On May 30, 2024, House Bill (HB) 24-1379 was signed into law. The enactment of HB24-1379 resulted from the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Sackett v. EPA, which drastically limited the scope of protection under the federal Clean Water Act (CWA) by interpreting the term “waters of the United States” much more narrowly than it had been interpreted and applied for over 50 years. “Waters of the United States” are waterbodies such as rivers, lakes, streams, and wetlands, over which EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Army Corps) have jurisdiction to protect through their regulatory programs.

In anticipation of the decision in the Sackett case, Governor Polis convened a task force in Jan. 2023 to explore options to ensure continued protection for Colorado’s waterways from the impacts of dredge and fill activities. Stakeholders continued to meet in 2023 and the first part of 2024 to discuss a regulatory framework that made sense for the protection of Colorado’s water resources. If you are interested in reviewing past meeting materials from these efforts, they are available in this public folder. These efforts culminated in the passage of HB24-1379.

HB24-1379 directs the Water Quality Control Division to develop a dredge and fill authorization program and the Water Quality Control Commission to establish permitting and mitigation rules by Dec. 31, 2025. The outcome will be Regulation No. 87, a control regulation for avoiding and minimizing the impacts of dredge and fill activity. You can learn more about the division's implementation efforts here. See below for more details about stakeholder engagement efforts for the implementation of HB 24-1379 and the development of Regulation No. 87