Editorial: Congress should save Clean Water Act

Arizona and many Western states face a serious threat to protecting surface water.

The 1972 Clean Water Act dramatically changed how this country protected its waterways and wetlands, and after a 1975 court decision, its arroyos and drainages.

Before the legislation and court ruling, rivers, lakes and washes were filled with sludge and burning waste.

The Clean Water Act significantly reduced surface water pollution.

Now a 2006 Supreme Court decision appears to be setting the clock back decades and throwing regulators into chaos.

That decision — called the Rapanos decision — requires any body of water or drainage regulated by the Clean Water Act to have a connection to a “navigable water of the United States.”

That isn’t simple for the State of Arizona when it wants stop pollution in arroyos and semi-perennial creeks that are far from the Colorado River.

Gov. Janet Napolitano, the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality and EPA Region 9 see Rapanos and industrial supporters of its interpretation as a huge threat.

A complicating factor is that Arizona’s Legislature, in its wisdom, has ensured the state cannot regulate water more stringently than the federal government. ADEQ sees some wriggle room; EPA Region 9 is less optimistic.

Rep. James Oberstar, D-Minn., and Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., have introduced the Clean Water Restoration Act to return authority to EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers to protect our nation’s waterways, wetlands and drainages at pre-2006 standards.

In the meantime, industrial and private sewage system operators have filed lawsuits throughout the country challenging the authority of the Clean Water Act to regulate their pollution or to stop them from blocking the flow of water.

ADEQ’s Water Quality Director Joan Card warns that 96 percent of the state’s CWA regulated drainages are in danger of increasing pollution. “I support your effort to maintain the clean water protections we have enjoyed for more than three decades and denounce any effort to the contrary,” Napolitano told Congress.

Arizona’s congressional delegation should be strongly supporting the Oberstar-Feingold bills and urging President Bush to halt the opposition to the bill from the EPA.

The Bush administration supported the right side during the Rapanos case, and its regional EPA offices are rightly upset by loss of authority to protect water quality.

The Corps of Engineers waits over a year in some court cases to discover they cannot stop waterways from being disrupted.

This is a nonpartisan issue and a quality of life that nearly two generations have taken for granted is at stake.

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