From The Palm Springs Desert Sun (Mark Olaide):
Two separate coalitions of environmental advocacy groups filed litigation on Wednesday against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers challenging the Trump Administration’s rollback of the Clean Water Act.
At the core of the litigation is the definition of federally protected waterways, as recent changes in regulatory language have reduced legal protections for huge numbers of streams, especially around the arid West…
“This regulation is plainly unlawful. It violates the simple but powerful mandate of the Clean Water Act to protect the integrity of our nation’s waters,” Jon Devine, the Natural Resources Defense Council’s director of federal water policy, said in a statement announcing one of the legal petitions.
The NRDC — joined by seven other environmental groups from Wisconsin, New Mexico and elsewhere — filed a challenge in a federal district court in Massachusetts.
The other lawsuit was launched by more than a dozen national and local environmental organizations in the federal district court in South Carolina. It claims that the EPA and the Army Corps “neglected fundamental rulemaking requirements meant to constrain whimsical agency action.”
From The Coastal View (Jennifer Allen):
The Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Army published April 21 in the Federal Register the final replacement rule defining what waters are federally regulated under the Clean Water Act. The rule, which is set to take effect June 22, had been met with both support and promises of legal action.
The EPA and Department of the Army have 60 days to respond to the lawsuit.The groups that joined in the legal challenge include the North Carolina Coastal Federation, which publishes Coastal Review Online, along with American Rivers, Charleston Waterkeeper, Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, Clean Water Action, Defenders of Wildlife, Environment America, Friends of the Rappahannock, James River Association, National Wildlife Federation, North Carolina Wildlife Federation, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, Roanoke River Basin Association and South Carolina Coastal Conservation League.
“We are particularly concerned that many wetlands along our coast will no longer be regulated by the federal government,” said Todd Miller, executive director of the Coastal Federation.
“These areas include pocosins, Carolina Bays and other forested wetlands. These wetlands protect water quality in our coastal estuaries and reduce floods during storms. Current wetland rules, that have been in place for decades, balance the needs of landowners with these environmental and economic benefits,” he continued. “Losing this oversight by adoption of these new rules will result in more water pollution, less fish, and more costly disasters in coming years.”
[…]
The administration’s Navigable Waters Protection Rule is the second step in revising the definition of the scope of waters subject to federal regulation under the Clean Water Act and repeals the 2015 Clean Water Rule: Definition of “Waters of the United States,” often called “WOTUS.” The final rule “recognizes that waters of the United States are those within the ordinary meaning of the term, such as oceans, rivers, streams, lakes, ponds, and wetlands, and that not all waters are waters of the United States,” according to the April 21 document.
The final rule specifically states that waters of the United States do not include groundwater; ephemeral, or impermanent, streams, swales, gullies, rills and pools made by rain; diffuse stormwater runoff, which is rainwater that spreads across the landscape, and features that control stormwater; previously converted croplands; ditches that are not traditional navigable waters, tributaries, or that are not constructed in adjacent wetlands; and other exclusions.