Remarks of G. Tracy Mehan, III
Assistant Administrator for Water
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
at AWRA's Water Policy Dialogue
Washington, DC
September 17, 2002
I am pleased to be here today to lead this istinguished panel in a discussion of how best
we can balance environmental protection and current and future water needs. I know I speak for
my fellow panelists when I say that it is a critical issue. EPA Administrator Christie Todd
Whitman has stated publicly many times her belief that water quality and quantity issues will
pose the greatest environmental challenge of the 21st century. How are we going to meet this
challenge in a way that balances the many needs and uses of our limited water resources?
This question becomes even more difficult when we take into account the fact that 97%
of the earth's water is saltwater in oceans and seas. Of the 3% that is freshwater, only 1% is
available for drinking and other uses -- the remaining 2% is frozen in the polar ice caps. There
are many needs that must be met by that small amount of usable water, and the pressure on those
finite resources is growing daily.
Retrospective on Water Quality Improvements
In looking toward the future and what we need to do to achieve balance in meeting water
resource needs, I would like to take a brief look at where we have been in terms of protecting this
nation's waters.
October 18, 2002, will mark the 30th anniversary of the Clean Water Act. Thanks in no
small part to this landmark legislation, we have accomplished a great deal over the past 30 years
in improving water quality in our country.
Earlier versions of the Clean Water Act (e.g., the Water Quality Act of 1965), were
focused on using state programs to achieve water quality standards - - on a water body by water
body basis. But in 1972 the Act was given a major overhaul to require national technology
standards for point source dischargers such as industrial facilities and municipal sewage
treatment plants, a successful approach that would greatly accelerate cleaning up our nation's
waters.
Congress also retained a water quality-based strategy for waters that remained polluted
after the application of technology standards - section 303(d), or the so called Total Maximum
Daily Load (TMDL) Program. This part of the CWA was kept on the back burner for about 20
years while other aspects of the CWA were emphasized, particularly implementation of
minimum levels of treatment for industrial and municipal dischargers.
The 1972 Amendments worked well. The landmark 1972 Clean Water Act set strong
federal standards for controlling municipal and industrial dischargers, and established the
National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit program to ensure that those
standards were put into place by cities and industries.
Municipal sewage treatment plants were also required to upgrade to meet certain levels of
treatment e.g., generally secondary treatment. Loadings from municipalities dropped while
populations continued to grow.
As a result, pollution from industries and municipal sewage treatment plants plummeted.
By any measure - pounds of pollution abated, stream segments improved, fisheries restored -
tremendous load reductions occurred from industries, resulting in significant improvements in
water quality across the nation.
Remaining Challenges
However, as our monitoring techniques improved and we monitored more waterbodies,
the news was not universally good. National water quality monitoring data reported by the states
in the year 2000 shows that approximately 40% of waters assessed by states are not clean enough
to meet basic uses such as fishing or swimming; e.g., they do not meet water quality standards.
The remaining problems impacting water quality are not easily remedied - they come not
just from pipes, but from diffuse sources such as farming and forestry operations, construction
sites, urban streets, automobiles, atmospheric deposition, and even suburban homes and yards.
They are no longer just chemical in nature either. There are biological threats to our nation's
waters that we must address as well if we are to truly achieve the stated goal of the Clean Water
Act to "restore and maintain the chemical, physical and biological integrity of the Nation's waters".
Invasive species, for example, are a real and growing threat to the biological well-being
of our nation's aquatic and terrestrial resources, as well as to the health of our economy. The
approximately 50,000 invasive species in the United States cause major environmental damage
and losses adding up to more than $138 billion per year (Pimentel et al., 1999). Citing a purely
aquatic example, more than 160 invasive aquatic organisms of all types - including plants, fish,
algae and mollusks - have become established in the Great Lakes since the 1800s. The U.S. Fish
& Wildlife Service estimates that the potential economic impacts of just one of these species -
the zebra mussel - will be $5 billion over the next ten years to U.S. and Canadian water users
within the Great Lakes region.
