Clinton Unveils Waterway Cleanup Plan

Launching an environmental initiative with significant implications for coastal areas such as Los Angeles, President Clinton announced plans Thursday to clean up oceans, rivers and streams by focusing on sources of polluted runoff.

The administration offensive, unveiled by Clinton in an appearance at Baltimore’s harbor, targets sources of water pollution that are considered more threatening than discharges from specific industrial sites--and more difficult to control. “Every child deserves to grow up with water that is pure to drink, lakes that are safe for swimming, rivers that are teeming with fish,” said Clinton, who toured a shore-side environmental education center.

“We have to act now to combat these pollution challenges with new protections to give all our children the gift of clean, safe water in the 21st century,” he said.

The president’s budget proposal sets aside $568 million for the pollution-control effort. It calls for stricter limits on coastal runoff, new controls on waste production from poultry and livestock operations and additional protections for endangered wetlands.

In addition, Clinton called for the expanded distribution of water quality information on the Internet so the public can readily discover the state of its local water supply.

Joined in Baltimore by a phalanx of politicians, Clinton was introduced at the event by someone who knows firsthand the importance of clean water: a commercial fisherman whose family has worked the Chesapeake Bay for generations.

Larry Sims, his latest catch just hours old, praised the recent resurgence of fish in Maryland’s waters but urged policymakers to continue to keep an eye on the water.

“We will all end up as people starving to death if we don’t take care of our waterways,” he warned.

Previous efforts to clean up the nation’s water supply have focused on major industrial polluters that spew impurities by the pipeful. But equally important, say experts, are toxic substances washed into water systems from city streets, pollution carried in rainwater, and animal waste generated on poultry, cattle and pig farms.

Among the elements of the administration proposal:

* Increased enforcement and assistance to states intended to control discharges that contaminate fish and shellfish, beaches and drinking water sources. The Environmental Protection Agency will develop new microbiological testing criteria for coastal waters to better gauge the potential for ear, skin and respiratory infections.

* Financial incentives for private landholders to create more than 2 million miles of buffer zones on agricultural lands to prevent pollutants from draining into nearby water systems.

* A national survey of mercury and other contaminants in fish and shellfish over the next two years and increased enforcement to control contaminants.

* A special brochure in Spanish and Asian languages to explain to immigrants how to reduce the health risks from contaminated fish and shellfish.

In pushing a broad range of initiatives, which could cost $2.3 billion over the next five years, Clinton is seeking to overcome Republican opposition to a reauthorization of the Clean Water Act, the landmark environmental legislation passed in 1972. Critics have pointed to the law’s costs to state and local governments.

The act is credited with doubling the number of waterways safe for fishing and swimming and reducing industrial discharges by billions of pounds a year. Despite the law’s many success stories, water systems remain in peril.

Forty percent of the nation’s surveyed rivers, streams and lakes are still too polluted for fishing and swimming. “No Swimming” signs are common on the nation’s beaches, which closed more than 2,500 times in 1996 because of contaminated waters.

Excess runoff of pollutants such as nitrogen and phosphorous damages algae blooms and contributes to outbreaks of harmful organisms that have plagued the country’s Eastern shore.

“It’s high time we responded to these dire signs warning us that our watersheds cannot sustain the growing stress from commercial and industrial waste,” said Kathryn Hohmann of the Sierra Club, who praised the administration’s effort.