The sky is reflected on Parsons Creek after sunrise in Madison, Maryland, in August. The Chesapeake Bay estuary is the largest in the United States, at a surface area of 4,480 square miles. (photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Supreme
Court Ends Challenge to the Chesapeake Bay Cleanup Plan
By Darryl Fears, The
Washington Post
01 March 16
The
Supreme Court has declined to hear a challenge to the Chesapeake Bay cleanup
plan, the largest attempt by the federal government and states to rid the
pollution from a body of water and to restore its health.
The
high court’s decision Monday ends an attempt by the American Farm Bureau
Federation to stop the cleanup, arguing that the Environmental Protection
Agency overstepped its authority in leading the effort because the bay can be
managed only by the states that sit in its watershed.
Monday’s
decision allows a lower court’s ruling that the EPA is well within its
authority to stand. In the 2013 decision, U.S. District Court Judge Sylvia H.
Rambo wrote that “the ecological and economic importance of the Chesapeake Bay
is well documented” and that the EPA is within its rights under the Clean Water
Act to partner with the six states in the bay watershed to cut the pollution
that pours in from sewers, construction developments, and particularly chemical
and biological waste from farms.
Rambo
ended her judgement, saying that “the court endorses the holistic, watershed
approach used here. This approach receives ample support in the [Clean Water
Act], its legislative history, and Supreme Court precedent.”
The
high court’s refusal to hear the case means that the EPA could plan to clean
other massive, multi-state water bodies, such as the Mississippi River.
Critics
of the American Farm Bureau Federation’s challenge said the group had shown
little interest in the bay before the suit was filed in 2011, and they called
it a strategic effort to preempt the federal government from regulating
pollution that runs off mega-farms it represents into the Mississippi River.
They
pointed to a speech by the farm bureau’s president, Bob Stallman, to support
that claim. “This new EPA approach will not end with the Chesapeake Bay,”
Stallman said at the group’s 2011 convention. “EPA has already revealed its
plan to follow suit in other watersheds across the nation, including the
Mississippi watershed.”
Attorneys
general in 21 states joined Stallman when the farm bureau appealed Rambo’s
decision. The prosecutors, most of them Republicans from as far as Alaska and
Montana, filed an amicus brief in support of stopping the EPA’s plan. Impaired
waters have led to fish-killing dead zones and other marine life die-offs for
decades.
“If
this [cleanup] is left to stand,” they argued in the brief U.S. Court of
Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, “other watersheds, including the Mississippi River
Basin, could be next.” Appeal judges let the cleanup stand.
One of
the farm bureau’s critics, Chesapeake Bay Foundation President William Baker,
called Monday’s decision historic. “Everyone who cares about clean water can
breathe easier now that the Supreme Court has let stand the lower court
decision that Chesapeake Clean Water Blueprint is perfectly legal under the
federal Clean Water Act.”
Baker
renewed his call to the farm bureau and others that joined its challenge, such
as home builders and chemical companies, to put aside their differences and
work to clean the nation’s largest estuary. But his final comment could serve
to stoke them. “Our collective … efforts … can be a model for other waters
worldwide.”
Farmers
worry that regulations such as those in the bay plan could cut their profit
margins or run them into debt. The cleanup placed the bay on a pollution diet
that called on farmers to spend tens of thousands of dollars to install
barriers to fertilizers, soil and manure that poured off farms with storm water
into streams, creeks and rivers that lead to the bay.
Municipalities
also complained about requirements that called on them to limit sewer overflows
during heavy rain that sent human waste awash in storm water into tributaries
to the Chesapeake. Those fixes will cost tens of millions of dollars to cities
such as the District and counties such as Anne Arundel.
C 2015 Reader Supported News
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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