Dirty pool in Clean Water Act rollback
Critics accuse EPA chief of cutting out dissenting voices
WASHINGTON — As Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt jetted around the country last year, regularly flying first or business class at hefty taxpayer expense, his stated mission was often a noble one: to hear from Americans about how Washington could most effectively and fairly enforce the Clean Water Act.
Yet, when Pruitt showed up in North Dakota in August to seek guidance on how to rewrite a landmark Obama-era water protection rule, it was clear there were some voices he did not care to hear.
The general public was barred from participating in the roundtable Pruitt presided over at the University of North Dakota. An EPA official even threatened to call security on reporters who tried to linger.
What happened at the meeting is still a mystery to all but the invitees, a list dominated by industry and Pruitt’s political allies.
The same is true of many of the other 16 such roundtables Pruitt held as he developed his plan to weaken a federal rule that protects the drinking water of 117 million Americans.
Such behind-closeddoors deliberation is a hallmark of the agency under Pruitt, an EPA administrator who spent $25,000 to set up a secure phone booth in his office and said security concerns guided his luxury plane travel.
Pruitt’s security detail said flying in coach exposed him to too much interaction with hostile members of the public.
Under fire for the costly plane tickets, which were revealed in records obtained by the nonprofit watchdog Environmental Integrity Project, Pruitt said last week he would start trying to fly coach when possible.
But the buffer Pruitt has created from critical elements of the public extends beyond his choice of airline seating. It also defines decision making at his agency.
Pruitt purged scientists from an independent EPA advisory board that rigorously reviewed the science behind the water rule and found it to be sound. An EPA regulatory reform task force advising Pruitt on the rollback of clean water and air rules operates largely in the shadows.
Pruitt rejects any suggestion he is bending the rules. He said the agency is working “through the robust public process of providing long-term regulatory certainty across all 50 states about what waters are subject to federal regulation.”
The effort is aimed at removing federal Clean Water Act protection from millions of miles of streams and wetlands, including more than 80 percent of the waters in California and the arid West. The administration last month suspended for two years the new guidelines protecting those waters as it scrambles to draft a replacement rule that substantially narrows the reach of the act.
Pruitt is, indeed, making a robust effort to connect with stakeholders — spending a lot of public dollars along the way. But his audiences are typically handpicked, and almost always industry-friendly.
While EPA officials say others have ample opportunity to be heard through pro-forma comment filings, webinars and occasional meetings with staff, many communities feel shut out.
“No outreach at all was done here,” the Navajo Nation protested in a letter to the EPA weeks before it suspended the clean water rule. The letter contrasted the hasty suspension of the rule with the four years of tribal consultation and scientific review that went into creating it.
There were no such complaints from the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, which not only hosted Pruitt on a Colorado ranch, but also persuaded him to star in its advocacy video filmed there.
In the video, Pruitt accused the Obama administration of “reimagining” its authority to define waters deserving federal protection to include even puddles — which the previous administration said it had specifically excluded from protection. The attorneys general of nine states, including California, cited the video as evidence that Pruitt, who had sued to scrap the Obama water rule while attorney general of Oklahoma, is not approaching the rewrite with an open mind, as the law requires.
In Pruitt’s home state of Oklahoma, the EPA spent $14,400 to charter a plane so Pruitt and his staff could hear from several dozen farmers eager to repeal the rule in the town of Guymon.
Soon after, the state of North Dakota spent $2,100 to ferry Pruitt and a couple of staffers to the closeddoor meeting there. During the North Dakota visit, EPA staff directed a radio host scheduled to interview Pruitt not to take calls from listeners, according to agency emails published by E&E News. The emails also revealed how EPA staff insisted the roundtable be closed to reporters.
EPA officials said in a statement that information from the roundtables will ultimately be uploaded into the public docket.
The agency’s caginess has drawn an onslaught of open-records lawsuits seeking basic information about who EPA officials are meeting with, when, and what Pruitt is saying in his many invite-only discussions.
EPA staffers were stunned when political appointees at the agency last year directed them to write in a key report that protecting wetlands, intermittent streams and vernal pools would not bring any economic benefit to anyone. A detailed EPA analysis had already found that up to $500 million in benefits would be reaped by a range of interests, including commercial fisheries, recreational outfitters and drinking water utilities.
“We were told to just drop the benefits,” said Betsy Southerland, who resigned her post as director of science and technology at the EPA Office of Water in August. “They told us verbally, so they wouldn’t have a written record of it.”
An EPA spokesman downplayed the importance of the study, saying it was not required to rewrite the water rule. Yet Pruitt’s allies in Congress are concerned the effort to unravel the Obama rule will falter. They are advancing a measure that would exempt the rollback from many of the public disclosure and other rules that apply to major regulatory changes.
In some states, lawmakers are moving to backstop the protections as best they can. California is particularly energized. In others, they are eager to see the rule disappear, amid a vocal organizing effort by the industries that align with Pruitt. Farmers, ranchers and homebuilders complain the rules expose them to all manner of liability.
They say filling a drainage ditch or a puddle on their property could draw costly EPA enforcement actions against them under the Waters of the United States rule drafted by Obama’s EPA.
Pruitt complained of overzealous puddle and ditch enforcement in the Cattlemen’s video.
It’s a point of view that is not necessarily shared widely in his own agency.
“We are not running around regulating ditches,” said Jessica Kao, who recently left her post as the EPA’s lead Clean Water Act enforcement attorney in the Southwest. “That whole argument is a red herring.”