CWA in limbo after House vote

When the House passed its version of the reauthorized Clean Water Act (CWA), local governments believed the regulatory tide had finally turned.

“The requirements of the current Clean Water Act sometime move beyond environmental protection to environmental perfection,” says Stephen John, a Decatur, Ill., councilman.

His sentiments echo those of the National League of Cities, National Association of Counties and U.S. Conference of Mayors, which say existing clean water rules will cost $29 billion over the next five years.

The CWA expired last October, but Congress allocated enough money to keep it going until October 1995. But if the bill is not reauthorized this year, Congress does not have to appropriate additional money for enforcement of its provisions.

Rep. Bob Livingston (R-La.), head of the House Appropriations Committee, says if Congress does not pass a clean water bill by October 1, he will not agree to appropriate those monies to local governments.

Key Senate Republicans are troubled by the House bill, which passed that chamber in May. “The Clean Water Act is successful as written,” says Sen. John Chafee (R-R.I.), the moderate chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, which has jurisdiction over the matter. “The House version drastically weakens clean water standards.”

But House Republicans say the act is too cumbersome. “We are beyond the topdown, one-size-fits-all approach to regulation in which federal bureaucrats are deemed to know what’s best for cities,” says Rep. Bud Shuster (R-Pa)., author of the House bill.

The House version would:

* allow publicly owned sewage plants to apply for a waiver to discharge more solids than currently permitted if those solids are judged not to degrade the receiving water supply. Towns with fewer than 20,000 people would receive automatic waivers from compliance. As currently written, the law requires all local governments to remove 85 percent of all solids before discharge;

* create a new definition of wetlands that gives federal regulators broad discretion. This provision, according to Chafee, would leave unprotected millions of acres currently covered by the law;

* require the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to conduct a cost-benefit analysis on any water quality standard that would cost at least $25 million annually, leading to “stagnation and paralysis,” says the agency; and

* permit states to write their own water quality standards if they can prove that the current definition of “fishable and swimmable” waters would detrimentally affect their economies. Chafee says this would do more to roll back the gains made under the act than any provision in the bill.

Chafee admits that the law could be improved, but that he will not present any such adjustments until after his committee has considered changes to the nation’s hazardous waste and safe drinking water laws, which could take another year.

Chafee believes that Livingston will be forced to bend on the appropriations issue because a final appropriations bill — which contains the money for all federal programs — will require him to engage in considerable deal making.

Efforts to weaken the act are not nearly as popular in the Senate, thus it is highly unlikely that the House version of the bill will make it out of Congress intact. Consequently, local governments cannot expect major changes to the CWA. They can, however, anticipate receiving the money to help them comply with its programs for another year.