Dear Editors: This week’s taxpayer-funded “Update” from supercilious “Tea Party” Congressman Scott Tipton does it again – pandering to local anti-government and anti-regulation extremists by mischaracterizing recent legislation. This time, Tipton touts H.R. 5078 – the revealingly-named “Waters of the United States Regulatory Overreach Protection Act” – which passed the House on September 9, 2014, and which Tipton disingenuously describes as “House votes to stop EPA water taking”. However, as John Trammell’s letter accurately observed in Sunday’s Sentinel (“EPA’s water rule not a gross federal overreach”), the assertions made by Tipton in the Sentinel last Wednesday and in recent public appearances are categorically false. “On the contrary, the proposed clean water rule only restores protections that were in place for our headwater and tributary streams for 30 years before Supreme Court rulings started to roll them back in 2003. Colorado did just fine with those protections in the 1970s, 1980s and ’90s.” Similarly contrary to Tipton’s dissembling, “[t]he rule won’t begin regulating mud puddles as some have falsely claimed, but it will protect our seasonal and intermittent streams, which in turn flow into our larger rivers, so that we can protect water quality for all of the many uses to which we put water”. “More than 70,000 miles of Colorado streams are in limbo in terms of Clean Water Act protection, and this rule will clarify that they are covered under the Clean Water Act. Without the rule, these waters may lose protection or be tied up in lengthy regulatory and legal battles over what is or isn’t covered under the act. That could open up our headwaters for development and pollution.” Thus, in fact, the EPA’s proposed “rule is not a ‘gross federal overreach’ nor ‘the biggest water grab in American history’.” Therefore, Tipton “and others who oppose this rule should cease misrepresenting it”. Bill Hugenberg
Posted on: Mon, 15 Sep 2014 22:28:36 +0000
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