More on EPA Ruling

More on EPA Ruling. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

Yesterday we talked with Washington Congressman Doc Hastings about the end around a congressional group hope to do on the EPA over pesticide buffer zones. On Wednesday the House passed legislation to limit EPA’s ability to issue new or revised water quality standards that supersede those states have already adopted with EPA’s ok. The bill, whose fate is still uncertain in the senate, is one of many measures House Republicans have pushed to reign in a flood of EPA rulemaking. Many Democrats charged the bill would weaken the clean water act, endanger water quality, and harm fishing and tourism…though some supported it. GOP bill manager Rob Bishop of Utah led the charge for the measure.

BISHOP: The growing excesses of the EPA in second guessing the states and retroactively revoking previously granted approvals must stop. The status quo hurts people and it does not help the value or the quantity or the quality of our water.

The White House issued a veto threat against the GOP bill, charging it would weaken the Clean Water Act and could harm public health, the economy and the environment. Bishop called the EPA’s actions a “taking” of private land without compensation—and gave the example of a beet farmer whose land the EPA claimed was wetland.

BISHOP: For Gene, this farm was his heritage. More importantly it was his retirement and it was his legacy for his kids and what one bureaucrat using the broad powers given under the Clean Water Act was able to do is basically impose a takings on this person property without ever compensating him for it.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.