Texas Stormwater Permit Leads for Contractors

Erosion-control and building-materials sales reps get active Texas stormwater construction-permit coverages from EPA's own database, ready to call before a competitor does.

Introduction

Any construction site in Texas that disturbs an acre of ground or more has to hold coverage under the state's general stormwater permit, TXR150000, before the first shovel goes in. That single fact is a signal buyers care about: general contractors, erosion-control and silt-fence crews, aggregate and building-materials suppliers, and site-development lenders all want to know where new active coverages are showing up, because a fresh permit is one of the earliest public signs that a construction job is about to start.

Texas's own environmental agency, TCEQ, runs the permit program, but its public query tool does not answer a plain request for a machine to read. The same coverages are re-published nationally by the EPA in its own ICIS-NPDES compliance database, which EPA's own data-licensing page states is public domain by default. This Actor reads that EPA file directly, live, on every run, and keeps only the Texas TXR15 stormwater coverages that are currently active (status EFF) and were recorded by EPA as issued inside the window you ask for.

Tutorial

1. Open the Actor and set County to a Texas county name (for example Harris or Travis), or leave it as All to search every county.
2. Set Days back to how far back you want to look for a permit's EPA-recorded issue date. EPA refreshes its download on its own schedule, not daily, so a wider window (30-90 days) is more useful than 1-2 days.
3. Set Maximum rows to your spend cap. Every row returned bills, so this number is also the most a single run can cost.
4. Click Start and open the resulting dataset once the run finishes.

Pricing

This Actor charges $0.005 per row returned to the dataset, with no start fee and no charge for a run that returns zero rows. A run that returns 80 rows costs $0.40. The price reflects that each row is a specific, dated, government-recorded construction permit, not a generic directory listing: finding this yourself means downloading and parsing a roughly 350MB national EPA file by hand.

Input and output examples

Input:

{"county": "Harris", "daysBack": 60, "maxItems": 100}

Output (one row):

{
  "permit_id": "TXR15XXXX",
  "site_name": "EXAMPLE SITE NAME",
  "county": "Harris",
  "city": "Houston",
  "zip": "77002",
  "permit_name": "EXAMPLE PERMIT NAME",
  "permit_issue_date": "2026-08-14",
  "status": "EFF",
  "source_url": "https://echo.epa.gov/files/echodownloads/npdes_downloads.zip",
  "fetched_at": "2026-09-15T12:00:00Z"
}

permit_name is EPA's own facility-name field for the permit, not a contractor or operator name — EPA publishes no operator field, and none is invented here. permit_issue_date is when EPA recorded the coverage as issued, not a ground-breaking date.

Recommendations

Run this weekly or monthly with a 30-90 day window rather than daily; EPA's own download does not change every day. Use the County filter to focus on a metro area you cover instead of pulling every Texas county each time.

FAQ

Does this include contractor or site-plan details? No. EPA's public dataset has no such field, so none is added or guessed.

Where does the data come from? EPA's national ICIS-NPDES download, which is public and free to access directly from EPA; this Actor automates the download, filtering, and county lookup so you do not have to.

What happens if EPA's file can't be read on a run? The run ends with a status message and an empty dataset. No row is ever invented, and you are never charged for a row that was not produced.

Refunds and support

Refunds: if a run returns zero rows for a valid input, email operations@ustechautomations.com within 7 days and we refund that run. Support: same address, replies within 2 business days.