EPA Seeks Leeway in Rules About Dirty Water

By Eric Pianin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 8, 2002; Page A11

The Environmental Protection Agency said yesterday that it will seek changes in a key Clean Water Act anti-pollution program to give states more flexibility in planning and executing the cleanup of more than 20,000 dirty rivers, lakes and estuaries.

The new rules would spell out the management process by which states would identify and list "impaired water bodies" and develop new water quality standards for achieving the "highest attainable" uses of those waterways.

The proposed rules would reflect EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman's emphasis on flexibility and environmental results over command-and-control federal regulations and strict enforcement. The proposed rules would stress "voluntary efforts" and possibly the establishment of a system in which states could trade pollution "credits."

However, EPA officials stressed in interviews that the new approach, while allowing the states considerable leeway to develop and implement effective watershed approaches, calls for tough federal oversight and review to ensure that adequate progress is being made.

"We would not be proposing a radical shift in the Clean Water Act responsibilities of the federal government," said Benjamin H. Grumbles, the EPA's deputy assistant administrator for water. "The states would develop the plans, and we would review and approve them -- which is what we currently do."

The Washington Post reported last month that the Bush administration was considering a plan to reduce federal oversight of the program and instead "trust states" to clean up their dirty waterways.

Grumbles said that the proposed new approach would refine the existing program by implementing the recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences and addressing the concerns of stakeholders, such as state and local sewage treatment and water pollution control agencies and farm groups.

But environmental groups described the move as the beginning of an administration effort to seriously weaken a program that, at best, has had mixed results.

"This is tantamount to abandoning the Clean Water Act program to clean up polluted waters," said Joan Mulhern of Earthjustice, an environmental legal defense group. "It is essentially telling American people to get used to the dirty waters they live near, because this means we will delay, if not derail completely, efforts to clean up."

Daniel Rosenberg, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said it appears that the EPA will try to weaken the program by making it harder to add new bodies of water to the list of impaired water bodies and by downgrading the definition of usable water. For example, he said, states might be able to meet their requirements by improving water quality enough to sustain boating, but not swimming or fishing.

"There's no question the better strategy is to work with the rules that exist," Rosenberg said.

The proposal would reverse a July 2000 Clinton administration rule requiring EPA approval of states' efforts to restore impaired water bodies, a designation applying to 300,000 miles of rivers and shorelines and 5 million acres of lakes.

That rule was supported by many environmentalists, but it has been criticized by farm groups, timber firms and municipalities that fear they could face onerous new restrictions on polluted runoff.

The cleanup program is part of the Clean Water Act, which was was passed in 1972 after the Cuyahoga River caught fire in Cleveland. The program focused on standards for entire water bodies instead of individual polluters, but environmental groups have had to sue to get the law enforced. Today, 44 percent of the nation's water bodies are still "impaired" by sediments, nutrients and microorganisms.

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