What tools can we use to address these issues?:
The Watershed Approach
The past decade has seen a shift away from source by source pollution controls to what is
now commonly referred to as the watershed approach. EPA has been promoting, and many of
you have been practicing, a "watershed approach" in your work, which encourages a holistic take
on identifying problems and implementing the solutions that are needed to overcome multiple
causes of water quality impairment. Increasingly, states, tribes, watershed groups and others are
recognizing the value of implementing watershed protection approaches, and are using them as
the organizing frameworks for their protection and restoration activities.
The watershed approach enables us to address the problems of greatest concern in a
comprehensive manner and through cooperation with affected stakeholders to maximize our
results with limited resources, and I believe it is the most effective approach for addressing the
complicated water resource problems we face today. The watershed approach also fits well with
the source water protection requirements under the Safe Drinking Water Act. Protecting our
limited and increasingly valuable sources of drinking water by preventing contamination from
occurring in the first place makes good public health sense and good economic sense. For
example, an EPA analysis found that remediating contaminated ground water supplies may be 30
to 40 times more costly than instituting measures that would prevent the contamination from
occurring in the first place.
In addition to the watershed approach, there are several specific tools I would like to
mention that we can bring to bear to address the more complicated water quality problems we are
now facing.
TMDLs ( the proposed Watershed Rule)
One of these tools is the Total Maximum Daily Load, or TMDL, Program. The authors
of the 1972 Clean Water Act created the TMDL Program as a safety net to catch waterbodies that
were not protected or restored under the general pollution control programs of the Clean Water
Act. EPA has been encouraging states to develop and implement TMDLs on a watershed basis.
Our hope is that this approach will greatly increase collaboration and support for the needed
pollutant controls. Increased public involvement will help make sure that TMDLs get translated
from allocations into action. Opening the deliberations to all stakeholders and allowing time for
innovation also will provide additional opportunities to take advantage of other programs,
including Nonpoint Source grants under section 319 of the Clean Water Act, the conservation
provisions of the newly reauthorized Farm Bill, the source water assessment requirements of the
Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), and other Federal, state and local programs. We are looking
forward to states completing their source water assessments under SDWA next year (2003) so
that we can have a clearer picture of the threats to source waters at both the state and national
level.
The TMDL program continues to evolve to meet the challenges of cleaning up our
nation's waters, and several changes to the TMDL program currently are under consideration.
One of the key changes would reinvigorate the states' continuing planning process under Section
303(e) of the CWA. This section of the Act calls for states to have a continuing planning process
which describes how all the pieces of the states' programs, including TMDLs, work together to
achieve water quality goals. A number of states have CPPs and we will be encouraging more
states to update their CPP documents. We also are encouraging that TMDL implementation be
done as part of revitalized state continuing planning processes, where states would use their own
approaches and programs to clean up their waters. We believe that this is good government and
puts implementation where it ought to be - at the state level.
Market-Based Incentives
Times have changed dramatically since the existing regulatory framework was put in
place. Today, we must contend with an extremely competitive world market. Population growth
and development are placing greater demands on the environment, making it more difficult to
maintain environmental standards. These trends will continue. The assimilative capacity of our
environment is limited and the technological and economic limitations of our existing regulatory
framework are at hand.
Maintaining high environmental standards and sustaining a healthy economy require that
we optimize costs and conserve our natural resources. Economic incentives can play an
important role in meeting this challenge. We must take advantage of market forces to provide
incentives for voluntary reductions, emerging technology and greater regulatory flexibility.
Water quality trading, for example, holds great promise as a market-based tool for
addressing water pollution. Trading is an innovative way for water quality agencies and
community stakeholders, including state and local governments, point source dischargers,
contributors to nonpoint source pollution, citizen groups, other federal agencies, and the public at
large, to develop common-sense, cost-effective solutions for water quality problems in their
watersheds. Trading is a tool communities can use to grow and prosper while retaining their
commitment to water quality.
Conclusion
The Watershed Approach, TMDLs, economic incentives such as trading - these tools are
just several examples of innovative mechanisms we can employ, indeed must employ, to manage
and meet current and future water needs while still restoring and protecting the environment. In
EPA's Office of Water, I am also committed to building on our early efforts to more fully
integrate the Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act programs, and to coordinate more
closely with other agencies working under other statutory authorities to maximize our mutual
environmental and public health objectives. I look forward to my fellow panelists' remarks on
this theme, and to the recommendations and ideas from the small discussion groups.
Thank you.
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