AFBF’s response to EPA’s TMDL take-over
Published
7/9/2011
AFBF’s lawsuit challenging the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) Total Maximum Daily Load in the Chesapeake Bay seeks to rein in EPA’s overreaching and to preserve the primary responsibility for water quality and land use planning that the Clean Water Act expressly reserved for state and local authorities. The American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), Pennsylvania Farm Bureau, and a half-dozen other agricultural trade associations have filed a lawsuit challenging EPA.
Court action to rein in EPA’s over-reaching is necessary now. Beyond its unlawful Chesapeake Bay TMDL, EPA is already laying the groundwork for similar action across the Mississippi River watershed – an area encompassing nearly 40% of the continental United States. Read full article for a fact sheet with AFBF's response to EPA's TMDL take-over.
EPA is actively working on modeling to identify target concentrations of nitrogen and phosphorus for the Northern Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi River. A likely next step, following EPA’s Chesapeake Bay model, would be issuance of a Mississippi River watershed-wide TMDL – complete with EPA-imposed deadlines and binding pollutant allocations. In fact, environmental activists have threatened litigation to compel EPA to do just that.
