With Activists Providing Cover,
EPA Targets Non-Point Pollution

The Environmental Protection Agency expects to start regulating non-point source pollution by the end of the year.

The Clinton administration announced this month that it will enforce a largely ignored part of the Clean Water Act that requires states to lessen pollution in 20,000 of the nation's rivers, lakes and bays.

Under new rules proposed by the EPA, each state would have to write an individual plan to clean every body of water that is too dirty for fishing and swimming. The EPA estimates that covers about two-thirds of the nation's waterways.

According to reports in The Washington Post, this is the first time the federal government would compel states to determine the cause of non-point source pollution and require them to figure out how to reduce contaminants that wash off farm fields and city streets.

In 1997, Maryland became the first state to regulate farm runoff as part of its effort to improve Chesapeake Bay water, but the EPA requirement would impact on other states which have not set limits on the discharge of nitrogen, a major source of water pollution, according to the federal agency.

The action is the deferred second phase of what lawmakers say they had envisioned as a two-pronged attack on water pollution when they passed the Clean Water Act a quarter-century ago.

The proposed regulation, signed by EPA Administrator Carol Browner Aug. 14, is expected to become final by the end of the year.

Environmental activists in 31 states have filed lawsuits against EPA, seeking to force the agency to impose the kind of pollution controls the administration is embracing. More than half of those suits have led to settlements requiring EPA to step in if the states do not act.

Activists, the Washington Post says, interpret the administration's action as capitulating to their wave of litigation.

The administration's proposal, the result of a three-year policy study by what they say is a broad-based group of advisers, differs from current water regulation in two main ways. It broadens the focus from specific quality of discharges from individual polluters such as factories and sewage treatment plants to the overall quality of a body of water.

The overall quality edict would require states to set total maximum daily load limits for each body of water. Until now, state have been responsible mainly for granting permits that cover the kind of technology that must be used by steel mills, wastewater plants and other specific sites of point source pollution to ensure their discharges did not exceed government standards.

The second change is that states would be forced for the first time to reduce nonpoint source pollution from more diffuse sources, including agricultural and urban runoff.

That pollution is difficult to measure and control. The EPA says, however, that it accounts for about 60 percent of current pollution.

For each body of dirty water, states would have to negotiate with all parties responsible for the pollution to determine which ones had to take and pay for the cleanup steps. States would have to submit their cleanup plans within two to three years.

The EPA has assembled the first national inventory of the bodies of water that need such work. It includes 300,000 miles of river and shoreline and nearly five million acres of lakes, Browner says.