New EPA water regulations unlikely to improve water quality

March 2000

U.S. Water News Online

Arlington, Va. -- The Environmental Protection Agency's proposed new water regulations would undermine state control over local water bodies and hinder innovative local and regional water pollution control efforts, according to comments submitted to the agency by the Regulatory Studies Program at George Mason University's Mercatus Center.

The comments address the proposed changes to the Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) Program and changes to the National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) and Water Quality Standards (WQS) regulations.

"Centralizing decision making with EPA for hundreds of thousands of river segments, lakes, and coastal zone regions would complicate and delay decision making about important environmental matters that are inherently local," said Dr. Roger E. Meiners, Professor of Law & Economics at the University of Texas - Arlington, and Dr. Bruce Yandle, Alumni Distinguished Professor of Economics at Clemson University, who prepared the comment on behalf of the Mercatus Center.

Dr. Wendy L. Gramm, Director of the Regulatory Studies Program said, "While the proposal seems to reflect a welcome shift in focus from technology-based controls determined at a federal level to controls based on the characteristics of individual watersheds, EPA's prescriptive, procedural rule is likely to undermine the benefits of a watershed approach."

"In the Clean Water Act of 1972, Congress clearly mandated that states should retain primary responsibility over water quality control. Contrary to this mandate, if these regulations move forward, the EPA will obtain nearly unlimited authority to second-guess states, and impose any standard it chooses on any body of water under any circumstance," warned authors Meiners and Yandle.

In addition to conflicting with the goals of Congress, the Center says the proposed new TMDL regulations and the changed NPDES and WQS regulations:

• Will hinder state efforts to target local water quality problems effectively;
• Do not advance the science supporting water management decisions;
• Are simultaneously prescriptive and open-ended, leaving states little flexibility, but burdening them with substantial responsibility; and,
• Fail to consider how significant the costs will likely be.

"The regulatory framework proposed by EPA, while it strives to be watershed-based, still relies heavily on federally mandated controls, which have not succeeded in meeting water quality goals in the past and are not likely to succeed now," continued Meiners and Yandle. "A decentralized system based on property rights and the rule of law would better form a solid foundation for water quality management than do these proposals."

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