WATER POLLUTION: House Democrats urge Obama to make enforcement a priority
Katherine Boyle
E&E News
12/16/2008
Two powerful House Democrats urged President-elect Barack Obama today to bolster Clean Water Act enforcement that they say lapsed during the Bush administration. House Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman James Oberstar (D-Minn.) and Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) sent Obama a letter today describing the hundreds of Clean Water Act violations that U.S. EPA has failed to pursue in recent years.
Internal e-mails and charts show EPA enforcement has drastically declined following the Supreme Court's muddled 2006 Rapanos-Carabell decision, which limited the reach of federal regulatory power over wetlands and waterways, a memorandum compiled by the committee's majority staffs says.
"Dozens of existing enforcement cases have become informal responses, have had civil penalties reduced, and have experienced significant delays," Oberstar and Waxman wrote. "Many violations are not even being detected because of the substantial reduction in investigations."
Nearly half the Clean Water Act violations that have been detected but were never addressed involved oil spills, the letter says.
"One of the legacies of the Bush administration is its failure to protect the safety and health of the nation's waters," Waxman said in a statement. "We need to work with the new administration to restore the effectiveness and integrity to this vital program."
Administration officials, including Benjamin Grumbles, EPA's assistant administrator for water, downplayed the decline in enforcement, Oberstar and Waxman said. The congressmen also said the agency has refused to produce hundreds of documents for the committees' investigation and has redacted many of the documents that it has produced, concealing the identities of corporations and individuals accused of polluting waters.
The committees' investigation also found that the Army Corps of Engineers favored the interests of corporate lobbyists over career officials' scientific determinations when making decisions affecting the Santa Cruz River in Arizona.
"The entire [enforcement] program faces critical deficiencies that threaten its primary mission," they wrote. "EPA field staff across the country have repeatedly warned about the lack of enforcement."
Grumbles, however, criticized the congressional investigation, which he said fails to evaluate the many EPA initiatives under way that will provide aggressive enforcement of Clean Water Act programs.
"In the last year EPA's enforcement program secured agreements with Clean Water Act violators to invest an estimated $3 billion in pollution controls," he said in a statement.
EPA's water office, along with the Army Corps of Engineers, has come under fire for issuing two guidances that wetland advocates say failed to clarify the Rapanos decision.
Democratic lawmakers, including Oberstar, argue that prior to the court's Rapanos decision and the 2001 Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decision, the phrase "navigable waters" in the Clean Water Act had been broadly defined as "waters of the United States, including the territorial seas." Oberstar and Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) have indicated they will reintroduce legislation aimed at restoring that definition during the 111th Congress (E&E Daily, July 8)...
Click here to view the letter.
Click here to view the majority staff memo.
Click here to view EPA's internal e-mails and enforcement tables.
