Clean Water Act; Clean Water Action Plan
[Federal Register: March 24, 1998 (Volume 63, Number 56)]
[Notices]
[Page 14109-14112]
From the Federal Register Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]
[DOCID:fr24mr98-67]
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ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY
Department of Agriculture
[FRL-5985-6]
Clean Water Act; Clean Water Action Plan
AGENCY: Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Agriculture.
ACTION: Notice of availability of clean water action plan.
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SUMMARY: In his 1998 State of the Union Address, President Clinton
announced a major new Clean Water Initiative to speed the restoration
of the nation's rivers, lakes, and coastal waters. This new initiative
aims to achieve clean water by strengthening public health protection,
targeting community-based watershed protection efforts at high priority
areas, and providing communities with new resources to control polluted
runoff.
On October 18, 1997, the 25th anniversary of the Clean Water Act,
Vice President Gore directed the Department of Agriculture (USDA) and
the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to work with other Federal
agencies and the public to prepare an aggressive Action Plan to meet
the promise of clean, safe water for all Americans. The Action Plan
forms the core of President Clinton's Clean Water Initiative in which
he proposed $568 million in new resources in his Fiscal Year 1999
budget to carry it out. The Action Plan builds on the solid foundation
of existing clean water programs and proposes new actions to strengthen
efforts to restore and protect water resources.
In implementing the Action Plan, the federal government will:
support locally led partnerships that include a broad array of
watershed partners, including federal and state agencies, tribes,
communities, businesses, and citizens to meet clean water and public
health goals; increase financial and technical assistance to states,
tribes, local governments, farmers, and others; and help states and
tribes restore and sustain the health of aquatic systems on a watershed
basis.
ADDRESSES: The Clean Water Action Plan is available for viewing on the
Internet at
http://www.nhq.nrcs.usda.gov/cleanwater/ or
http://www.epa.gov/cleanwater/.
Copies of the Clean Water Action Plan may be obtained from EPA's
National Center for Environmental Publications and Information, 1-800-
490-9198 (toll free), P.O. Box 42419, Cincinnati, OH 45242; (513) 489-
8695 (fax). Ask for EPA-840-R-98-001. Copies may also be obtained from
Douglas Wilson, USDA-NRCS, Conservation Communications Staff, Room
0054--South Building, P.O. Box 2890, Washington, D.C. 20013-2890, or by
fax at (202) 720-6009.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Ben Ficks, U.S. EPA, Office of
Wetlands, Oceans, and Watersheds, 401 M Street, S.W. (4501F),
Washington, D.C. 20460; fax: 202-260-2529; email
ficks.ben@epamail.epa.gov; or Douglas Wilson, USDA-NRCS Conservation
Communications Staff, Room 0054--South Building P.O. Box 2890,
Washington, D.C. 20013-2890; fax: 202-720-6009.
SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION:
Clean Water Action Plan Overview
I. Clean Water--The Road Ahead
Over the past quarter century, America has made tremendous strides
in cleaning up its rivers, lakes, and coastal waters. In 1972, the
Potomac River was too dirty to swim in, Lake Erie was dying, and the
Cuyahoga River was so polluted it burst into flames. Many rivers and
beaches were little more than open sewers. The improvement in the
health of the nation's waters is a direct result of a concerted effort
to enhance stewardship of natural resources and to implement the
environmental provisions of federal, state, tribal and local laws. In
particular, the Clean Water Act has stopped billions of pounds of
pollution from fouling the nation's water, doubling the number of
waterways safe for fishing and swimming. Today, rivers, lakes, and
coasts are thriving centers of healthy communities.
Despite tremendous progress, 40 percent of the nation's waterways
assessed by states are still unsafe for fishing and swimming. Pollution
from factories and sewage treatment plants, soil erosion, and wetland
losses have been dramatically reduced. But runoff from city streets,
rural areas, and other sources continues to degrade the environment and
puts drinking water at risk. Fish in many waters still contain
dangerous levels of mercury,
[[Page 14110]]
polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and other toxic contaminants.
After 25 years of progress, the nation's clean water program is at
a crossroads. Implementation of the existing programs will not stop
serious new threats to public health, living resources, and the
nation's waterways, particularly from polluted runoff. These programs
lack the strength, resources and framework to finish the job of
restoring rivers, lakes and coastal areas. To fulfill the original goal
of the Clean Water Act--``fishable and swimmable'' water for every
American--the nation must chart a new course to address the pollution
problems of the next generation.
