Water bill supported by Barletta stirs fight

JONATHAN RISKIND Times Leader Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON – U.S. Rep. says Pennsylvania and other states need more power to decide how best to protect waterways from pollution.

That’s why the freshman Republican from Hazleton says he is backing a bill giving states final approval over an array of clean water regulations affecting everything from rivers and streams to mountain-top mining operations.

Environmentalists and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency charge that the legislation, which is co-authored by the GOP chairman and top Democrat on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, would undermine decades of progress cleaning up waterways made under the federal Clean Water Act.

The bill would prevent the EPA from even offering its views on whether a “proposed project that pollutes or even destroys lakes, streams and wetlands” violates the Clean Water Act, removes the agency’s existing coordination role in overseeing the law and eliminates the “careful state/federal balance” established under the federal law, says an analysis by the EPA of the legislation co-authored by GOP Rep. John Mica of Florida and Democratic Rep. Nick Rahall of West Virginia.

“The bill would overturn almost 40 years of federal legislation by preventing the EPA from protecting public health and water quality,” the EPA analysis charges. “The bill would significantly undermine the EPA’s longstanding role under the CWA to ensure that state water quality standards protect clean water and public health and comply with the law.”

Nearly three dozen House members are co-sponsoring the legislation, most of them Republicans.

But a spokesman for Barletta, of the 11th Congressional District, notes that several Pennsylvania Democrats also are co-sponsors: Reps. Jason Altmire of the 4th District, Mark Critz of the 12th District and Tim Holden of the 17th District.

Ignoring state rights

“The EPA has once again shown its desire to ignore states’ rights by delaying permitting and reversing established protocol and decisions,” said Shawn Kelly, Barletta’s spokesman. “The EPA’s regulatory overreach has cost many American jobs, burdened small businesses, and stalled our economic recovery.”

Kelly said that, “Everyone has the same goal of protecting the health of citizens and preserving the environment, and this bill will help to restore a more healthy balance between states’ rights and the federal interest by bringing back the regulatory partnership between state and federal agencies.”

Environmental groups disagree, saying the bill would gut the Clean Water Act and lead to more polluted waterways.

Noting that the bill is dubbed by its authors the “Clean Water Cooperative Federalism Act of 2011,” Natural Resources Defense Council attorney Steve Fleischli said the legislation takes “‘cooperation’ to a whole new level by stripping EPA of its ability to protect national water quality without state-by-state approval.”

Addressing ‘overreach’

But after the House Transportation and Infrastructure last month approved the legislation, Rahall said that it is needed because of EPA’s “overreach” in approving permits for projects such as those impacting on coal mining in his home state of West Virginia and elsewhere in Appalachia.

“For far too many years now, my state and others throughout the Appalachian Region that produce coal to power our nation have been struggling under the weight of an uncertain federal permitting process,” said Rahall.

The bill would “provide common sense protections for states’ EPA-approved water quality standards and permitting authority under the Clean Water Act. Under practices by the current EPA, the permits for surface mines throughout the Appalachian States have been bottled up for months. The bill would help to speed up the permitting process and rein in EPA, which has imposed new criteria for permits that have stymied the process,” Rahall said in a statement.

The bill could reach the House floor later this summer, but its prospects are uncertain in the Senate.