Indianz.Com > News > Cronkite News: Tribal nations win court ruling for clean water rule
Court rejects Trump clean water rule with ‘significant’ Arizona impact
Thursday, September 2, 2021
Cronkite News
WASHINGTON – Environmental groups welcomed a federal judge’s decision this week to overturn Trump-era clean-water regulations that were so narrow that many waterways in Arizona ended up being excluded from federal oversight.
The Monday ruling by U.S. District Judge Rosemary Marquez said the 2020 Navigable Waters Protection Rule has “been particularly significant in arid states” like Arizona and New Mexico, and that it must be reversed while federal regulators devise new standards.
“States like Arizona were significantly affected, where so many water bodies were cut out of the Clean Water Act” under the Trump regulations, said Janette Brimmer, a senior attorney for Earthjustice. It represented six Native American tribes, including the Pascua Yaqui and Tohono O’odham in Arizona, that had sued to overturn the rule.
Ruling in Pascua Yaqui Tribe v. EPA – [PDF]
But farming, building and mining interests said they were disappointed in the ruling, which removes regulations that clearly defined which bodies of water are subject to federal oversight and which are not.
“We go back to nobody knows what is regulated, what the regulations are, how they will be implemented,” said Bas Aja, vice president of the Arizona Cattle Feeders’ Association. “That uncertainty certainly is not how you conduct a water protection program.”
Uncertainty is what led the Obama administration to issue a new definition of “waters of the United States” (WOTUS) under the Clean Water Act, which regulators had interpreted for decades to include everything from rivers to wetlands. The new WOTUS rule in 2015 specified that wetlands, downstream waters and “ephemeral waters” – streams that may only flow part of the year and be dry at other times.
“A particular issue we had in Arizona, New Mexico and parts of the Southwest is that we have a lot of ephemeral streams, where we know water will run if there is a big rainstorm, but they don’t run all year round,” said Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University.
“There’s been a lot of discussions, conflicts, confusion over how the Clean Water Act should apply to ephemeral streams,” she said.
Note: This story originally appeared on Cronkite News. It is published via a Creative Commons license. Cronkite News is produced by the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.
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