Kansas Water Permits and the 30-Day Clock: What a KDHE Public Notice Means for Your Facility
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Kansas Water Permits and the 30-Day Clock: What a KDHE Public Notice Means for Your Facility

KDHE names Kansas facilities in a weekly water permit notice with a 30-day comment window. What the clock means, who it covers, and what missing it costs.

by iSi Environmental

Ten Kansas facilities are named in a KDHE public notice right now with a comment deadline of September 12, 2026, and not one of them is going to get a phone call about it. The notice published August 13, 2026. It carries draft water pollution control permits, permit numbers, effluent limits, and monitoring parameters, and it runs exactly 30 days. If your facility is on that list, this is the last inexpensive moment to correct a limit, a monitoring parameter, or a compliance schedule before it binds you for up to five years. After the deadline, changing a permit term stops being a letter and starts being a legal process.

That is the part most writing on Kansas wastewater permitting leaves out. The public comment window gets described as civic procedure. For the permittee, it is an operational deadline with a cost of inaction, and the facility most exposed to it is the one that assumes somebody will call.

Before the clock matters, one program question has to be settled, because two different Kansas permits share almost the same name.

What Is a Kansas Water Pollution Control Permit and How Is It Different From an NPDES Permit?

A Kansas Water Pollution Control permit in the strict program sense covers non-overflowing systems that never discharge to surface water: evaporative lagoons, recycle and reuse systems, land application to cropland, and hauled containment. KDHE states these facilities are “regulated solely under State authority,” with no federal permit number. Facilities that discharge to waters of the US receive a joint Kansas/NPDES permit instead.

KDHE says it plainly on its own program page: “Kansas administers two separate wastewater treatment and permitting programs” (KDHE, Pollution Control and NPDES Wastewater Programs). The NPDES program handles “the direct discharge of wastewater to streams, rivers, lakes, and reservoirs.” The Kansas Water Pollution Control program handles “wastewater systems that do not discharge to surface waters.” Roughly 3,137 Kansas facilities hold the state-only non-discharge permit: 1,328 state-permitted animal feeding operations, 1,327 certified AFOs, 276 municipal, 140 commercial, 65 industrial, and 1 federal (EPA, Kansas NPDES Program and Permit Quality Review, December 2021).

Here is the trap. KDHE’s weekly notices use “Kansas Water Pollution Control” loosely, as an umbrella term, and the phrasing changes line by line inside a single document. The August 13, 2026 notice is titled “Public Notice Concerning Kansas / Federal Water Pollution Control Permits and Applications.” Within it, one facility gets a “Kansas Water Pollution Control permit,” another a “Kansas/NPDES Water Pollution Control permit,” and a third an “NPDES/Kansas Water Pollution Control (KWPC) permit” (KDHE Public Notice, August 13, 2026). Two facilities reading the same notice can reasonably reach opposite conclusions about whether EPA has any role in their permit.

The 90-second self-check:

  1. Does anything leave your site as a liquid discharge to a stream, creek, ditch, lake, or storm sewer? You need a Kansas/NPDES permit. The federal number starts KS0.
  2. Is all your wastewater retained, evaporated, land-applied, or hauled off site? You hold a state-only Kansas Water Pollution Control permit. No federal number, no EPA involvement.
  3. Do you confine animals? Run the animal unit math below.
  4. Do you send process wastewater to a city sewer? That is pretreatment, and your approval authority is EPA Region 7, not KDHE.
  5. Do you hold general permit coverage for construction stormwater, industrial stormwater, concrete ready-mix, or hydrostatic testing? Your name never appears in the weekly notice. Watch the general permit expiration date instead.

When Is the KDHE Public Comment Deadline for the August 2026 Water Permit Notice?

September 12, 2026. The KDHE notice dated August 13, 2026 (Public Notice Nos. KS-AG-26-272/276, KS-AG-R-26-021, KS-Q-26-082/085) prints “Comments Due: SEPTEMBER 12, 2026” on page one. Written comments received on or before that date will be considered in the formulation of the final determination. Ten Kansas facilities are named in that notice.

