EPA official defends cuts
WASHINGTON (AP) – The Bush administration’s chief enforcer of the three-decade-old Clean Water Act concedes its goal of making all rivers and lakes safe for swimming and fishing has fallen in priority to combating terrorism and righting the economy. “Because of the war on terrorism and the economy, … we’re standing on our request” of $1.21 billion for modernizing sewage treatment and storm water runoff systems, G. Tracy Mehan III, the Environmental Protection Agency’s assistant administrator for water, told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on Tuesday.
Congress has been spending $1.35 billion a year for those projects for the past five years.
Republicans and Democrats in both the House and Senate have introduced legislation to increase the outlay to $4 billion a year, citing an EPA report last week that about 45 percent of the nation’s waterways are too polluted for fishing or swimming.
As the law’s 30th anniversary on Oct. 18 nears, retired Sen. Robert Stafford, D-Vt., said additional money and more controls on nonpoint pollution, such as runoff from farms and lawns, are essential “to take us closer to the day when all our streams are swimmable, and all our waters are fishable.”
Unlike pollution that leaks from industrial and sewage treatment plants, nonpoint pollution comes from many sources. Rainfall or melted snow flowing on the ground picks up natural and manmade pollutants, such as fertilizers, toxic chemicals from urban runoff and acid drainage from abandoned mines.
The annual $1.35 billion outlays finance a revolving fund that states can draw upon to help pay for wastewater and sewer projects.
“There must be an increase in funding if our nation is to make progress on cleaner water,” said former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, D-Maine, who in 1987 led the effort to shift financing of such projects away from construction grants.
To address nonpoint source pollution, Meehan said the Bush administration is encouraging states to draft regulatory schemes on a watershed-by-watershed basis, explaining that existing tools aimed at specific pollution sources are proving ineffective.