In his 1998 State of the Union Address, President Clinton announced
a major new Clean Water initiative to speed the restoration of the
nation's precious waterways. This new initiative aims to achieve clean
water by strengthening public health protection, targeting community-
based watershed protection efforts at high priority areas, and
providing communities with new resources to control polluted runoff.
On October 18, 1997, the 25th anniversary of the Clean Water Act,
Vice-President Gore directed USDA and EPA to work with other federal
agencies and the public to prepare an aggressive Action Plan to meet
the promise of clean, safe water for all Americans. This Action Plan
forms the core of President Clinton's Clean Water Initiative in which
he proposed $568 million in new resources in his FY 1999 budget to
carry it out. The Action Plan builds on the solid foundation of
existing clean water programs and proposes new action to strengthen
efforts to restore and protect water resources. In implementing the
Action Plan, the federal government will support locally led
partnerships that include a broad array of federal agencies, states,
tribes, communities, businesses, and citizens to meet clean water and
public health goals; increase financial and technical assistance to
states, tribes, local governments, farmers and others; and help states
and tribes restore and sustain the health of aquatic systems on a
watershed basis.
II. Four Tools for Clean Water
Federal, state, tribal, and local governments have many tools they
can use to clean up and protect water resources. Regulation, economic
incentives, technical assistance research, education, and accurate
information all have a role to play in meeting clean water goals. The
Action Plan is built around four key tools to achieve clean water
goals.
A Watershed Approach
The Action Plan envisions a new, collaborative effort by federal,
state, tribal, and local governments; the public; and the private
sector to restore and sustain the health of watersheds in the nation.
The watershed approach is the key to setting priorities and taking
action to clean up rivers, lakes, and coastal waters.
Strong Federal and State Standards
The Action Plan calls for federal, state, and tribal agencies to
revise standards where needed and make existing programs more
effective. Effective standards are key to protecting public health,
preventing polluted runoff, and ensuring accountability.
Natural Resource Stewardship
Most of the land in the nation's watersheds is cropland, pasture,
rangeland, or forests, and most of the water that ends up in rivers,
lakes, and coastal waters falls on these lands first. Clean water
depends on the conservation and stewardship of these natural resources.
The Action Plan calls on federal natural resource and conservation
agencies to apply their collective resources and technical expertise to
state and local watershed restoration and protection.
Informed Citizens and Officials
Clear, accurate, and timely information is the foundation of a
sound and accountable water quality program. Informed citizens and
officials make better decisions about their watersheds. The Action Plan
calls on federal agencies to improve the information available to the
public, governments, and others about the health of their watersheds
and the safety of their beaches, drinking water, and fish.
A. A Watershed Approach--The Key to the Future
The Action Plan proposes a new collaborative effort by state,
tribal, federal, and local governments, the private sector and the
public to restore those watersheds not meeting clean water, natural
resource, and public health goals and to sustain healthy conditions in
other watersheds.
For the past 25 years, most water pollution control efforts relied
on broadly applied national programs that reduced water pollution from
individual sources, such as discharges from sewage treatment plants and
factories, and from polluted runoff. Today, there is growing
recognition that clean water strategies built on this foundation and
tailored to specific watershed conditions are the key to the future.
Why Watersheds?
Clean water is the product of a healthy watershed--a watershed in
which urban, agricultural, rangelands, forest lands, and all other
parts of the landscape are well-managed to prevent pollution. Focusing
on the whole watershed helps strike the best balance among efforts to
control point source pollution and polluted runoff, and protect
drinking water sources and sensitive natural resources such as
wetlands. A watershed focus also helps identify the most cost-effective
pollution control strategies to meet clean water goals.
Working at the watershed level encourages the public to get
involved in efforts to restore and protect their water resources and is
the foundation for building strong clean water partnerships. The
watershed approach is the best way to bring state, tribal, federal, and
local programs together to more effectively and efficiently clean up
and protect waters. It is also the key to greater accountability and
progress toward clean water goals.
Key Elements of the Watershed Approach
The Action Plan proposes a watershed approach built on several key
elements.
1. Unified Watershed Assessments. States, tribes, and other federal
agencies currently set priorities for watershed action in many
different ways. For example, state water quality agencies are
developing lists of impaired water bodies, defining source water
protection areas for drinking water, identifying coastal protection
priorities, and defining priority areas for agricultural assistance
programs. Similarly, federal, state and tribal natural resource
agencies set their priorities for watershed restoration and protection
in various ways to meet their mandates for natural resource
conservation. These processes are designed to meet valid objectives,
but too often opportunities to work together to meet common goals are
overlooked.
