Roxana Vega
Professor M.M. Eskandari-Qajar
Political Science 101
SBCC
November 28, 2018
T/TR 9:35-10:55 CRN 31591
Clean Water Act
The Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1948 was the first major U.S. law to address water pollution. When it was made a law in 1972 it became widely known as the Clean Water Act . The idea of Clean Water Act was enacted in 1948 and was called the Federal Water Pollution Control Act but the act was completely reorganized and expanded in 1972. “Clean Water Act” became the Act's common name with amendments in 1972. The Clean Water Act also named the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972, a law that the U.S. legislation enforced in 1972 to restore and keep clean water for the United States. The Clean Water Act was brought to the government's attention by citizens that had concerns for the environment and for the condition of the United States water. Before the CWA there was the Federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1948 which showed it was ineffective and was revised and turned into the CWA. The Clean Water Act was changed in 1977 to change the way wastewater from cities, businesses and industries into lakes, rivers and ocean water. The United States Environmental Protection Agency has the primary authority for enforcing the environmental laws and regulations in the United States.
The Clean Water Act is in charge of water quality and makes specific standards for water waste for each department as well as regulations for special conflicts for example, oil spills and toxic chemicals.
As a result of the Clean Water Act big cities across the U.S. were given federal money to improve and build wastewater plants. The CWA was also changed to address unique environmental issues such as wetlands protection water quality.
The Environmental Protection Agency works with partners from the state and federal offices in order to control and guarantee cooperation with clean water laws and regulations to protect the health and the environment of the people. The Clean Water Act is the primary federal law governing water pollution.
Subsequent amendments modified some of the earlier CWA provisions. Revisions in 1981 streamlined the municipal construction grants process, improving the capabilities of treatment plants built under the program. Changes in 1987 phased out the construction grants program, replacing it with the State Water Pollution Control Revolving Fund, more commonly known as the Clean Water State Revolving Fund. This new funding strategy addressed water quality needs by building on EPA-state partnerships.
Over the years, many other laws have changed parts of the Clean Water Act. Title I of the Great Lakes Critical Programs Act of 1990, for example, put into place parts of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement of 1978, signed by the U.S. and Canada, where the two nations agreed to reduce certain toxic pollutants in the Great Lakes. That law required EPA to establish water quality criteria for the Great Lakes addressing 29 toxic pollutants with maximum levels that are safe for humans, wildlife, and aquatic life. It also required EPA to help the States implement the criteria on a specific schedule.
The Clean Water Act was passed by Congress in 1972, almost didn't happen because after it was passed by Congress, Nixon vetoed it.
Approved by Congress the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 and the Clean Air Act amendments of 1970, the Clean Water Act received positive support. But even then at the beginning of the environmental movement. Politics that today surround the landmark law were beginning to emerge.
The idea of the Clean Water Act started in a 1956 by Minnesota Democrat John Blatnik the chairman of the House Public Works Committee's Rivers and Harbors Subcommittee. While Blatnik was on a river he was astonished and concerned by how filthy the river was. Blatnik created the Federal Pollution Control Act of 1956 to give them research on the causes of the filthy water and ways to treat the pollution, funding for wastewater treatments, and a system to keep the states along water bodies to agree on limits and cleanups.
The bill was passed and signed into law by President Eisenhower, but as the Public Health Service started to look into the wastewater treatment problems the agency discovered that the findings were more severe than they first thought. They started a new bill to strengthen federal enforcement powers, improve the projects of wastewater treatment facilities and enhance the research. The legislation passed the House and Senate but Eisenhower issued a veto.
"Water pollution is a uniquely local blight," Eisenhower said in his veto message hitting a theme that resounds today in the battle over where authority to combat water pollution should rest. "Primary responsibility for solving the problem lies not with the Federal Government but rather must be assumed and exercised, as it has been, by State and local governments," Eisenhower wrote.When President Kennedy was in office one year later improving the water pollution program was one of his first accomplishments
"Our nation has been blessed with a bountiful supply of water, but it is not a blessing we can regard with complacency," Kennedy said in a message to Congress on natural resources one month after his inauguration from the beginning Kennedy had made clean water a priority which is when the rest of the nation started to care more as well.
Congress gave a modified and improved version of Blatnik's bill to Kennedy and soon it was only a matter of time before it was signed into law.
Massive clouds of soap suds floated down the nation's waterways and sometimes out of people's faucets. The Potomac River flowed out of the nation's capital carrying the stench of the 240 million gallons of waste flushed into it each day. And Cleveland's Cuyahoga River oozed, brown and oily, bubbling with gases just below the surface.
Declaring the Cuyahoga one of the country's most polluted waterways, in 1970 Time reported one of Cleveland residents' favorite jokes: "Anyone who falls into the Cuyahoga does not drown. He decays."
On June 22, 1969, oil-soaked debris in the river caught fire, likely ignited by either a spark from a passing rail car or molten steel.
"Public opinion was now racing ahead of the policymakers, and there was widespread support [for legislation] among Democrats and Republicans, not just in our Committee on Public Works, but in the whole House and Senate," Oberstar said.
Over the next year and a half, Congress held hearings and collected documentation about the technologies that could reduce pollution. The turning point, according to Oberstar, came when industry began to get behind national standards for pollution control.
"They were seeing evidence of businesses fleeing to states that had lower water quality standards, and industries that would find it difficult to move were unhappy about that," Oberstar said, pointing to 3M and the American Chemical Society as key supporters.
"They created a consensus in the business sector that national standards were in the broadest public interest, the broadest economic interest, and it was a major breakthrough in crafting the Clean Water Act."
