How Obama’s EPA Is Trying To Regulate Your Creek Beds And Ditches

Have you ever seen some water runoff in your yard during a hard rain and attempted to put a boat in it for an afternoon cruise?

I didn’t think so. Such a thing is almost as ridiculous as the continued actions by the Obama Administration, and such runoff isn’t far from the type of “water” it is trying to put under the EPA’s control. Earlier this year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (CoE) proposed a new regulation under the Clean Water Act (CWA) that would sweep in, as “waters of the U.S.,” millions of new miles of rivers and streams and, more alarming, areas of land that are dry most of the year and aren’t near a body of water.

The 86-page proposed rule, appended with almost 400 more pages of “data,” would put under the EPA and CoE’s jurisdictional thumbs such “waters” as a drainage ditch in Maricopa County, Arizona that carried water five times from 1993 to 2000 in 182 rain events for a total elapsed time of flow of 7.5 hours. A park ditch in Pinellas County, Florida, of the type in which you may see teenagers skateboarding, would cost taxpayers there over $31 million just to maintain for hypothetical “fishable, swimmable” uses under the proposed rule.

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