The Action Plan creates a strategic opportunity for states and
tribes, in cooperation with federal land and resource managers on
federal lands to take the lead in unifying these various existing
efforts and leveraging scarce resources to advance the pace of progress
toward clean water. As a number of states and tribes have demonstrated,
they can meet existing requirements efficiently and develop more
coordinated and comprehensive priorities on a watershed basis.
Unified watershed assessments are a vehicle to identify: watersheds
that will
[[Page 14111]]
be targeted to receive significant new resources from the President's
FY 1999 budget and beyond to clean up waters that are not meeting water
quality goals; pristine or sensitive watersheds on federal lands where
core federal and state programs can be brought together to prevent
degradation of water quality; and threatened watersheds that need an
extra measure of protection and attention.
2. Watershed Restoration Action Strategies. The Action Plan
encourages states and tribes to work with local communities, the
public, and federal environmental, natural resource, and land
management agencies to develop strategies to restore watersheds that
are not meeting clean water and natural resource goals. Watershed
Restoration Action Strategies will spell out the most important causes
of water pollution and resource degradation, detail the actions that
all parties need to take to solve those problems, and set milestones by
which to measure progress. Funds made available to federal agencies
through the FY 1999 Clean Water and Watershed Restoration Budget
Initiative will be used to help states implement these strategies.
3. Watershed Pollution Prevention. Protecting pristine or sensitive
waters and taking preventive action when clean water is threatened by
new activities in the watershed can be the most cost-effective approach
to meeting clean water goals. The Action Plan encourages states,
tribal, and federal agencies to bring core programs and existing
resources together to support watershed pollution prevention strategies
to keep clean waters clean.
4. Watershed Assistance Grants. Federal agencies will provide small
grants to local organizations that want to take a leadership role in
building local efforts to restore and protect watersheds. These grants
will ensure that local communities and stakeholders can effectively
engage in the process of setting goals and devising solutions to
restore their watersheds.
B. Strong Federal and State Standards
The Action Plan calls on federal, state, and tribal governments to
strengthen existing programs to support an accelerated effort to attack
the nation's remaining water quality problems. Federal, state, and
tribal standards for water quality and polluted runoff are key tools
for protecting public health, preventing polluted runoff, and ensuring
accountability. Some of the specific actions called for in the Action
Plan are identified below.
1. Improve Assurance that Fish and Shellfish are Safe to Eat.
Federal agencies will work with states and tribes to expand programs to
reduce contaminants that can make locally caught fish and shellfish
unsafe to eat, particularly mercury and other persistent, bio-
accumulative toxic pollutants, and to ensure that the public gets clear
notice of fish consumption risks.
2. Ensure Safe Beaches. Federal, state, and local governments will
work to improve the capacity to monitor water quality at beaches,
develop new standards, and use new technologies such as the Internet to
report public health risks to recreational swimmers.
3. Expand Control of Storm Water Runoff. EPA will publish final
Phase II storm water regulations for smaller cities and construction
sites in 1999. EPA will also work with its partners to make sure that
existing storm water control requirements for large urban and
industrial areas are implemented.
4. Improve State and Tribal Enforceable Authorities to Address
Polluted Runoff. Federal agencies will work with states and tribes to
promote the establishment of state and tribal enforceable authorities
to ensure the implementation of polluted runoff controls by the year
2000.
5. Define Nutrient Reduction Goals. EPA will establish by the year
2000 numeric criteria for nutrients (i.e., nitrogen and phosphorus)
that reflect the different types of water bodies (e.g., lakes, rivers,
and estuaries) and different ecoregions of the country and will assist
states and tribes in adopting numeric water quality standards based on
these criteria.
6. Reduce Pollution from Animal Feeding Operations. EPA will
publish and, after public comment, implement an Animal Feeding
Operation Strategy for important and necessary actions on standards and
permits. In addition, by November 1998, EPA and USDA will jointly
develop a broad, unified national strategy to minimize the
environmental and public health impacts of Animal Feeding Operations.
C. Natural Resource Stewardship
Nearly 70 percent of the United States, exclusive of Alaska, is
held in private ownership by millions of individuals. Fifty percent, or
907 million acres, is owned by farmers, ranchers, and their families.
Another 400 million acres are federal lands. Most of the rainfall in
the country falls on these lands before it enters rivers, lakes and
coastal waters. Effective management of these croplands, pastures,
forests, wetlands, rangelands, and other resources is key to keeping
clean water clean and restoring watersheds where water quality is
impaired.
The Action Plan commits all federal natural resource conservation
and environmental agencies to focus their expertise and resources to
support the watershed approach described above. In addition, these
agencies will work with states, tribes, and others to enhance critical
natural resources essential to clean water.
