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The Wall Street Journal
Copyright (c) 2001, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Wednesday, July 18, 2001
Bush Finds Support for Revision Of Clinton Water-Cleanup Rule
By John J. Fialka
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration has found allies among state
regulators, governors, farmers and members of Congress in seeking to rewrite a
Clinton administration rule for cleaning up thousands of polluted lakes, rivers
and streams.
The regulation, adopted last July, relies on a relatively nonspecific section of
the 1972 federal Clean Water Act that deals with so-called nonpoint sources of
pollution, such as fertilizer-laden runoff from farmland and sediment from
construction and timber projects. It would require states to develop plans and
start cleanup and water-quality restoration programs to attack nonpoint
pollution within eight to 13 years.
But Congress withheld enforcement funding for the current fiscal year to
pressure the Environmental Protection Agency to withdraw the rule. In the
meantime, mining and timber interests sued in federal district court in a bid to
have it invalidated.
EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman asked a federal appeals court here for
a stay of the case to give her agency 18 months to review the rule, with an eye
toward rewriting it. A decision on that request is pending.
Environmental groups attacked Ms. Whitman's move as another industry-backed step
by the Bush administration to thwart a regulation. But the move was applauded by
state agencies, which would have had to apply the federal rule to about 20,000
rivers, lakes and streams it would define as polluted. State officials argue
they don't have the expertise or the billions of dollars they say it would take
to comply.
"It was a flawed rule. It is not workable," said Roberta Savage, who heads the
Association of State and Interstate Water Pollution Control Administrators.
A warning from the National Academy of Sciences that the budget requirements of
the regulation "are staggering" also attracted the National Governors
Association's support for a review. Because the Clean Water Act doesn't
explicitly give the EPA controlling authority over nonpoint pollution, Rep.
Sherwood L. Boehlert of New York, chairman of the House Science Committee and a
Republican leader on environmental issues, warned that the entire act may have
to be reviewed as well.
The nation's municipal treatment plants, on the other hand, want the regulation
because they are required to clean up streams fouled, in part, by nonmunicipal
sources. "How can we just turn a blind eye to the largest remaining source of
water pollution?" asks Alexandra Dunn, general counsel for the Association of
Metropolitan Sewerage Agencies.
Nina Bell, the head of a Portland, Ore., legal foundation and a member of an EPA
advisory committee that helped develop the Clinton rule, said the legal
challenges are misguided.
"I would say that the Clinton administration went as far as they possibly could,
legally, to make this rule work. They didn't take one step beyond that, but they
certainly went right to the edge."