MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) – The Vermont Agency of Natural Resources is now 15 years overdue in meeting federal clean-water requirements, and doesn’t want the public to know why, according to recent agency documents.

The ANR’s Department of Environmental Conservation was in the final stages of drafting rules to control stormwater flowing from industrial sites in the last months of the Dean administration in 2002 – already 12 years late.

The rule was first called for in the federal Clean Water Act of 1972, but Congress didn’t crack down on the Environmental Protection Agency until 1987, ordering it to address pollution that results when rain or melted snow gets hold of pollutants from industrial sites and carries it off to nearby streams or lakes. The EPA issued rules in 1990 and called on the states to manage the new permitting scheme.

The state DEC issued a press release in October of 2002 acknowledging that “Vermont is one of the last states in the United States to implement the permit.” It set a series of public hearings for that month on a draft general permit – usually one of the last steps before a new rule’s formal adoption – and said the new permitting process would be in place by March.

Before March there was January, when a new administration took office. Three years after the permit appeared to be in its final stages, the DEC web site says, “The issuance of the MSGP (multi-sector general permit) in Vermont has been delayed, and the actual date of implementation is uncertain.”

The Conservation Law Foundation, a New England-wide environmental group with an office in Montpelier, set out to find out what was causing the delay. It made a request in February under Vermont’s access-to-public-records law for “access to all Vermont Agency of Natural Resources records regarding the development and implementation of these (industrial stormwater permit) programs.”

Nine months later, that request has yet to be fulfilled. The DEC first responded to the request by saying that the documents CLF was seeking were exempt from the public records law. CLF wrote back saying it wanted an itemized list of records being withheld and the agency’s justification for doing so.

The agency responded with a catalogue of some 300 e-mails, memos and other documents between and among agency staff and its reasons for keeping them secret. It also sent CLF a bill for $957.60 for its lawyers’ staff time determining all the reasons the environmental group couldn’t see the documents.

DEC Commissioner Jeffrey Wennberg and his boss, Agency of Natural Resources Secretary Thomas Torti, were said to be in meetings Tuesday and unavailable for comment. Wennberg told Vermont Public Radio last week that the he expected his department would have a new draft permit – replacing the one it issued in September of 2002 – out by the end of this year.

He said his department had been slow to issue the new general permit in part because it was tied up dealing with a lawsuit brought by CLF on another aspect of stormwater regulation. CLF called that claim “ridiculous.”

In 1990, the Vermont Supreme Court crafted a new legal doctrine of “executive privilege,” allowing documents that go to and from a governor to remain secret, reasoning that a governor needs to get frank advice from her or his advisers without fear of the public knowing what that advice is.

Secretary of State Deborah Markowitz said Tuesday that the agency appeared to be trying to stretch that doctrine way down the chain of command from the governor. She said the agency was “trying to take this exception well beyond what was contemplated by the court when it first articulated this doctrine.”

She added that if the courts were to allow this expanded privilege to stand, “It would be time for the Legislature to take another look at executive privilege.”

Meanwhile, CLF, using data from the state Department of Labor, came up with an estimate of about 2,500 industrial sites in Vermont that have needed stormwater discharge permits since 1990.

CLF lawyer Anthony Iarrapino said those firms operating without a permit could be opening themselves up to suits brought under the Clean Water Act, with each violations punishable by fines up to $30,000.

A permitting system would give those companies some protection from such suits, Iarrapino said, adding, “To the extent the agency thinks it’s doing the regulated community any favors by not having this program in place, that’s just wacky.”