EPA Issues

EPA Issues. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s “Clean Water Act Protection Guide” is one step closer to being implemented. That’s a big concern for farmers, ranchers and many other landowners, according to American Farm Bureau Regulatory Specialist Don Parrish, because it would greatly expand EPA’s regulatory reach under the Clean Water Act.

Parrish: This is going to allow EPA and the Corps of Engineers to regulate features that only have water in them during and for a short duration after a rainfall. 

Parrish says that broad reach is not what Congress intended when they wrote the law and would require landowners to get expensive permits to use their own land.

Parrish: It takes the control and the use of the land out of the landowners decision-making process. It doesn’t tell you, you can’t use it, but it’s going to tell you you’ve got to get a permit. Those permits are going to cost anywhere from well into the thousands to the hundreds of thousands of dollars and it’s going to have a direct impact on virtually any land that a farmer might want to use and it is really going to be burdensome. It’s going to impact projects that transportation departments do in order to put a road in place. It’s going to impact power lines. It’s going to impact home builders. It may not stop economic development, but it’s going to make it more expensive. It’s going to make it more bureaucratic.

Parrish says Congress intended states and local jurisdictions to regulate waterways that aren’t big enough for navigation and called the EPA action a power grab.

Parrish: The state and local governments are in a better position to balance out economic growth, environmental concerns and the social implications of these policies. EPA, They’re going to entangle farmers and ranchers in a bureaucratic mess. It’s the wrong approach and it’s not going to protect water. It’s going to have, I believe, a more detrimental impact because we’re going to be protecting things that aren’t important at the detriment of utilizing resources to protect things that are. 

He talks about the potential impact of the EPA’s new Clean Water Act Protection Guide.”

Parrish: This is more about the politics of the issue than it is protecting clean water. It is about putting the federal government into local land use decisions that are going to impact county commissioners; it’s going to impact local you know local units of government well beyond just the private property owner and it’s going to have a huge impact.

Parrish talks about how for the regulation could go.

Parrish: You’re going to be regulating virtually all water. You may not regulate a raindrop as it falls out of the sky, but it when it hits the ground and starts to move, EPA and the Corps want to regulate it at that point. That’s going to have a big impact.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.