Agenda - 09-21-2010 - 4g - Laserfiche WebLink

Browse Search

4 Clean Water For All: County Leaders Speak Out for Clean Water Introduction Most county officials know that we all need clean water and healthy watersheds to ensure clean and safe drinking water supplies and outdoor recreation, and to protect bridges, roads, hospitals, treatment plants, and other critical infrastructure. As county officials, we are on the front lines in protecting the health, safety, and welfare of our citizens, but we need help to address water pollution issues in our local area. Water flows downhill and across county and state lines. Counties need support from coordinated state and federal water quality programs to ensure that communities and industries upstream and downstream are working together, enforcing uniform water quality standards to keep the nation's waters clean and healthy for all. This report tells the local stories of water pollution and destruction and the resulting harm and In 1972, Congress passed the Clean Water Act "[t]o restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the nation's waters." Congress understood that to achieve this goal it must broadly protect from pollution even the many small streams and wetlands that store and filter water and sediment upstream before sending waters downstream to larger, more permanently flowing, more typically "navigable" waters. Congress understood that it must prevent pollution at its source. Congress defined "navigable waters" in the Clean Water Act broadly as "waters of the United States." In 1977, on the Senate floor, Tennessee Senator Howard Baker reinforced the fundamental importance of Clean Water Act protections for waters large and small: "It is important to understand that toxic substances threaten the aquatic environment when discharged into small streams or into major waterways. Similarly, pollutants are available to degrade water and attendant biota when discharged in marshes and swamps.... Continuation of the comprehensive coverage of this program is essential for the protection of the aquatic environment. The once seemingly separable types of aquatic systems are, we now know, interrelated and interdependent. We cannot expect to preserve the remaining qualities of our water resources without providing appropriate protection for the entire resource." For nearly 30 years, Clean Water Act regulations provided relative certainty that virtually all natural surface waters were "waters of the United States" and therefore subject to the Clean Water Act. Then, in 2001, in Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (SWANCC), and again in 2006 in Rapanos v. United States, a sharply divided Supreme Court gave new weight to the term "navigable" and questioned Clean Water Act protections extending to "waters of the United States" beyond the more permanently flowing, traditionally "navigable" rivers and their immediately adjacent streams and wetlands. expense to communities. These stories remind us that to protect our local water supplies, property, - ..-;., infrastructure, and economies, we must look upstream to the many miles of trickling headwater and intermittently flowing streams and acres of wetlands that do most of the real work of storing and Great Fgret cleansing our waters. AS these stories show us, we disregard at our peril these "non-navigable" PhotoCrediC Dave workhorses of our watersheds. Unless we restore our commitmentto their protection, their pollution Menke, usFws and destruction over time will leave us with very costly reparations -and in some cases irreversible harm to our water resources. 1 Clean Water For All: County Leaders Speak Out for Clean Water