Clean Water Act Archives

Opinion: Clean Water in California is Overdue

Forty-nine years ago this week, Congress passed the federal Clean Water Act, with the goal of restoring America’s waters. Yet today, 95% of California’s rivers, lakes, bays and wetlands are plagued by pesticides, metals, pathogens, trash and sediment, making it unsafe to swim, fish or drink. As we approach the 50^th anniversary of this landmark environmental legislation, it is time for the state to get on track toward ensuring swimmable, fishable and drinkable waters for all Californians.

Underserved communities of color shoulder far too much of the cost of unsafe water. But the state has increasingly treated these communities as water quality “sacrifice zones.”

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AP Interview: EPA Water Chief On Clean Water Protections

To finally determine a lasting definition of waterways that qualify for federal protection under the Clean Water Act, the Environmental Protection Agency’s new water director says everyone with a stake in the issue will need to be engaged.

Radhika Fox recently spoke to The Associated Press about the Biden administration’s plan to rewrite the regulation, also called Waters of the United States. The contentious rule was scaled back by the Trump administration after being expanded under President Barack Obama.

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Biden Budget Seeks Boost for EPA Core Programs and Research

June 1, 2021/in California and the U.S., Home Headline, Media Coverage /by Kristiene Gong /Bloomberg Lawby Stephen Lee, Dean Scott, Jennifer Hijazi, Bobby Magill, Ellen M. Gilmer

President Joe Biden’s fiscal 2022 budget lays out a 24.1% boost to the EPA’s core rule-writing and enforcement programs and a 7.5% increase in staffing to get the work done, according to a detailed blueprint released on Friday.

The plan envisions a $3.4 billion request to implement the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and other statutes, up from $2.8 billion in the current budget. That funding would cover a huge range of activities, such as creating ways to attain ambient air quality standards and overseeing states’ management of hazardous waste.

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Biden Races Courts for Chance to Torpedo Trump Water Rule

April 29, 2021/in California and the U.S., Home Headline, Media Coverage /by Mike Lee /E&E Newsby Jeremy P. Jacobs and Pamela King

President Biden has gone full throttle in his first 100 days seeking to reverse Trump-era environmental rollbacks. But on one controversial rule, the president’s team may not be able to outpace the judicial system.

Key lawsuits that could define the reach of the Clean Water Act are working their way through federal courts — despite Biden administration attempts to stop them so it can craft its own regulations.

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PG&E Settles Lawsuit Over Century-Old Gas Plant Pollution

March 17, 2021/in California and the U.S., Media Coverage /by Chelsea Campos /Courthouse News Serviceby Nicholas Iovino

Pacific Gas and Electric will pay to remove soil possibly tainted by century-old gas plants and investigate groundwater contamination in a San Francisco shoreline area under the terms of a deal announced Monday.

The agreement represents the third and final settlement reached in a lawsuit filed in 2014 over pollution from manufactured gas plants operated by PG&E in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

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Biden Swings Waters Pendulum With Final Resolution Still Elusive

January 29, 2021/in California and the U.S., Media Coverage /by Chelsea Campos /Bloomberg Law by Bobby Magill

The Biden administration is swinging the pendulum of repeated changes to water regulation back to expanding after those regulatory powers contracted under President Donald Trump.

But the swing isn’t likely to be permanent, legal scholars say.

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Poway Council Unready to Dip Toes into Los Peñasquitos Lagoon Restoration

January 20, 2021/in Home Headline, Media Coverage, San Diego County /by Mike Lee /Times of San Diegoby City News Service

The Poway City Council Tuesday evening directed staff to further negotiate with regional partners on the Los Peñasquitos Lagoon restoration project. The council chose that option over immediately spending $6.7 million, as part of a multi-agency agreement, to reduce the level of sediment in the lagoon.

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Pendulum Swings in Clean Water Act Regulation

January 13, 2021/in California and the U.S., Home Headline, Media Coverage /by Chelsea Campos /Capital Pressby Mateusz Perkouwski

The regulatory pendulum is expected to swing toward stricter Clean Water Act enforcement, though experts say the Biden administration’s changes probably won’t be immediate. Farmers and environmentalists have been in a political tug-of-war over the law’s scope for years, largely due to ambiguous legal interpretations of the statute. While Democrats will now have power over Congress, their majority is too slim to make changes to the law, said Don Parrish, the American Farm Bureau Federation’s senior director of regulatory relations.

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Why the American West is Fighting for Water Protection

January 6, 2021/in California and the U.S., Home Headline, Media Coverage /by Chelsea Campos /Voxby Laura Bult

Since the Clean Water Act passed in 1972, the assumption has been that all waterways are protected from pollution — meaning that rivers, streams, lakes, and wetlands are, by law, shielded from industrial and agricultural waste through a strict permitting process via the federal government.

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EPA Guidance May Exempt Some Water Polluters from Supreme Court Permit Mandate

December 9, 2020/in California and the U.S., Media Coverage /by Chelsea Campos /The Hillby Rachel Frazin

The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday released a draft guidance that interprets a Supreme Court decision in a way that may exempt some facilities from needing permits to pollute groundwater. In April, the court decided that a permit is required for both direct discharges of pollutants into federally-regulated rivers and oceans as well as their “functional equivalent” in groundwater that flows into regulated waters.

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