Posted November 14, 2013
Agriculture organizations are raising concerns over the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) draft report “Connectivity
of Streams and Wetlands to Downstream Waters: A Review and Synthesis of
Scientific Evidence,” according to an article by Drovers available here.
In September, EPA sent a draft rule to the Office of
Management and Budget (OMB) to clarify the jurisdiction of the Clean Water
Act. A recent post from this blog on the
EPA’s announcement of the draft rule is available here. The proposed rule is being reviewed by OMB,
and is not yet available to the public.
EPA’s Science Advisory Board (SAB) will hold a public meeting on the
draft report in December. The notice is
available here.
The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA) said
that the report “fails to discuss how effects are measured; and whether it is
possible to establish science-based effects thresholds that could ultimately be
applied in a regulatory context.” The
NCBA also urged the SAB to reject the draft rule.
The Water Advocacy Coalition said, EPA “put the cart
before the horse,” and asked the agency to withdraw the draft rule and wait for
the SAB’s final review of the rule before making any regulatory decisions.”
Bloomberg BNA recently released a leaked draft of the
proposed rule in an article here. Bloomberg reports that based on their
scientific and technical experts, the EPA and the Army Corp of Engineers
concluded that “tributaries, as defined in the proposed regulation, in a
watershed are similarly situated and have a significant nexus alone or in
combination with other tributaries to the chemical, physical or biological
integrity of traditional navigable waters, interstate waters or the territorial
seas.”
For more information on the Clean Water Act, please
visit the National Agricultural Law Center’s website here.
