The EPA's overreaching rules

A few miles south of Dearing, Georgia, McCorkle Nurseries grows shrubs, vines, evergreens and perennials for just about any landscaping project you can think of.

But there's one thing — worse than weeds — that the thriving area business doesn't ever want to see crop up.

Government red tape. That's what could happen if certain federal water regulations are allowed to stand.

Instead, the acting head of the Environmental Protection Agency visited the McCorkle family at their business to support them and countless other farmers in trying to right a serious wrong.

The location for Administrator Andrew Wheeler's appearance was chosen deliberately. Growing operations like the McCorkles' are the ones powerfully affected — a better word is shackled — by poorly shaped, hard-to understand federal water regulations.

In December, the Trump administration presented a proposal to pull back many of the EPA's cumbersome rules — among them, the Waters of the United States, or WOTUS, regulations. Those are rules regarding “navigable waters” that basically tell Americans what they can do with sometimes even the tiniest sprinkling of water on their property.

Under EPA rules set forth in 2015, federal protection is extended, for example, to any stream created just by intermittent rainfall, or “wetlands” that really are no more than patches of soggy dirt.

“Putting WOTUS in rough terms,” wrote Burt Rutherford, an editor for the agriculture trade magazine BEEF, “the rule means that if a duck thinks it can land on it, any puddle is considered navigable and falls under jurisdiction of the federal government.”

A stretch? Not by much. Do those rules sound like they make even the tiniest bit of sense?

If growers had to check with the federal government after every rainfall — to make sure a new ditch near a field isn't a new federal waterway that requires a federal permit to deal with — growers would

get hardly any actual work done. They couldn't fully use their own land.

Under the more commonsense EPA rules being proposed, there are six categories of water considered waters of the United States: navigable waters, tributaries, some ditches — for navigation or affected by tides — certain lakes and ponds, impoundments (often reservoirs) and wetlands connected to the other five categories.

These changes would save money, keep the economy humming, encourage business development and protect national waters that actually are navigable.

If there are other environmental aspects of these massive rules that advocates take exception to, then those green groups can address the disputes in court. But telling farmers what they can and can't do with essentially any random puddle of water on their land? That's shameful federal overreach.

We wish the Trump administration luck in getting these absurd rules changed.