EPA Downplays Impact Of Rulings Undoing Stays On CWA Standard Delay

摘要

EPA is downplaying the impact of recent court rulings overturning stays of Obama-era rules on environmentalists' challenges to the agency's delay of the 2015 Clean Water Act (CWA) jurisdiction standard, arguing in a new defense of the delay that courts should give the agency broad authority to reconsider and set aside past rules under the water law. In an Oct. 22 brief filed with the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers say a federal judge in South Carolina took too narrow a view of the agencies' legal discretion when he scrapped the delay in a separate case. The agencies jointly crafted the CWA jurisdiction rule in the Obama administration and also wrote the Trump administration rule delaying the standard's "applicability date" to 2020. The brief is available on InsideEPA.com. (Doc. ID: 216210) Democratic states and environmentalist groups suing over the two-year delay say EPA and the Corps failed to consider the environmental impacts of keeping the existing jurisdiction standard in place rather than the 2015 rule that they say would be more protective.