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Keeping Western waterways clean: The L.A. River deserves protection under the Clean Water Act. Will the feds step up? asks editorial

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on June 22, 2008 at 9:31 pm

From the Los Angeles Times, this editorial:

Over the course of almost 40 years, the Clean Water Act — which compels landowners to secure permits from the Environmental Protection Agency before dredging or discharging pollutants into “waters of the United States” — has become the cornerstone of our water-quality law, helping states and local governments make development decisions that keep the country’s watersheds healthy.

Here in Southern California, the Clean Water Act limits the sewage and industrial waste that flow into streams, rivers and, ultimately, the ocean. It protects washes and other seasonal waters from being bulldozed over, helping to maintain habitat for birds and other wildlife. But today, just as elaborate plans for a long-awaited Los Angeles River restoration have begun moving forward, the river and its already stressed watershed could lose some of the law’s protections.

Lay the blame on legalese, courtesy of the U.S. Supreme Court. In a 2006 rulingin Rapanos vs. U.S., Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote that the term “waters of the United States,” to which the Clean Water Act still applies, should be interpreted more narrowly as “navigable waters” and wetlands with a “significant nexus” to them.

It was left to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which shares enforcement responsibilities for the act with the EPA, to figure out how to define those and other muddy terms, and it chose to do so, critics say, literally and narrowly. By the corps’ definitions, according to a memo released June 4, only two short stretches of the Los Angeles River are “traditionally navigable”: 2 miles in the Sepulveda Basin and 1.75 miles in Long Beach.

No one knows, just yet, what the consequences will be for Los Angeles — the river or the watershed — because the corps has not yet determined whether specific waters are or aren’t covered by the act. Once that process begins, the corps says, the entire Los Angeles River should remain protected because it meets the definition of “relatively permanent.” People won’t be able to start dumping into the waterway with impunity. The corps says that it maintains its commitment to restoring the river, and that it will be open to reevaluating the “navigability” of the currently “non-navigable” stretches.