LETTER: Time to vote for clean water

From Sen. Gary Kubly
District 20, DFL-Granite Falls and Rep. Aaron Peterson District 20A, DFL-Appleton

Minnesotans are all for clean water — and with good reason. Clean water for drinking, for health and hygiene, for agriculture, for industry, for the outdoor recreation on our lakes, rivers and wetlands that is so central to Minnesota life. Yet while we Minnesotans talk a good game on clean water, our actions fall short.

Minnesota is working hard to clean up its waters, but the water quality monitoring, enforcement, cleanup and restoration challenges are immense and, as Gov. Pawlenty recognized in 2003, a significant rollback in federal Clean Water Act jurisdiction “could lead to greater loss and degradation of our state’s and the nation’s waters and increased costs to the state of Minnesota and our local governments at a time when we can least afford it.” (Letter to the EPA and Corps of Engineers, April 14, 2003).

In fact, a significant Clean Water Act rollback is exactly what we face right now in the wake of two recent contentious U.S. Supreme Court decisions: Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v. United States Army Corps (2001) and Rapanos v. United States (2006). The upshot of these two decisions and the federal government’s tortured attempts to deal with them is that — for the first time in more than 30 years — Clean Water Act protection for lakes, streams, and wetlands is being questioned simply because these waters are not “navigable.” As the governors of New Mexico and Montana recently testified in Congress, the notion that we can protect the nation’s waters by protecting only those that “float a boat” is sheer “lunacy.”
As a result, the Corps and EPA are now hopelessly mired in time-consuming and confusing jurisdictional determinations, wasting scarce taxpayer dollars to answer questions resolved decades ago, rather than spending them to actually protect these precious waters from pollution and destruction.

This unraveling of the 35-year old Clean Water Act seriously threatens Minnesota’s and the nation’s waters. It also wreaks havoc for those seeking permits, including state and county transportation departments, who are suffering from the legal confusion and lengthy delays caused by the court decisions and the agencies’ inability to cope with them.

The current regulatory morass is untenable. Congress must step up and restore the historic scope of the Clean Water Act. The Clean Water Restoration Act of 2007 would do just that. Opponents of the Clean Water Restoration Act do a great disservice with their outlandish claims of a “federal land grab” that would regulate “dry land.” Of course, they too claim to want clean water, but apparently share little sense of responsibility for ensuring it.

Contrary to their claims, this bill does not expand federal authority, but simply restores the Clean Water Act jurisdiction over wetlands, lakes, and streams that was in place for over 30 years prior to the U.S. Supreme Court decisions in 2001 and 2006. Nor does the bill encroach on state sovereignty. Indeed, the vast majority of states, including Minnesota, support broad Clean Water Act jurisdiction, recognizing the effectiveness of the “cooperative federalism” framework it embodies.

And the Clean Water Restoration Act does not increase the regulatory burden for farmers or remove the exemption for prior converted cropland. Agricultural operations are largely exempt from the Clean Water Act and will remain so with passage of the Clean Water Restoration Act.

We urge Congressman Collin Peterson and the rest of Minnesota’s congressional delegation to join forces with bill author Congressman Jim Oberstar and lead on this issue rather than be bullied by irresponsible rhetoric. We all depend on clean water and we need the Minnesota delegation to back the clean water talk with clean water action and vote for the Clean Water Restoration Act.