WASHINGTON — President Bush is abandoning a plan that could have further reduced wetlands protections even though his administration has said their occasional use by farmers, migratory birds or endangered species isn't reason enough to stop developers from filling them in.
Mike Leavitt
Leavitt said the administration wants to avoid "a contentious and lengthy rule-making debate" over disputed environmental benefits or losses by putting into force advisory guidelines issued in January.
The administration recognizes the ecological value of remaining wetlands that function as "nature's kidneys" by filtering pollutants, Leavitt said, explaining Bush's decision to drop a formal rule-making process since then.
The Supreme Court ruled in 2001 in a Chicago-area case that isolated ponds and mudflats should not be afforded Clean Water Act protections if only to provide habitat for migratory birds.
EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers issued the January guidelines for carrying out the court's decision. Environmentalists said those guidelines went beyond the court ruling by adding endangered species and crop irrigation as insufficient grounds for protecting small, as wetlands, isolated streams, ponds and marshes that don't cross state lines.
At the same time, the administration began crafting new regulations specifically to exclude isolated ponds and streams, many of them dry for part of the year, as protected wetlands under the law.
Chandler Morse, a policy analyst for the National Association of Home Builders said the guidelines have created even more inconsistency and unpredictability on whether developers must get permits from the Corps of Engineers before filling isolated wetlands.
"Not moving ahead with the rule-making is going to leave the problems around," he said. "There just isn't a lot of information on what this all means."
Last month, 218 House members, including 26 Republicans, independent Rep. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and all but 14 of the House's205 Democrats, signed a letter to Bush urging him to scrap what they called an attempt "to remove federal protection from waters ... that have been covered by the Clean Water Act for decades."
EPA has estimated that as much one-fifth of the current 100 million acres of wetlands in the United States, a full 20 million acres, could be considered isolated. Other Bush administration officials have put that figure at as low as45 , 000acres.
"We're happy that they've decided not to go forward," said Malia Hale, a water policy specialist at the
Tracy Mehan, who oversees the EPA Office of Water, said the Supreme Court's decision and guidelines implementing it have had little impact on wetlands so far.
© Associated Press.
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