The named list runs five agricultural permits, one agricultural registration, and four non-agricultural permits. Two are worth pulling out because they show the two ends of the range. Valley Center WTP in Sedgwick County (I-LA16-PO03) is a brand-new issuance carrying monitoring for seven parameters including Total Recoverable Mercury, with no sampling history behind it. Sundowner, Inc. in Saline County (C-SA20-NO04), a treated domestic facility, is being reissued with a schedule of compliance to pay back due fees, submit quarterly updates on back due maintenance items, and comply with the terms of a previously issued Order (KDHE Public Notice, August 13, 2026).

For the new permittee, the comment window is the moment to challenge a monitoring burden. After issuance, that burden is a compliance obligation with a sampling cost attached to it every quarter for five years.

How Long Is the KDHE Water Permit Public Comment Period?

Thirty days, applied consistently, though it is KDHE practice rather than a numbered regulation. Verified across three consecutive notices: December 18, 2025 closed January 17, 2026; February 26, 2026 closed March 28, 2026; August 13, 2026 closes September 12, 2026. KDHE publishes weekly on Thursdays, so a new 30-day clock opens every seven days.

Be precise about the sourcing here, because it matters if you are building an internal compliance calendar. We could not locate a Kansas Administrative Regulation that fixes the comment period at 30 days, and EPA’s detailed review of Kansas public notice practice never states a period length. The 30 days is established empirically from the notices themselves (Kansas Register, December 18, 2025, Kansas Register, February 26, 2026, KDHE Public Notice, August 13, 2026). Treat it as reliable practice, not as a right you could enforce against a shorter window.

The weekly cadence is the operational problem. Because a fresh notice opens every Thursday, a monthly compliance check can land on day 28 of a 30-day clock. A facility checking on the first of the month has, in the worst case, 48 hours to draft a technical comment on its own draft permit.

How Do I Find Out If My Facility Is in a KDHE Public Notice?

Facility names appear only inside the linked PDF. The RSS feed and the KDHE News Flash detail page carry the boilerplate preamble and nothing else. Open the PDF from the weekly Proposed Water Permits feed and search your permit number rather than your company name, because permittees are frequently listed under an individual’s name rather than an entity.

This is the single most common way a Kansas facility misses a deadline it was legally noticed about. Three failure modes, all mechanical:

You check the web page instead of the PDF. A manager who opens the KDHE news item, sees generic regulatory language, and closes the tab has confirmed nothing. Names, permit numbers, and effluent limits live in the DocumentCenter PDF only.

You search by company name. In the August 13 notice, permittees appear as Eric Gassmann, Terry Farwell, and Rick Cline. Permit numbers are stable across reissuances. Company names change with ownership. Search the number.

You are on a general permit and watching the wrong document entirely. Roughly 3,710 Kansas permittees hold coverage under just four general permits, against 1,584 individual permits (EPA Kansas PQR). None of those 3,710 are named in the weekly notice. Their terms change at general permit reissuance. The Kansas Industrial Stormwater General NPDES Permit runs November 1, 2021 through October 31, 2026 and affects roughly 855 permittees, none of whom will see their name in a public notice. If that is you, our breakdown of construction stormwater permit and SWPPP requirements covers the general permit side of this.

A working retrieval path, verified without a browser: pull the Proposed Water Permits RSS feed, open the linked PDF, and search your permit number. KDHE also maintains an email list for permit public notices and sends them weekly. Get on it.

What Do the KS-AG, KS-Q, and KS-AG-R Prefixes Mean on a KDHE Notice?

KS-AG covers “Pending Permits for Confined Feeding Facilities.” KS-AG-R covers registrations received under K.S.A. 65-171d for proposed facilities, which are registrations and not permits. KS-Q covers every non-agricultural draft permit, issued pursuant to the Kansas Surface Water Quality Standards at K.A.R. 28-16-28(b-g) and Federal Surface Water Criteria.

Each of those block labels is stated in the notice text itself. KDHE publishes no glossary for the prefix letters, so read them as block labels rather than decoded abbreviations.