1. Federal Land Stewardship. More than 800 million acres of the
United States, including Alaska, is federal land. These lands contain
an immense diversity and wealth of natural resources, including
significant sources of drinking water and public recreation
opportunities.
By 1999, the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) and USDA will
take the lead in developing a Unified Federal Policy to enhance
watershed management for the protection of water quality and the health
of aquatic systems on federal lands and for federal resource
management. Federal land managers will improve water quality protection
for over 2,000 miles of roads and trails each year through 2005 and
decommission 5,000 miles each year by 2002. Federal land managers will
also accelerate the cleanup rate of watersheds affected by abandoned
mines and will implement an accelerated riparian stewardship program to
improve or restore 25,000 miles of stream corridors by 2005.
2. Protect and Restore Wetlands. The Action Plan sets a goal of
attaining a net increase of 100,000 wetland acres per year by the year
2005. This goal will be achieved by ensuring that existing wetland
programs continue to slow the rate of wetland losses, improving federal
restoration programs, and by expanding incentives to landowners to
restore wetlands.
3. Protect Coastal Waters. Federal agencies, led by the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), will work in partnership
to improve the monitoring of coastal waters, expand research of
emerging problems like Pfiesteria, amend Fishery Management Plans to
address water quality issues, and ensure the implementation of strong
programs to reduce polluted runoff to coastal waters.
4. Provide Incentives for Private Land Stewardship. The Action Plan
relies on a substantial increase in the technical and financial
assistance available to private landowners as the primary means of
accelerating progress toward reducing polluted runoff from
agricultural, range, and forest lands.
USDA, working with federal, state, tribal, and private partners,
will
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establish by 2002 two million miles of conservation buffers to reduce
polluted runoff and protect watersheds, direct new funding for the
Environmental Quality Incentives Program to support watershed
restoration, and develop as many new agreements with states as
practicable to use the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program to
improve watersheds. The Plan also envisions new and innovative methods
to provide incentives for private landowners to implement pollution
prevention plans, including risk management protection for adoption of
new pollution prevention technologies and market recognition for
producers that meet environmental goals.
In addition, DOI will expand its existing Partners for Wildlife
Program, which restores degraded fish and wildlife habitats and
improves water quality through partnerships with landowners. The
program provides technical and financial assistance, and gives priority
to threatened and endangered species.
D. Informed Citizens and Officials
Effective management of water resources requires reliable
information about water quality conditions and new tools to communicate
information to the public. Federal agencies, led by the U.S. Geological
Survey (USGS), will work with states and tribes to improve monitoring
and assessment of water quality, focusing on nutrients and related
pollutants. Federal agencies will also work with states and tribes to
develop and use state-of-the-art systems, such as EPA's Index of
Watershed Indicators on the Internet, to communicate meaningful
information to the public about water quality conditions in their
communities.
III. Clean Water and Watershed Restoration Budget Initiative
To support the new and expanded efforts to restore and protect the
nation's waters as proposed in the Clean Water Action Plan, the
President's FY 1999 budget proposes a Clean Water and Watershed
Restoration Budget Initiative. The funding provided in this budget
initiative will dramatically increase federal financial support for
clean water programs in FY 1999 and beyond. Specifically, the Clean
Water and Watershed Restoration Budget Initiative will: increase direct
support to states and tribes to carry out a watershed approach to clean
water; increase technical and financial assistance to farmers,
ranchers, and foresters to reduce polluted runoff and enhance the
natural resources on their lands; fund watershed assistance programs
and grants to engage local communities and citizens in leadership roles
in restoring their watersheds; accelerate progress in addressing
critical water quality problems on federal lands, including those
related to roads, abandoned mines, riparian areas, and rangelands;
expand and coordinate water quality monitoring programs; and increase
efforts to restore nationally significant watersheds, such as the
Florida Everglades and the San Francisco Bay-Delta.
IV. A Continuing Commitment to Clean Water
The publication of the Action Plan is just the beginning of a long-
term effort. Many of the proposed actions will provide for later public
review and comment and federal agencies are committed to working
closely with states, tribes, and others to ensure successful
implementation of specific actions.
In addition, regular reports will keep the public apprised of
progress and remaining challenges. By the end of the year 2000 and
periodically thereafter, status reports on progress in implementing
watershed restoration plans and related programs will be provided to
the President, the nation's governors, tribal leaders, and the public.
Dated: March 18, 1998.
Robert Perciasepe,
Assistant Administrator, Office of Water, Environmental Protection
Agency.
James R. Lyons,
Under Secretary, Natural Resources and Environment, Department of
Agriculture.
[FR Doc. 98-7641 Filed 3-23-98; 8:45 am]
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