By Jan Meekcoms
In a half-century’s time, Oregon has gone from leading the nation in environmental issues under Gov. Tom McCall to standing in puddles with U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley.
As a result of having both feet firmly planted in the past, Senator Merkley is missing today’s biggest environmental challenge: To say when enough is enough. Failure to answer that question will have huge, harmful consequences on another environment: Our economy’s.
This new challenge can be found in 86 pages of regulations the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers want to add to the Clean Water Act, the nation’s primary law governing water pollution. Passed in 1972, the Clean Water Act was a major expansion on a 1948 law and was significantly broadened in 1977 and 1987.
But has the time come to say no more? A bipartisan group of congressional leaders thinks it may have.
Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, has proposed legislation calling on the EPA and Army Corps of Engineers to stop.
“This proposed rule does and will have a huge impact on farmers, on ranchers and small businesses that need to put a shovel into the ground to make a living,” said Barrasso in a speech to the U.S. Senate. “The rule in a sense amounts to a user’s fee, a user’s fee for farmers and ranchers to use their own land after it rains.”
Merkley is not a co-sponsor of Barrasso’s bill, S. 2496, which is rather strange, because his campaign website claims that his “dad’s calloused hands built a better life for our family,” and “Jeff is working to create jobs for families and small businesses in rural communities.”
As Barrasso warns, these are the communities that would be slammed the hardest under the new rule. “Federal agencies are attempting to expand the definition of ‘Waters of the United States.’ They want to expand the definition to now include ditches, other dry areas where water does flow but only flows during a short duration; basically, after a rainfall.
“Federal regulations have never defined ditches and other upland drainage features as waters of the United States. So this is an expansion of the way we viewed waters of the United States. It forces suburban homeowners to pay the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers to use their backyards after a storm. To me, this is one of the worst things that I would think that we would ever do to Americans let alone during this poor economy.”
Dan Bosch, manager of regulatory policy for the National Federation of Independent Business, America’s voice of small business, said, “When Congress gave the EPA authority over U.S. waters it clearly didn’t mean any water, anywhere. It meant those waters important for commerce. Without a check on the EPA and Army Corps, small-business owners, famers and anyone who owns land will face a torrent of litigation over water that the law was never intended to regulate.”
In the House of Representatives, Congressman Steve Southerland of Florida has proposed a companion measure to Barrasso’s in the House of Representatives. “This bipartisan legislation [H.R. 5078] provides a safeguard against Washington’s brazen overreach into regulatory decisions best made by officials at the state and local levels,” said Southerland. “Drawing that line in the sand preserves the federal-state partnership that has proven so successful in keeping our waterways clean for more than 40 years. And by fighting back against this D.C. power grab, we’re restoring the certainty our farmers, manufacturers, transportation builders, and construction industries need to grow.”
One of the co-sponsors of Southerland’s legislation is Merkley’s fellow Oregon Democrat, U.S. Rep. Kurt Schrader, who gets what today’s environmental challenge is.
With an election upon us, it’s time for Senator Merkley to answer an important question: Will another generation of dads be able to get calloused hands and build a better life for their families, like his dad did?”
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Jan Meekcoms is Oregon state director for the National Federation of Independent Business.
