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NY Times, Sept. 12, 2019
Trump Administration Rolls Back Clean Water Protections
By Coral Davenport and Lisa Friedman
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Thursday announced the repeal
of a major Obama-era clean water regulation that had placed limits on
polluting chemicals that could be used near streams, wetlands and other
bodies of water.
The rollback of the 2015 measure, known as the Waters of the United
States rule, adds to a lengthy list of environmental rules that the
administration has worked to weaken or undo over the past two and a half
years. Those efforts have focused heavily on eliminating restrictions on
fossil fuel pollution, including coal-fired power plants, automobile
tailpipes, and oil and gas leaks, but have also touched on asbestos and
pesticides.
The repeal of the water rule, which is expected to take effect in a
matter of weeks, has implications far beyond the pollution that will now
be allowed to flow freely into streams and wetlands from farms, mines
and factories. With Thursday’s announcement, the Environmental
Protection Agency is aiming to establish a stricter legal definition of
“waters of the United States” under the Clean Water Act, a precedent
that could make it difficult for future administrations to take actions
to protect waterways.
Patrick Parenteau, a professor of environmental law at the Vermont Law
School, said that, for conservative states and leaders who hold the view
that the Clean Water Act has been burdensome for farmers and industry,
“this is an opportunity to really drive a stake through the heart of
federal water protection.
Weakening the rule had been a central campaign pledge for President
Trump, who characterized it as federal overreach that impinged on the
rights of farmers, rural landowners and real estate developers to use
their properties as they see fit. Mr. Trump signed an executive order in
the early days of his administration directing federal agencies to begin
the work of repealing and replacing it.
“Today’s final rule puts an end to an egregious power-grab,” Andrew
Wheeler, the administrator of the E.P.A., said Thursday in a news
conference to announce the repeal.
Mr. Wheeler said the rollback would mean “farmers, property owners and
businesses will spend less time and money determining whether they need
a federal permit and more time building infrastructure.”
Agricultural groups, an important political constituency for Mr. Trump,
praised the repeal. Zippy Duvall, president of the American Farm Bureau
Federation, said the water rule had sparked outrage from thousands of
farmers and ranchers across the country and led to the largest effort to
kill a regulation in his organization’s history.
“When you take private property rights from a man who’s worked all his
life,” Mr. Duvall said, “that is very intrusive to him and it’s
something he just can’t stand for.”
But environmentalists assailed the move. “With many of our cities and
towns living with unsafe drinking water, now is not the time to cut back
on clean water enforcement,” said Laura Rubin, director of the Healing
Our Waters-Great Lakes Coalition.
The Obama rule, developed under the authority of the 1972 Clean Water
Act, was designed to limit pollution in about 60 percent of the nation’s
bodies of water, protecting sources of drinking water for about
one-third of the United States. It extended existing federal authority
to limit pollution in large bodies of water, like the Chesapeake Bay and
Puget Sound, to smaller bodies that drain into them, such as
tributaries, streams and wetlands.
Under the rule, farmers using land near streams and wetlands were
restricted from doing certain kinds of plowing and from planting certain
crops, and would have been required to obtain E.P.A. permits in order to
use chemical pesticides and fertilizers that could have run off into
those bodies of water. Those restrictions will now be lifted.
The Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers,
which had worked together to write the original Obama rule, are expected
to issue a new, looser replacement rule by the end of this year. It is
expected that the new rule, still being developed, will retain federal
protections for larger bodies of water, the rivers that drain into them
and wetlands that are directly adjacent to those bodies of water.
But it will quite likely strip away protections of so-called ephemeral
streams, in which water runs only during or after rainfalls, and of
wetlands that are not adjacent to major bodies of water or connected to
such bodies of water by a surface channel of water.