The trailing numbers are a running annual counter, not a facility count. KS-AG-26-272/276 is agricultural permits 272 through 276 of calendar year 2026. That makes throughput derivable: between the February 26 and August 13, 2026 notices, the agricultural counter ran 080 to 276 and the non-agricultural counter ran 023 to 085 across 24 weeks. That works out to roughly 8.2 agricultural and 2.6 non-agricultural permits public-noticed per week. The weekly notice is overwhelmingly a livestock document, and some weeks carry no non-agricultural content at all.

Facility permit numbers follow a [class]-[basin and county]-[type][sequence] pattern, consistent across 14 permits in two independent notices. The class letter is the useful part: A- agricultural, C- commercial or private domestic, M- municipal, I- industrial, P- pretreatment. Federal numbers run KS0###### for individual NPDES and KSP000### for pretreatment.

How Many Animal Units Require a Kansas Confined Feeding Permit?

1,000 or more animal units requires a permit under K.S.A. 65-171d. At 300 to 999 animal units, registration is mandatory before new construction but a permit is required only if KDHE identifies significant water pollution potential, which it has 30 days from receipt to do. Below 300, registration is optional. Registration costs $25.

Animal unit capacityObligationSeparation distance
Under 300May register ($25). KDHE has 30 days to identify water pollution potentialNot applicable at this tier
300 to 999Must register before new construction ($25). Permit required only on a finding of significant water pollution potential1,320 ft from habitable structures
1,000 or moreMust register and must obtain a permit4,000 ft
Swine, 3,725 or morePermit required5,000 ft for new construction; 16,000 ft from a wildlife refuge (10,000 ft applies to swine facilities of 1,000 to 3,724 animal units)

Source: K.S.A. 65-171d.

Animal units are computed with statutory multipliers, not head count: beef over 700 lb at 1.0, cattle under 700 lb at 0.5, mature dairy at 1.4, swine over 55 lb at 0.4, swine at or under 55 lb at 0.1, sheep and lambs at 0.1, horses at 2.0, turkeys at 0.018, ducks at 0.2. Poultry crosses a separate federal trigger at 125,000 broilers or 82,000 laying hens on a dry manure system.

Two entries in the August 13 notice show why the math is worth doing carefully. KC Pork Arrowhead West runs 2,400 head of swine over 55 lb. At 0.4, that is 960 animal units, below the 1,000 permit trigger, and it holds a permit anyway (A-LRWS-S036), which means KDHE identified water pollution potential inside the 300 to 999 band. Eric Gassmann’s operation runs 999 head of cattle over 700 lb, which is exactly 999 animal units, one unit under the line. That is not a coincidence, and it is the clearest illustration available of why the calculation drives the obligation.

One more timing rule that catches operators: after registration, the permit application is due within 18 months, extendable by petition up to 18 additional months, or the registration expires. Once it expires, KDHE will not accept a new registration for the same location for at least 180 days.

What Is the Penalty for Discharging Without a Kansas Water Permit?

Up to $10,000 per violation under K.S.A. 65-170d, and “every day such violation continues shall be deemed a separate violation.” A 30-day unpermitted discharge therefore exposes $300,000 in state penalty alone. Federal Clean Water Act judicial penalties reach $68,445 per day per violation under 40 CFR 19.4.

The state statute reaches five violation types: permit terms, effluent or water quality standards, filing requirements, reporting and inspection and monitoring requirements, and any lawful order of the secretary. It also instructs that a penalty “shall constitute an actual and substantial economic deterrent to the violation for which it is assessed.” Procedurally, you get a written order from the director of the Division of Environment stating the violation, the penalty, and your appeal rights. You then have 15 days to request a hearing, and the hearing occurs within 30 days of the request. That 15-day window is shorter than the comment window and much easier to blow through.

Delegation does not remove federal exposure. Federal administrative penalties run $27,378 per violation with a $68,445 cap for Class I, and $27,378 per day with a $342,218 cap for Class II (40 CFR 19.4). Kansas DMR data batch-uploads nightly into EPA’s ICIS-NPDES system, so your reported numbers are federally visible whether or not EPA issued your permit.

