ALABAMA: Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), its actions are necessary to protect people. It says that the Navigable Waters Act gives it the authority to protect America’s transport waterways. It is a principle held up by the courts.But now it says it has reinterpreted the act and found out that it actually has a far greater jurisdiction than it realized.
Not only does it have authority over bodies of water that are large enough to transport goods by boat, but it has the authority to regulate the streams, ditches, gullies, swamps and even seasonal waters that potentially feed into any navigable waterway plus 4,000 feet of land in any direction from any such culvert, wash, arroyo, mudflat or seasonal marsh.
“Today’s rule marks the beginning of a new era in the history of the Clean Water Act,” said Assistant Secretary for the Army (Civil Works) Jo-Ellen Darcy. “This is a generational rule and completes another chapter in history of the Clean Water Act. Yet not everybody is happy. PacificLegal.org calls it “undoubtedly the largest expansion of power ever proposed by a federal agency.
”The American Farm Bureau Federation says that the EPA power grab puts 99 percent of Pennsylvania and Montana, and 100 percent of Virginia under the federal agency’s authority. Vast oceans of other states fall under the EPA’s claim of domain too. Suddenly, and without congressional input, the EPA has placed the majority of the rivers and farmland in the United States under its regulatory control.