Indeed, during those early years, the divides most evident today — between Republicans and Democrats, business and environmentalists — were not the ones at play in Congress, according to staffers from that era.
The House pushed for a program built on the same model as the Federal Aid Highway Program, in which the federal government collected revenue and set standards but let the states handle implementation.
"The House liked that model of a federally assisted program run by the states, whereas the Senate came from the point of view of command and control," said Mike Toohey, who served on the Republican staff of the House Public Works Committee Water Resources Subcommittee when the last major amendments to the Clean Water Act were made in 1977.
The Senate's version of the legislation set specific deadlines for implementation, whereas the House's version offered more flexibility.
"You know that old saying that the Republicans in the House are the opposition but the Senate is the enemy? Well, that was the way we felt at the time in negotiating very heartfelt views on these issues of the bill," Oberstar said.
The bill remained in conference for 10 months, until a compromise was brokered at the beginning of October 1972.But President Nixon, who was generally supportive of the bill's environmental aims, objected to its $24 billion price tag. He had hoped to issue a pocket veto, but Congress did not leave town as expected. According to news reports from the time, Nixon waited until 40 minutes before the bill would have become law without his signature to issue his veto.
"Legislation which would continue our efforts to raise water quality, but which would do so through extreme and needless overspending, does not serve the public interest," Nixon said in a veto message that declared the bill "budget-wrecking."
Just two hours after the president sent up his disapproval, the Senate voted 52-12 to override, with 17 of the votes in favor coming from Republicans.
"There are many, many federal programs that are wasteful, and many American tax dollars are idly spent on programs that do not produce commensurate results — but that is not true of the federal pollution effort," said Sen. Howard Baker, a first-term Republican from Tennessee, during floor debate.
"I believe that the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972 is far and away the most significant and promising piece of environmental legislation ever enacted by the Congress."
The House voted 247-23 to override — a margin of more than 10-1 — with 96 of the yays from Republicans and 151 from Democrats.
But Nixon didn't give up. He used his presidential powers to impound half the funds appropriated by Congress. The technique of impoundment — which Nixon also used to withhold other federal funds, including highway money — sparked a feud with Congress over who controlled the purse strings.
The dispute ultimately reached the Supreme Court, which in the 1975 case Train v. City of New York ruled that "the president had no authority to withhold funds provided by Congress in the Clean Water Act of 1972," and that "the president cannot frustrate the will of Congress by killing a program through impoundment."
But environmentalists say the country's waters face new challenges: toxic pollutants that cannot be seen or tasted but are dangerous to human health; pollution running off farm fields and suburban streets, called nonpoint sources, that is not regulated under the federal law; and potential changes brought about by a changing climate.
Meanwhile, the landmark law is at the center of a maelstrom in Congress over the proper role for federal regulation. A number of amendments have been introduced in the House this session to return control to the states or otherwise modify the law.
Against this backdrop, few environmentalists want to risk opening up the law for revisions.
But Toohey, the former House Republican staffer, said Congress just didn't know enough about many of the big water problems when it passed the bill.
"We could get and understand the point source pollution problem pretty well and figure out a strategy to get to a solution, and that worked," Toohey said. "Less well understood was nonpoint source pollution … and at the time there was nothing about groundwater.
Michigan state agencies overseen by Gov. Rick Snyder and a series of emergency managers appointed by the governor are to blame for allowing contaminated water into Flint homes, according to a report released Wednesday. The findings—the most sweeping indictment to date of the role state officials played in creating the crisis—were released as part of the task force’s final report on Flint, where residents were exposed to lead in their drinking water for over a year even as officials were telling them it was safe to drink.
The task force, appointed by the governor to investigate the Flint crisis, found that the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ), which did not require that Flint treat its water after switching from Detroit’s water system to the Flint River, “bears primary responsibility for the water contamination in Flint.” The report faults the agency for misinterpreting the federal lead and copper rule, which requires actions like corrosion control to minimize lead levels, and failing to investigate whether the Flint River was contributing to a high number of cases of Legionella, a respiratory disease that has led to 10 deaths in Flint but has not been fully linked to the water switch. Lead in children can be particularly devastating and cause developmental disabilities later in life.
The report also found that the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services “failed to adequately and promptly act to protect public health” and said that the Environmental Protection Agency, which oversaw MDEQ, delayed enforcement of federal laws that would’ve ensured safe drinking water. But the task force placed much of the blame for the crisis on emergency managers appointed by Gov. Snyder to help the city handle its finances and said the governor’s office repeatedly relied on incorrect information from state officials on the Flint water situation.
“Emergency managers made key decisions that contributed to the crisis, from the use of the Flint River to delays in connecting to DWSD [Detroit Water and Sewage Department] once water quality problems were encountered,” the report states.
In May 2015 Environmental Protection Agency came up with a new law on the definition of "waters of the United States" ("WOTUS") and the future enforcement of the act. Thirteen states sued and on August 27 U.S. Chief District Judge for North Dakota Ralph R. Erickson issued a preliminary injunction blocking the regulation in those states. In a separate lawsuit, on October 9 a divided Sixth Circuit appeals court stayed the rule’s application nationwide. Congress then passed a joint resolution under the Congressional Review Act overturning the WOTUS rule but President Barack Obama vetoed the measure.
On February 28, 2017, President Donald Trump signed documents directing Environmental Protection Agency to review and rewrite the Obama administration's "Clean Water Rule,". The agencies were ordered to reassess the rule consistent with promoting economic growth and minimizing regulatory uncertainty.
The Sixth Circuit appeals court stay was overturned on January 22, 2018 when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that challenges to the 2015 rule must be filed in United States district courts. EPA then formally suspended the 2015 regulation and announced plans to issue a new version later in 2018.