Block Bush Dirty Water Proposal!

The following BEC Byline was originally published as a call to action in July 2002. It is available here for archival purposes.

By BEC and the Clean Water Network

The Bush administration is poised to roll back another key environmental protection program by attempting to gut an important part of Clean Water Act regulations. The administration is on the verge of proposing new rules that will undermine the Act's program for cleaning up polluted waters. Please respond to this alert immediately by:

Telling Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Christine Whitman that she must maintain a strong Clean Water Act and not weaken it and, Letting your Congressional representatives know that after 30 years the promise of clean water for everyone is more important than ever and the administration's attempts to undercut this promise must be stopped. Take action via the Clean Water Network's Legislative Action Center and send a message to EPA and one to Congress by going to http://congress.nw.dc.us/cwn. (Note- there are two separate alerts on that page, please take a few minutes to respond to both!)

Background

For three decades, water pollution control efforts have been guided by a fundamental goal of the Clean Water Act: all rivers, lakes, and coastal waters be "fishable and swimmable" -- that is, they should be safe for swimming and boating and any fish caught should be safe to eat. While progress has been made, forty percent of assessed waters (over 20,000 water bodies) fail to meet this goal. EPA's recent National Coastal Condition report acknowledged that the overall condition of our coastal waters is only fair to poor.

The provision of the Clean Water Act designed to clean up these polluted waters is the Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) program. The TMDL clean up program requires states and EPA to identify polluted waterways, rank them for priority attention, and then develop pollution limits for each water body.

Despite the law, EPA and states largely failed to restore our waterways under the clean up program until a wave of citizen lawsuits forced them to do so. Over the last few years, Americans' demand for clean water succeeded in generating momentum to improve implementation of the program in the states. Now, just as the TMDL program is starting to work, the Bush administration is considering changes that will significantly delay - if not forever derail - efforts to clean up these polluted waters. In the coming weeks, EPA will decide whether to move forward with rewriting and weakening the TMDL rule. Clean Water Network groups are urging the administration not to rewrite the rule but, instead, to focus its resources on cleaning up our waters.

The Bush proposal would:

  • Weaken standards for classifying water bodies and allow polluted waters to be treated as if they were clean;
  • Permit increased pollution in exchange for unenforceable promises of future reductions;
  • Weaken EPA's oversight of the states in carrying out this vital program; and,
  • Get the EPA off the hook from taking action when the states fail to do what is required.

If approved, this Bush Dirty Water Rule will ensure polluted waters remain polluted - if not become more so - for decades to come.

Rather than promoting this Dirty Water Rule, the Bush administration should focus on ensuring that the states properly implement the current TMDL program.

This column originally appeared in July 2002 in the Chico Examiner.