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Take action now at American River’s Eaction website: http://amriversaction.ctsg.com/action/index.asp?step=2&item=12384
The Bush Administration is proposing changes to the Clean Water Act that would undermine protection of water quality in the nation’s rivers and streams.
The Environmental Protection Agency has issued a published a proposed new plan for Oregon water quality standards that will gut requirements that force polluters to clean up their act. Under the proposed plan, the federal government will prevent the public and state government from making the important decision about how clean their rivers and streams should be. The rule could also allow federal dams to pollute rivers by exempting them from current requirements under the Clean Water Act.
This “Oregon” rule is the first salvo in Bush Administration’s attack on the nation’s clean water -- it contains many of the same bad provisions that the EPA is proposing in an upcoming national water quality rule.
We need your help to keep the Bush Administration from moving ahead with this “dirty watersheds” plan for Oregon and the nation. Please send comments to the EPA communicating your opposition to the proposed rule. We have attached a fact sheet with details about the proposal, and sample comments prepared by American Rivers to help you develop your own comments.
With 30 years of work under the Clean Water Act, we have been making great progress in cleaning up our rivers and streams in Oregon and around the nation. Don’t allow the Bush Administration to take this step backward; support continued strong protection for clean water.
Written comments must be submitted by Monday, November 10, 2003 to:
Valerie Badon, ORC-158,
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region X,
1200 Sixth Avenue, Seattle, WA 98101,
Attention Docket ID No. OW-2003-0068,
via e-mail: OW-Docket@epa.gov
Or take action immediately through American River's Eaction website at:
http://amriversaction.ctsg.com/action/index.asp?step=2&item=12384
For more information or questions you can contact the Northwest Offices of American Rivers:
David Moryc, American Rivers Northwest Regional Office
320 SW Stark St., Suite 418
Portland, Oregon 97204
(503) 827-8648
BACKGROUND:
What the Bush Administration is proposing:
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is under federal court order to write new water quality standards for temperature and dissolved oxygen in Oregon. The order came from a lawsuit, Northwest Environmental Advocates v. EPA, that challenged EPA’s approval of Oregon’s 1996 water quality standards. These standards were inadequate to meet the requirements of the Clean Water Act (CWA) and the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Salmon, steelhead, and bull trout are cold-water species in Oregon that are listed as threatened and endangered under the ESA. High water temperatures cause disease, reproductive failure, and death in these fish.
Instead of protecting our salmon and rivers, though, the EPA rules actually propose a process to exempt federal dams from the Clean Water Act. The process sets in place a swift and strict time frame in which EPA would be required to consider lower standards for Oregon’s rivers and streams where federal dams affect them. The result would avoid controlling pollution and lower standards for clean water protection, harming water quality and all that depend on it, including Oregon communities and businesses that depend on healthy rivers as an economic resource.
The high-speed exemption proposed for federal dams stands in stark contrast to the proposal's lack of urgency in delaying actions to lower the lethal temperatures in Oregon's rivers and streams. These high temperatures cause disease, reproductive failure, and death in threatened and endangered salmon, steelhead, and bull trout.
Why this is a national issue:
This proposed exemption of federal dams from Oregon water quality standards is for the first step toward a promised national rule that would affect this nation's waterways and wildlife on a nationwide scale.
EPA is proposing a process that could exempt the operators of federal dams in Oregon from compliance with the Clean Water Act. This is the first public proposal that carries out proposals discussed over the last year for a new national “dirty watershed”. Federal dam owners like the Army Corps of Engineers and Bureau of Reclamation are seeking exemptions from water quality standards. A publicly leaked version of the dirty watershed rule shows EPA is working on developing a rule with a wide range of loopholes for many water polluters.
Conservation and environmental groups, as well as businesses and communities that rely on clean water and a healthy environment, are united in seeking to stop a federal dam exemption in any proposed rule.
*** The Action Alert and Background were written by American Rivers ***