Ploy Against Clean Waters

Tens of thousands of angry people have shoved the Bush administration away from its effort to obliterate Clean Water Act provisions for a whole class of streams and wetlands, one that includes almost all the waterways in Southern California. But the action will mean little if the administration doesn’t also rescind an “interim” order to the Army Corps of Engineers that makes it hard for the agency to protect these waters.

A blizzard of 133,000 public comments, almost all of them opposing, hammered the administration’s plan to strip protection from “ephemeral” waters -- those fed by rain or snowmelt rather than groundwater and that don’t flow at least six months a year. In other words, the Los Angeles and San Gabriel rivers, seasonal ponds and pretty much any water you can name in the Southwest. Never mind that interconnected streams, rivers and wetlands sustain wildlife and that most flow to the ocean, where they can contribute to coastal pollution.

Administration officials had said the proposal to weaken the regulations was forced by a Supreme Court ruling on an old strip mine area that had become a bird habitat. Subsequent lower court rulings have held, though, that the high court never meant to gut protections for a vast class of waterways.

Though the administration announced this month that it would stop pursuing its proposal, it quietly kept in place a directive that orders corps field staff to get permission from Washington headquarters before making any move to protect these waterways from development or pollution; the staff needs no such permission to allow potentially destructive activities. This was supposed to be a temporary order while the administration pursued its weakening of the Clean Water Act. The order sends a terrible, if tacit, message and must be rescinded.

To ensure that this directive goes away for good, as well as to forestall any attempt to bring back toxic rule-making, Congress should immediately pass the recently introduced Clean Water Authority Restoration Act. It would reestablish federal authority over crucial waterways and banish the legal gremlins that some have made dance on the basis of a lone Supreme Court case. Lawmakers must act swiftly before the administration’s order can do immeasurable damage to streams and wetlands.