Restoring protection to all waters

Promising to restore protections stripped from hundreds of miles of small streams and thousands of acres of wetlands in Colorado, at least 173 members of Congress have endorsed the Clean Water Restoration Act in recent months.

Over the past five years, the Bush administration and the U.S. Supreme Court have chipped away at protections for our waterways, especially smaller streams and wetlands, by defying years of precedent and narrowly defining the Clean Water Act to apply to only “navigable waterways.”

“Failing to protect the small streams, ponds and wetlands that feed the Colorado, the Arkansas and other important Colorado waterways is simply foolhardy,” says Environment Colorado’s Matt Garrington. “Whatever goes in the stream ends up in the river. Pave over the wetlands and you lose the wetlands’ ability to filter pollutants before they reach larger waterways.”

Troubled Waters

On the 35th anniversary of the Clean Water Act’s passage, we released our “Troubled Waters” report. The report exposed facilities that exceeded their Clean Water Act permits in 2005 (the most recent year for which data is available).

By revealing the type of pollutants that industrial facilities are discharging into our waterways and the extent to which these facilities are exceeding their permit levels, we wanted to shine a spotlight on the troubled state of our waterways.

The goals of the 1972 Clean Water Act were to eliminate the discharge of pollutants into waterways and make all U.S. waters swimmable and fishable.

However, our research showed that in Colorado, as in other states, many major facilities continue to violate their permits. In 2005:

• Forty-five percent of Colorado’s industrial and municipal facilities exceeded their Clean Water Act permits at least once in 2005.

• Forty-nine facilities in Colorado reported more than 120 exceedances of their Clean Water Act permits in 2005.

• On average, Colorado facilities exceeding their Clean Water Act permits did so by 223 percent, or by more three times the legal limit.

Rep. James Oberstar (Minn.) joined our federal clean water advocate, Christy Leavitt, at the Washington, D.C., release of the report. Rep. Oberstar is the chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, the committee that will pass our bill to the full House of Representatives.

A long-time champion for clean water, the representative said, “We are at a turning point in history, and our responsibility to this generation and our legacy to future generations is to advance the cause of protecting the most precious of natural resources—clean water.”