One caveat stated plainly, because you will see it reported carelessly. The federal figures above trace to 40 CFR 19.4 with a most recent effective date of January 8, 2025 (90 FR 1377). We found no 2026 EPA civil monetary penalty inflation adjustment rule. These are the newest verifiable numbers, not confirmed 2026 numbers. Verify against eCFR before quoting them in a filing.

How Often Must a Kansas NPDES Permit Be Renewed?

Five years, maximum. NPDES permits carry a fixed term not to exceed five years under 40 CFR 122.46, and the renewal application is due 180 days before expiration under 40 CFR 122.21(d). Kansas synchronizes reissuance across eleven major river basins, so every permit in a given basin expires in the same year.

The basin synchronization is a planning advantage most facility managers do not know they have. Your reissuance year is a function of geography, not of your individual paperwork date. If you operate multiple Kansas sites in one basin, they come up together and you can staff the review once.

The 180-day rule is not administrative pedantry. EPA flagged this exact mechanism in its review of Kansas: “Since the allowance for administratively extended permits hinges on receipt of a complete application 180 days prior to permit expiration [40 CFR 122.21(d)], documenting the date KDHE determines the permit application is complete is necessary” (EPA Kansas PQR). File late, and you can lose the administrative continuation that keeps you legally covered after your permit expires.

While the permit runs, two operating details catch facilities out. Every environmental lab supplying data required by a Kansas NPDES permit must be accredited through KDHE. And schedules of compliance are capped at three years under K.A.R. 28-16-28f(c), with an exception provision to five. If your problem takes longer than three years to fix, you do not get a longer schedule, you get an enforceable compliance order referenced in the permit. The instrument changes and so does the legal posture.

What Happens If I Miss the KDHE Comment Deadline on My Draft Permit?

Only comments received on or before the deadline are guaranteed consideration. K.S.A. 65-165(e) grants a 30-day appeal to the permittee or applicant served with notice of denial, revocation, modification or change. Kansas statute grants no equivalent administrative appeal to a third-party commenter. Practically, the comment window is your cheapest correction point.

Three honest parts to that answer.

First, the notice conditions consideration on timeliness: comments “received on or before SEPTEMBER 12, 2026 will be considered in the formulation of the final determination.” Nothing obligates KDHE to consider a late comment. Nothing says late comments are rejected either. After the deadline you are asking a favor rather than exercising a right.

Second, the statutory appeal right runs to the regulated party, not to the public. We found no Kansas statutory provision granting a third-party commenter an administrative appeal of a permit issuance. Do not assume missing the window forecloses judicial review, and do not assume commenting preserves it. What the statute grants, it grants to the permittee.

Third, if you are the permittee, the economics are lopsided. Once the permit issues, changing it means an appeal under 65-165(e) within 30 days of service, a modification request, or living with the terms for up to five years. K.A.R. 28-16-62 lets KDHE reopen a permit, but that is KDHE’s option, not yours. The 30-day window is the one moment when a factual correction costs a letter instead of a legal process.

You also will not hear back during the window. Per the notice, “all comments received will be responded to at the time the Secretary of Health and Environment issues a determination regarding final agency action.” The response comes bundled with the decision, on KDHE’s schedule.

Who Do I Send KDHE Permit Comments To?

Two separate addresses, and using the wrong one is a real risk. Agricultural draft documents, applications, and registrations go to Casey Guccione, Livestock Waste Management Section, KDHE Bureau of Environmental Field Services, 1000 SW Jackson, Suite 430, Topeka, KS 66612. All other permits go to Andrew Bowman, KDHE Bureau of Water, 1000 SW Jackson St., Suite 420, Topeka, KS 66612.

Comments must be in writing, and the notice instructs commenters to “refer to the appropriate Kansas document number and name of the applicant/permittee when preparing comments.” A comment that omits the document number is a comment that has to be matched to a file by hand.

