Senate Committee's WOTUS Report Released

Earlier this week the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee released their report detailing the EPA's ongoing efforts to implement and enforce their concepts for Waters of the U.S. or WOTUS despite the court's stay on WOTUS. National Cattlemen's Beef Association Environmental Counsel Scott Yager says

Yager: "Really what is important in this report is that it shows that the agencies are implementing and enforcing the WOTUS rule — despite the court's stay that is happening right now in the courts. So, if you look in the report there are case studies and a lot of them are focused on agricultural issues. For example there is a farmer in California who use to graze cattle on his land and then he changed that over to winter wheat and he started plowing that land. The Army Corp of Engineers said, 'Well you can't do that without a permit.' Remember that the Clean Water Act has ag exemptions for just that sort of thing. But the agencies in a clever interpretation they said, 'Actually you are not plowing your land, you are creating small mountain ranges by discing that land.' That is just incredible — number one and number two it completely erodes the agricultural exemptions in the Clean Water Act. So this report really shows that a lot of this stuff is really happening out there already. It is very troubling and we hope that it will help kick start the Senate into passing some sort of compromise to fix these issues."