New
Federal Water Rules Threaten To Swamp State EPAs
By John Nagy, Staff Writer
07/19/2000
Stateline.org
New
rules touted by the Clinton administration as the best way to get
states on the fast-track toward eliminating non-point source pollution
and cleaning up the nation’s waterways will strain states’ environmental
protection resources – some possibly to the breaking point – state
analysts say. But federal officials counter that the rules are needed
to help states, the vanguard of national environmental protection
efforts, meet the goals of the federal Clean Water Act. Under the
1972 act and later amendments, state agencies are charged with identifying
contaminated rivers, streams, lakes and coastal areas and setting
acceptable "pollution budgets" or total maximum daily loads (TMDLs)
for each. In recent years, control efforts have shifted from major
polluters to substances that enter all waterways from hard-to-trace
sources like lawns, farms, and heavily developed areas aggravated
by sprawl.
The
work is costly and incredibly time consuming and states are outspending
the federal government nearly 2 to 1, according to the most recent
estimates available from the Environmental Council of the States
(ECOS), a non-partisan association of environmental commissioners
representing 52 of the 55 states and territories.
Several
states, under pressure from lawsuits charging the U.S. EPA with
failing to keep states on a tighter schedule, "are already working
aggressively" on the identification and cleanup of non-point pollution,
said Christophe Tulou, deputy director of intergovernmental relations
for ECOS.
The
new rules, which do relax the states’ reporting schedule from two
to four years, also set a more rigorous long-term implementation
deadline, requiring a full inventory of polluted waters, completed
TMDLs and clear plans for enforcing them within 15 years.
"It
is burdensome. No matter how you hash this thing, it’s an expensive
proposition," Tulou said.
"We
certainly understand that some – not all – states have concerns
about that. One of the most important things for us through this
whole process was intense dialogue with the states to make sure
we heard all their concerns," said EPA assessment and watershed
protection division director Elizabeth Fellows.
"States
do most of the traditional environmental work in this country,"
ECOS executive director Robert E. Roberts told reporters at Governing
magazine’s Outlook 2000 conference in February. But state observers
worry that the EPA rules constitute a significant federal challenge
to what had been a steadily growing trend toward increasing reliance
on states to provide environmental protection.
"It’s
an enormous new unfunded federal mandate. That is clear," said Diane
Shea, who directs natural resources policy for the National Governors’
Association (NGA).
The
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released the rules July
11, putatively cutting short discussions with governors and state
water pollution officials in a move jeered by Congress – including
several Democrats – as a transparent attempt to shore up the administration’s
environmental legacy. Congress had moved to delay a rules change
in a spending bill rider on its way to Clinton’s desk. The action
effectively ducked that tactic with its announcement, but the agency
will have to wait until October 2001 for the authority and funding
needed to launch the program, the Washington Post reported on July
12. The new rules also turn state control in setting particular
TMDLs over to federal authorities within a year of missed deadlines,
which some state officials see as something not unlike a whip-handle
held over their heads.
Not
so, says Fellows. "If the state came in and said, ‘we’re ready now,
we want to take it back, they can do that" under the plan. "They
are in the driver’s seat and we hope they stay there. But we do
need to be a backstop if they can’t."
State
environmental protection agencies now have until April 2002 to submit
preliminary lists of polluted waters under the plan, which is subject
to congressional review.
"States
that have very little in the way of resources to get these things
done or are not interested in having heavy EPA oversight, are obviously
not very happy with it," Shea said.
Although
it is too early to precisely calculate the impact on state resources,
the governors projected additional environmental protection costs
of $1 billion to $2 billion in a July 6 letter to President Clinton,
a figure they base on estimates from state water managers. "It will
also depend on whether or not some states will simply say that meeting
EPA deadlines is just not a reasonable thing to expect and will
say to EPA, ‘take the program back. We can’t get things done in
the time frame you’ve given us’," Shea said.
In
the letter signed by Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn (R) and Iowa Gov. Tom
Vilsack (D), who co-chair NGA’s natural resources committee, the
governors reasserted "that the primary responsibility for managing
the national’s vital water resources is properly vested with the
states" as specified by the Clean Water Act. "Given the costs of
collecting data for each pollutant in each waterbody, calculating
the contribution from each discharger for each pollutant, and devising
methods for reducing each contributor’s share, it becomes clear
that the states simply do not have the enormous resources necessary
to accomplish such a task," they wrote.
The
EPA’s Atlas of America’s Polluted Waters lists 20,000 bodies of
water that did not meet water quality standards based on the most
recent round of state surveys, completed in 1998. "The overwhelming
majority of Americans – over 218 million – live within ten miles
of a polluted waterbody," the atlas’s compilers wrote.
The
state-by-state atlas and the EPA’s summary of the 1998 National
Water Quality Inventory are available, along with the press release
detailing the rule change, on the EPA’s Web site.