To inspect the underlying draft permit and supporting file before you write: agricultural records through Jada Martin, 785-296-0076, kdhe.feedlots@ks.gov; all others through Jamie Packard, Bureau of Water, 785-296-4148, Jamie.Packard@ks.gov. Offices are open 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays, and copies are provided at KDHE’s assessed copying cost. Request the file early. Thirty days is not long to obtain a record, analyze a limit, and draft a technical response.

How Do I Request a Public Hearing on a Kansas Draft Water Permit?

Submit a written request, separate from your comment. Per the notice, “a request for public hearing must be submitted in writing and shall state the nature of the issues proposed to be raised during the hearing.” KDHE holds hearings under K.A.R. 28-16-61, or 28-46-21 for UIC, when response to a draft document “indicates significant public interest.”

The operative words are “shall state the nature of the issues.” A comment that does not name its issues cannot double as a hearing request. If you want the hearing, write two documents.

Set expectations realistically. EPA’s review found that “outside of new or expanded CAFO permits which routinely have public hearings, there are rarely requests for public hearings on other NPDES permits” in Kansas. If you hold a municipal or industrial permit, a hearing is an unusual outcome. Your leverage is in the written comment, not in the hearing request.

Does Kansas or EPA Issue Water Permits in Kansas?

KDHE. EPA authorized Kansas to administer a program equivalent to the federal NPDES program continuously since 1974, and has “delegated authority to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) to issue NPDES permits for all facilities outside tribal lands.” Two exceptions matter: EPA issues permits on tribal lands, and EPA Region 7 remains the pretreatment approval authority.

EPA’s own language is “continuously since 1974” with no month or day stated, so treat 1974 as the year and leave it there. KDHE is authorized for the base program, federal facilities, and general permits, and is explicitly not authorized for pretreatment or biosolids (EPA Kansas PQR, EPA Kansas NPDES Permits). Pretreatment is jointly administered with Region 7 under a Memorandum of Agreement refreshed on February 19, 2020, replacing a 42-year-old agreement.

The practical consequence: if your facility is not on tribal land, your permitting authority is Topeka, not Lenexa. But if you discharge process wastewater to a Kansas municipal sewer, the approval authority for your pretreatment obligations is EPA Region 7. Kansas being “not authorized for biosolids” is the same kind of split, and it is the reason emerging contaminant questions in sludge do not resolve cleanly at the state level. We covered that in detail in our analysis of PFAS, biosolids, and industrial wastewater discharge risk.

If you also run air permits in the region, the public notice mechanics are close cousins across media. See our walkthrough of Kansas City air permitting requirements and the parallel comment-window analysis in minor source air permit public notice requirements.

What a Comment That Actually Moves a Limit Looks Like

Most comments on draft permits are generic objections, and they read like generic objections. There is a specific, fully documented ask available on a Kansas draft permit that is far harder to deflect.

Kansas adopted a chemical-specific reasonable potential procedure by regulation at K.A.R. 28-16-60. EPA’s Permit Quality Review then found that permit writers were not applying it:

“No permit reviewed appeared to have utilized the KDHE-adopted RP procedure. Where RP was mentioned, it typically represented a permit writer’s judgement that no reasonable potential existed. Opinion or judgement can be used to establish RP, like KDHE does with WET, but should not be used to exclude RP.”

“Application of RP analyses has largely been overlooked in the permitting process. KDHE has agreed to establish a mechanism to appropriately apply RP.”

Source: EPA Kansas PQR.

A comment asking KDHE to document the K.A.R. 28-16-60 reasonable potential analysis supporting a specific numeric limit in your draft permit is asking the state for something it already committed to EPA it would do. That is a different conversation than “this limit seems strict.” It is also the right ask when you are handed a monitoring parameter with no discharge history behind it, which is exactly the Valley Center WTP situation described above.

The related federal citations to pair with it: reasonable potential procedure under 40 CFR 122.44(d)(1)(ii), and fact sheets showing limit calculations under 40 CFR 124.56(a). Both appear in EPA’s list of essential action items for KDHE.

