Local environmental groups worry that a recent order by President Donald Trump aimed at scaling back rules on clean water could threaten wetlands and small streams.
Last month, Trump signed an executive order directing the Environmental Protection Agency to dismantle the 2015 “Waters of the United States” rule, a measure that brought a scientific approach controlling aquatic pollution and ultimately expanded federal authority over the county’s waters.
The rule attempts to clarify which rivers, streams, lakes and wetlands are regulated by the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers.
The 2015 rule was written in response to the 2006 U.S. Supreme Court case Rapanos v. United States, which challenged federal jurisdiction to regulate some wetlands under the 1972 Clean Water Act.
Environmental groups mostly like the rule, said Janette Brimmer, staff attorney with the environmental group Earth Justice, because it used science to understand how waterways function.
“On balance, overall, most of the rule is good and science-based,” she said. “EPA put an enormous amount of time and effort with hydrologists, geologists, biologists. … It was circulated to even larger group of scientists looking at connectivity.”
However, the rule was quickly seen by many industries, farmers, real estate developers and farmers as an example of egregious overregulation.
In 2014, Congress took aim at the new rules with the 2014 bill, “Waters of the United States Regulatory Overreach Protection Act,” which U.S. Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Camas, supported.
“Too often, D.C.-based government bureaucrats depart from common sense in favor of a ‘government knows best’ attempt at regulating a business or property owner, and this is one of the most egregious examples,” Herrera Beutler said in a 2014 news release explaining her position.
Now Trump’s executive order titled “Restoring the Rule of Law, Federalism, and Economic Growth by Reviewing the ‘Waters of the United States’ Rule” starts the process of reviewing and likely replacing it with one more in line with late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s interpretation of the judicial limits of the Clean Water Act.
Scalia’s opinion in the Rapanos case much more narrowly defined waters of the United States as only permanent, standing or continuously flowing waters.
That narrow of a definition has local environmental groups worried that a lot of many regional waterways would be excluded.
“Riverkeeper is concerned about how a revised rule would cut off protection for wetlands and small streams that feed into the Columbia and the tributaries,” said Miles Johnson, clean water attorney at Columbia Riverkeeper. “We’re concerned removing those protections would have a real impact on wildlife and people in the Columbia Basin.”
Johnson said the Clean Water Act sets the minimum for water quality standards and states can exceed it if they want to, but he and others like Brimmer question if they would.
“States could take additional action if the EPA rewrites that rule to pull protections for small streams and wetlands,” Johnson said. “Whether or not that would happen is one question, what it would look like is another.”
However, Department of Ecology Spokesman Dave Bennett said the agency is concerned any time water protections are relaxed, but the agency isn’t worried, because state water protection laws are stronger and more protective than federal rules and laws.
“The executives order will have little, if any, affect on water quality laws, rules and practices within the borders of Washington state,” he said.
