It Is The City That Creates Agriculture, Not The Other Way Around
No doubt, this is a pre-election move. We note that this article in today's Wisconsin State Journal does not occur in the online version. Even an online search at the journal's website does not retrieve it.
13 Sept 2019 Wisconsin State Journal, Clean Water Rules Pulled
'Traverse City, Michigan. The Trump administration on Thursday revoked an Obama-era regulation that shielded many U.S. wetlands and streams from pollution but was opposed by developers and farmers who said it hurt economic development and infringed on property rights.
Environmental groups criticized the administration's action, the latest in a series of moves to roll back environmental protections put into place under President Barack Obama.
The 2015 Waters of the United States rule defined the waterways subject to federal regulation. Scrapping it "puts an end to an egregious power grab, eliminates an ongoing patchwork of clean water regulations and restores a longstanding and familiar framework," Environmental Protection Agency chief Andrew Wheeler said at a news conference in Washington, D.C. Wheeler and R.D. James, assistant secretary of the Army for civil works, signed a document overturning the rule and temporarily restoring an earlier regulatory system that emerged after a 2006 ruling from a sharply divided Supreme Court.
....
Betsy Southerland, who was director of science and technology in EPA's Office of Water during the Obama administration, said revoking its policy would create further regulatory confusion. "This repeal is a victory for land developers, oil and gas drillers and miners who will exploit the ambiguity to dredge and fill small streams and wetlands that were protected from destruction by the 2015 rule because of their critical impact on national water quality," Southerland said.
Sen. John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican and chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, applauded the Trump administration move, saying the Obama rule "would have put backyard ponds, puddles and prairie potholes under Washington's control." '