The Honest Read on KDHE’s Program

It would be easy to write this post as a warning about a slow, overloaded state agency. The record does not support that, and pretending otherwise would cost credibility with anyone who checks.

KDHE’s permit backlog is under 1%. EPA found that “as of March 30, 2021, 99% of Kansas’s permits are current” and wrote that “KDHE deserves recognition for consistently maintaining a high percentage of permits current.” Meanwhile, every NPDES permit EPA itself issues in Kansas, the five on tribal lands, is expired. The federally administered permits in Kansas are 100% backlogged and the state-administered ones are 99% current (EPA Kansas PQR, EPA Kansas NPDES Permits). EPA’s overall verdict was that “KDHE NPDES permits generally met applicable requirements and were protective of water quality.”

That performance comes off a thin bench. EPA recorded a 33% vacancy rate for non-CAFO permit staff and an average of roughly 145 individual permits or notices of intent drafted per writer per year. That cuts both ways for a permittee. Less time per draft argues for reviewing your own permit carefully. It also means a well-documented comment is more likely to land, because the reviewer has less time to reconstruct the record independently.

Sackett did not shrink your Kansas obligations, for most permittees. Sackett v. EPA (2023) narrowed Clean Water Act jurisdiction over wetlands to those with a continuous surface connection to a relatively permanent water, and EPA and the Corps proposed a conforming WOTUS revision with comments closing January 5, 2026. But Kansas permits “waters of the state,” not waters of the United States. K.S.A. 65-171d authorizes the Secretary to prevent “surface and subsurface water pollution and soil pollution,” and true non-discharge Kansas permits are regulated solely under State authority with no federal nexus at all. A narrower WOTUS shrinks the federal half of the program and leaves the state half untouched. For the 3,137 facilities on state-only permits, it changes nothing.

We are not going to tell you enforcement is trending up. EPA’s Permit Quality Review contains no enforcement statistics: no significant-noncompliance rates, no inspection completion counts, no penalty totals. PQRs review permit quality, not enforcement. Anyone citing a Kansas water enforcement trend is not working from that document, and we did not find a primary source that supports one.

What KDHE does document is inspection cadence: nine inspectors across six district offices in Chanute, Wichita, Dodge City, Salina, Hays, and Lawrence. Large CAFOs are inspected every 18 months. Other state-permitted livestock operations are inspected once per permit cycle. Inspectors also respond to complaints.

What to Do Between Now and September 12

  1. Determine which program you are in. Federal number starting KS0 means Kansas/NPDES. No federal number means a state-only Kansas Water Pollution Control permit. Write it on the permit file cover.
  2. Pull the current notice PDF and search your permit number. Not the web page. Not your company name. The August 13, 2026 notice is live until September 12.
  3. Subscribe to the weekly notice email list so a monthly check does not land on day 28 of a 30-day clock.
  4. If you are named, request the supporting file immediately through Jamie Packard for non-agricultural permits or Jada Martin for agricultural. The clock does not pause while you wait for records.
  5. Check every new or changed numeric limit against a reasonable potential analysis. If the fact sheet does not show the K.A.R. 28-16-60 analysis, that is your comment.
  6. Calendar your basin’s reissuance year and your 180-day renewal date. Both are predictable years in advance.
  7. If you are on a general permit, calendar the general permit expiration instead. The Kansas Industrial Stormwater General NPDES Permit expires October 31, 2026, roughly ten weeks out.

Where iSi Fits

The work in that list is not complicated. It is just work that only gets done if somebody owns it, and at most Kansas facilities the person who would own it is also running safety, training, waste, and air. That is how a 30-day window closes unnoticed on a facility that had a legitimate technical objection to raise.

iSi’s environmental compliance program management covers the standing side of this: watching the weekly notice for your permit numbers, reviewing draft permit limits and monitoring parameters before they bind, tracking basin reissuance and 180-day renewal dates, and drafting the technical comment when a limit needs to be challenged. If you want a read on a specific draft permit in the current window, tell us the permit number and we will look at it.

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