Entrepreneur Magazine
When we’ve watched our elected officials and pundits go hammer and tong over laws in recent years, the documents being debated have usually been hundreds or thousands of pages in length, like the Affordable Care Act or the recent net neutrality regulations.
With those battles as a backdrop, it seems almost quaint that one of the most contentious arguments being fought by public policy makers right now is language contained in just a handful of paragraphs. The document is a “clarification” from the Environmental Protection Agency that further defines which bodies of water come under the jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act.
People on both sides of the debate agree that clarifications are in order. For years, courts have handed down rulings that don’t always seem to align with one another. However, what EPA officials call a clarification, critics are calling a “power grab” at best and a “land grab” at worst.
More Power to Bureaucrats
“The (new) rule will extend federal bureaucrats’ reach into every corner of the American economy, affecting small businesses of every type, including those involved in, among many others, oil and gas production, mining, homebuilding, and agriculture,” says Karen Kerrigan of the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council.
It’s not just our country’s water quality that is being threatened, she notes, “but so too the constitutional balance between the federal and state governments. The result is more litigation and greater bureaucratic control from Washington, putting small businesses and state regulators at the mercy of courts and federal bureaucrats.”
Originally, “navigable waters” were mainly covered by the Clean Water Act. The EPA’s new definition of “Waters of the United States” that fall under its regulatory control include:
• All tributaries.
• Adjacent waters,
• Wetlands, and
• Other waters.
Terms like all, adjacent, wetlands and other immediately send up red flags for anyone who works where dirt might be moved, crops planted or buildings constructed. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how these can be interpreted to mean virtually anything that gets wet…ever.
