Senators seek water bill upgrade

Rhode Island’s U.S. senators are co-sponsoring a bill that would strengthen the Clean Water Act following a controversial weakening of the landmark environmental law by the U.S. Supreme Court last summer.
On July 25, Democrats Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse joined with several Senate colleagues to introduce the Clean Water Restoration Act, which would extend federal regulatory protection of wetlands, streams and tributaries not connected to navigable waterways.
Last June, in what was seen as the first clear indication of a rightward shift under Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court ruled in a split decision that the Clean Water Act of 1972 only protects “navigable” waters, and that environmental regulators who apply the Clean Water Act to wetlands are not acting in accordance with the law.
The 1972 environmental protection law gives the Army Corps of Engineers the ability to block developments that would cause water pollution.
The bill filed by Reed and Whitehouse would delete the term “navigable” from the Clean Water Act to clarify that Congress’s primary intent in 1972 was not to limit clean water protection to navigable waters, but to protect all of the nation’s waters from pollution, according to a press release issued by Reed.
“This legislation reaffirms and upholds the intent of the Clean Water Act – to establish and maintain the biological and physical integrity of our nation’s waters,” Reed said. “Rhode Island has always been a leader in conserving our natural resources. This bill will extend protections to ensure the health of more ecosystems across the nation.”
Environmental advocates have said the court’s decision could open the door to lawsuits challenging decisions blocking development projects that would impact wetlands based on the Clean Water Act, and would shift more of the cost of protecting wetlands to state and local governments.
But such scenarios would not happen in Rhode Island, regardless of the Supreme Court’s decision or the fate of the Clean Water Restoration Act, because the state has its own wetland-protection statutes in place, said Curt Spalding, executive director of Save the Bay.
“All the wetlands here are still under regulatory protection,” Spalding said. “It’s a very powerful law, and it has done a pretty good job, we think, of steering development away from wetlands.”
Rhode Island’s wetlands statute, which has been in place for several decades, creates a 50-foot buffer zone around all wetlands in the state and essentially prevents developers from altering any wetland, he said.
In states in other parts of the country – particularly in the South – that don’t have state laws protecting wetlands, the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision could be “terrible” in some cases, Spalding said.
But Rhode Island still needs to vigilantly safeguard its wetlands and aquatic ecosystems, he said. Wetlands have diminished throughout the state in the decades since its strong wetlands protection law was enacted – particularly salt-marsh wetlands along Narragansett Bay, he said.
“Half the salt-marsh wetlands around Narragansett Bay are gone,” Spalding said. “They were here, and now they’ve been fiddled with and altered and they’re gone. And the half that is left is in less than full health. All of them could use a level of restoration.”
The bay’s salt marshes are especially important because they are crucial to the long-term health of the bay, which is already experiencing stresses associated with global warming, including rising water levels and temperature and decreasing salinity, Spalding said.
“We have to make the bay more resilient to the ecosystem changes we’re seeing, probably due to climate change,” he said. •