County lawmakers send message to DC

Navigable waters run deep

By FRITZ MAYER

MONTICELLO, NY — The U.S. Senate Committee on Public Works on July 9 approved a bill called the Clean Water Restoration Act (CWRA), along party lines. Democrat Barbara Boxer said it was a good way to restore some of the authority to the original Clean Water Act (CWA), which had been eroded by two Supreme Court decisions over the past decade. Republican James Inhofe, on the other hand, said it was a serious case of federal overreach that would harm the interests of rural America.

The dust up concerns the words “navigable waters,” which was the wording in the original CWA bill that was enacted in 1972. The Supreme Court decisions, which critics say jeopardized the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Army Corp of Engineers (ACE) to protect many waters in the country, relied heavily on the words “navigable waters.”

Critics argued that the court decisions, which hinged on the definition of navigable waters, put millions of acres of wetlands and thousands of miles of seasonal streams beyond the reach of the CWA. The new legislation would remove the words “navigable waters” and replace them with “waters of the United States.”

On the day the Senate committee was debating the issue, Sullivan County lawmakers came down squarely on the side of the senate Republicans. The legislature unanimously passed a resolution calling for the national lawmakers not to change the language. The resolution read that if the CWRA passed, “it is possible that streets, gutters, ditches, pipes, human-made ponds, drainage features… could be regulated by the federal government, which are currently handled in an effective manner by local governments.”

The bill itself on the open congress website ( www.opencongress.org/bill/111-s787/show ) says in part: “‘waters of the United States’ is defined to mean all waters subject to the ebb and flow of the tide, the territorial seas, and all interstate and intrastate waters and their tributaries, including lakes, rivers, streams (including intermittent streams), mudflats, sandflats, wetlands, sloughs, prairie potholes, wet meadows, playa lakes, natural ponds and all impoundments of the foregoing…”

However, the bill says it does not affect the authority of the EPA or ACE in regards to “the construction or maintenance of farm or stock ponds, irrigation ditches and maintenance of drainage ditches, or farm, forest or temporary roads for moving mining equipment in accordance with best management practices, or the construction of temporary sedimentation basins on construction sites for which discharges do not include placement of fill material into the waters of the United States.”

The bill does not mention streets, gutters or pipes.