Natural State News

Arkansas' entire congressional delegation wants the Environmental Protection Agency to acknowledge state sovereignty and not repeal the Navigable Waters Protection Rule, a delegation member said in a social media post.

"Instead of repealing popular policies and repeating the mistakes of the Obama administration, the EPA should allow states to regulate waters within their borders," U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton said in a June 24 Facebook post.

Cotton and the other congressional delegation members sent a letter to the EPA to to "adamantly oppose" repeal of the rule, declaring it would "harm businesses, foresters, and farmers across the State of Arkansas," according to a release from Cotton.

The rule "preserves our waterways while giving producers and landowners the clarity they need to farm and build without burdensome regulations and government overreach. It is our position that states and localities should regulate waters within their borders—not the federal government," the letter said. "The Trump administration championed cooperative federalism with regard to the environment, and the current administration should continue this practice going forward."

The letter also said the Waters of the Unites States, the previous rule promulgated during the Obama administration, "was a vast and vague expansion of federal regulation that placed significant hardships on Arkansans" and encroached on local authority.

"Arkansans are good stewards of the land and should make their own decisions about their own property—as they have for generations—without the EPA looking over their shoulders," the letter said.

Other signatories were the rest of the state’s delegation, Republican U.S. Sen. John Boozman and Republican U.S. Reps. Eric "Rick" Crawford, French Hill, Steve Womack and Bruce Westerman.

The current rule redefined the federal government’s Clean Water Act to streamline what the act means by "waters of the United States" and how it applies to "navigable waters." The EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers published the current "final" Navigable Waters Protection Rule to define "Waters of the United States" in the Federal Register in April of last year.

The Obama-era rule caused "decades of litigation, regulatory reversals, and divergent judicial interpretation," the American Bar Association said in a blog published the following month.  

"In addition to defining what is a water of the United States, the Navigable Waters Protection Rule clarifies what is not a water of the United States," the bar association's blog said. "Critically, the rule provides that groundwater is not a water of the United States and that groundwater connections are an insufficient basis upon which to assert CWA jurisdiction. The rule also explicitly excludes ephemeral features that flow only in direct response to precipitation, diffuse stormwater runoff, ditches, prior converted cropland, artificially irrigated waters, artificial lakes, water-filled depressions constructed or excavated incidental to mining or construction activity, and water-filled pits excavated for the purpose of obtaining fill, sand, or gravel."