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Concerns Surround Extending EPA Authority

An eleventh hour bid to boost EPA clean water authority over Chesapeake Bay area states and by extension, the rest of the country seems to be facing long odds in the waning lame duck congress.

American Farm Bureau's Don Parrish calls the effort to include the Chesapeake Bay bill in an omnibus lands bill, "a really heavy lift" for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

"Some people are going so far as saying it's dead, I'm not going to go quite that far," Parrish said. "Clearly there are a lot of concerns and I think we've made it well known across the country that this has broad implications for people outside of the Chesapeake Bay." 

Parrish says the measure's backers want EPA to be able to override through permitting, state land use decisions in the bay region that impact water quality.     

But he says an engineering firm hired by Farm Bureau and other ag groups found EPA data less favorable than USDA on everything from farmland numbers to farm runoff.

"EPA's numbers are attributing a lot of water quality problems to agriculture that USDA didn't find," Parrish said. "If you believe there are a lot of problems and don't think incentive based conservation approaches work then the approach they want to put into place is very regulatory and permit driven." 

Now, Parrish says EPA has bid a contract for modeling runoff on the Mississippi River.  The agency has repeatedly said it views the Chesapeake proposal as a regulatory model in other major watersheds.

Meantime Parrish says EPA is moving ahead on regulating so-called "total maximum daily loads," no matter what happens to the legislation and must implement new pesticide permitting by a court-imposed April 9, 2011 deadline. The states are already laying the groundwork with EPA to issue hundreds of thousands of permits for spraying in or near water.