Several Groups Testified Against Clean Water Restoration Act
Witnesses characterize the legislation as regulatory quicksand.
Compiled by staff
Published: Jul 23, 2009
Jim Chilton, a fifth generation rancher from southeast Arizona, testified Wednesday on behalf of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association and the Public Lands Council during a House Small Business Committee hearing on the Clean Water Restoration Act. The bill, which passed out of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee last month, would drastically expand the current Clean Water Act giving the federal government control over all watersheds in the nation.
"The Clean Water Act of 1972 should not be expanded to include activities affecting water," Chilton said. "What life activity does not affect water? It would open the door to lawsuits for every human use, allowing radical environmentalist to stop or seriously delay any rancher or farmer's improvement project anywhere in the nation."
The legislation would remove the word navigable from the Clean Water Act and allow the Corps of Engineers and Environmental Protection Agency to regulate all interstate and intrastate waters from farm ponds to storm water retention basins to roadside ditches to desert washes. Missouri Farm Bureau President Charlie Kruse, testifying before the committee, said the bill leads to increased compliance costs, burdensome permit processes and could put farmers in regulatory quicksand.
Kruse noted that expanding the scope of the Clean Water Act would sweep many agricultural and forestry activities under Clean Water Act regulation simply because such activities are conducted near some isolated ditch, swale, wash, erosion feature or ephemeral stream that would newly be deemed a water of the United States.
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Tagged: farm, Farm Bureau, Environmental Protection Agency, National Cattlemen's Beef Association, missouri farm bureau
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