Hartford – A legislative committee today unanimously approved regulations for the amounts of water that must be released from dams to maintain ecologically healthy flows in all the state’s rivers and streams.

Six years in the making, the new streamflow regulations will apply to about 60 public water supply reservoirs owned by private and municipal water companies. They were approved by the Regulations Review Committee, which had rejected an earlier version. Previously minimum flow requirements existed only for the five percent streams stocked with fish.

Smaller reservoirs, groundwater withdrawals and withdrawals from streams for agriculture and golf courses are exempt. The regulations were adopted to implement a law passed in 2005 that sought state management of water releases into rivers and streams that balance human needs for water resources with ecological needs for sufficient flows to maintain aquatic life and healthy waterways.

About 80 percent of Connecticut residents are served by public water systems, and of those, about 75 percent receive water from surface reservoir supplies fed by rivers and streams. The remaining 25 percent of public water supplies come from groundwater wells that are not covered by the new regulations.

State Rep. Arthur O’Neill, R-Southbury, referred to the long court battle over low flows in the Shepaug River, a key source of drinking water for Waterbury and surrounding communities, as the catalyst that brought the issue to the state’s attention. He also praised the lengthy negotiation process the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection oversaw with water companies and representatives of environmental groups to develop regulations all parties could accept.

“The regulations do not go as far as some environmental advocates would have liked, and they do not do as little as some of those in the regulated community would have liked,” O’Neill said. “But everyone was at the table in the negotiations. Today we have a set of regulations that provide Connecticut with a system to regulate streamflows so that we don’t have multi-million dollar lawsuits going through our court system. It will be much better for the people of Connecticut to have these regulations in place.”

Betsey Wingfield, bureau chief of DEEP’s Bureau of Water Protection and Land Reuse, said the regulations will officially take effect in about a month. The first step will be for DEEP to classify all rivers and streams into one of four categories, each with different flow requirements. Water companies will have 10 years to make equipment upgrades to enable them to meet the flow requirements.