough to move the deadline onto the wrong day.

Common questions