Commentary: U.S. House considering ‘dirty water’ bill to strip away key Clean Water Act protections

Recent polling shows that while Minnesotans have their share of political disagreements, those disagreements largely end, in a sense, at the water’s edge.

A whopping 86% of Minnesotans reached in a March opinion poll agreed that protecting water is very or extremely important. And while it’s true that those in the Land of 10,000 Lakes have a special relationship with our waters, we’re not alone: Polling from only a few years ago showed that Americans nationwide agree that lakes, rivers, and streams need the protection and support of the Clean Water Act.

Given the clear public support for clean water, it’s striking that the U.S. House of Representatives appears willing to wade into political quicksand by proposing H.R. 3898, the “PERMIT Act” – a bill that would provide enormous giveaways to polluting industries at the expense of clean water.

The bill, which claims by way of its title to “Promote Efficient Review for Modern Infrastructure,” would strip away key Clean Water Act protections. The list of rollbacks in the bill is long, and among them are the following.

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It would prevent the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from developing scientifically accurate water-quality criteria and give polluters new ways to challenge them. This creates situations in which the EPA would have to falsely call a body of water “safe” merely because polluters would deem it too great a cost to make the water actually safe for fishing or swimming.

It would curtail the ability of state and tribal governments to regulate projects that could affect their waters, limiting the scope of issues they could consider and rushing the timeline in which they could act, and give states less ability to enforce their own water standards. This would be especially problematic for multi-state projects such as fossil fuel pipelines.

It would allow industrial and municipal pollution dischargers to operate under permit for 10 or more years, rather than the current limit of five years. Because pollution and our understanding of water science continues to advance, permit conditions can become outdated quickly, and this would hamstring agencies’ ability to protect our water from emerging pollutants.

It would create new loopholes for agricultural industry operations, including factory farms and pesticide use, to skirt around commonsense protections for human and environmental health.

It would create an enormous loophole for filling of 3-acre water bodies or wetlands across the country. Allowing 10 3-acre segments of aquatic ecosystems to be destroyed can be as bad as or worse than a single 30-acre swath of destruction.

It would require agencies to move much more quickly in determining if water bodies fall under Clean Water Act authority, but not give those agencies – many of which are already struggling under federal cuts – any new resources to accomplish this work.

At a time when our waters and fish are under increasing threats from climate change, toxic forever chemicals, carcinogens such as nitrate, and many other pollutants, this is precisely the wrong time to be weakening the Clean Water Act.

But the U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee seems indifferent to the threat, having passed the bill to the full House on June 25. The bill is expected to be considered in the House in the near future.

Fortunately, this bill is not inevitable. It can and should be rejected by the House or the Senate, but members of both bodies need to be told that Americans – especially Minnesotans – care about clean water and support the Clean Water Act.

You can help by writing or calling your U.S. senators and representative, writing in support of the Clean Water Act to your local paper, or sharing information about the water-polluting PERMIT Act with your neighbors.

We need Congress to know that Americans did not elect them to leave polluted lakes, rivers, and streams behind for our children and grandchildren.

Doll is MEP’s operations and engagement director. He joined MEP in 2017 and handles the coalition’s communications, member services, individual fundraising, and operations. He has previously worked with the Sierra Club as a legislative intern and volunteer. This column first was published July 14.