October marked the 30-year anniversary of the Clean Water Act, but instead of celebrating, environmentalists across the country accused the Bush administration of attempting to weaken the decades-old law.

According to Dwayne Andersen, program coordinator for Texas Clean Water Action, the Act, though not always properly applied, has made significant impact since its inception in 1972 with 60 percent of Texas waterways meeting its criteria. Before that time, more than half of the state’s waterways were polluted.
Still, he fears that recent rule changes and the promise of future ones by the current administration will halt the progress needed to meet the Act’s goal of 100 percent of U.S. waters being safe for fishing, swimming and drinking.

“Not only have (the new rules) left the door open for industrial polluters,” he said, “they took the door off the hinges.”

Upon taking office in January 2001, George W. Bush put a hold on regulations proposed by the Clinton administration that were designed to control overflows of raw sewage from inadequate and poorly maintained sewer systems. The proposed regulations would have imposed tougher operation and maintenance requirements on sewer system operators.

In May, the administration approved a new rule allowing the Army Corps of Engineers to give mining companies permits to dump debris from mountaintop removals into wetlands, rivers and streams. The rule is constructed so broadly that environmentalists fear the corps can issue permits allowing nearly any kind of waste dumping from industrial operations into streams and wetlands in any part of the country.

In July 2001, the Environmental Protection Agency announced an extensive “redesign” of the regulations aimed at addressing non-point source pollution: oil, fertilizers, pesticides, sediments, debris and other hazardous waste that contaminates runoff from farms and streets and winds up in waterways.

Another of the regulations the administration has formally proposed would relax the EPA’s responsibility to recommend pollution reduction plans for waterways where states have failed to offer their own plans. Other changes would eliminate fixed and enforceable schedules for states to set pollution limits for impaired water bodies.

This is particularly dangerous in pro-business Texas, Anderson said. He compared the administration’s approach to clean water to the voluntary compliance programs enacted to address clean air in Texas by then-governor Bush. The Texas Natural Resources and Conservation Commission (now TCEQ) reported a reduction of less than one percent of air pollutants as none of the state’s major offenders volunteered for enforcement programs. According to the EPA, Texas was one of the 10 worst states at allowing wastewater treatment facilities to exceed the Clean Water Act effluent permit from 1999-2001.

In September, administration officials announced at a congressional hearing that they plan to issue new rules limiting the scope of the Clean Water Act to navigable interstate waters, removing many smaller rivers, streams and wetlands from under the law’s protective umbrella.

Anderson said environmentalists had little faith that state and local environmental law enforcement would be able to compensate for the weakening of federal clean water policy.

“The only way we’re going to have cleaner water is if local enforcement agents improve their policing efforts,” he said.

Harris County Pollution Control officials referred CEC’s questions to the Texas Commission on Environmental Equality and EPA Region 6 because they said the state, not the county, was responsible for enforcing the Clean Water Act. Officials from both agencies who were contacted for this story said they were unaware of how specific changes to the law would affect their enforcement or the health of Houston’s waterways.