[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 23 (Monday, March 7, 1994)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: March 7, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                     THE WATER QUALITY ACT OF 1994

                                 ______


                         HON. NORMAN Y. MINETA

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                         Monday, March 7, 1994

  Mr. MINETA. Mr. Speaker, today my colleague Sherry Boehlert, the 
ranking Republican on the subcommittee, and I are introducing the Water 
Quality Act of 1994.
  A lot of work by a lot of people has gone into the writing of this 
bill. The bill reauthorizes, and substantially rewrites, the Federal 
Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972, also known as the Clean 
Water Act, an enormously important and complex piece of legislation .
  This is one of the bills President Clinton highlighted as must-pass 
legislation for 1994 in his State of the Union Address just a few weeks 
ago.
  Water pollution is one of the most important issues in American life. 
It determines a large part of our quality of life, our health and well-
being, our supply of drinking water, the kinds of recreational 
opportunities we have, a significant part of our food supply, where we 
can locate new businesses, whether we can accommodate growth, and what 
kind of a world our children will inherit from us.
  Ninety-seven percent of all water on our planet is saline, and 2 
percent is frozen. We depend on that last 1 percent to sustain all 
human life and economic activity on Earth. And that amount of fresh 
water available to us has not changed in the entire history of human 
beings on Earth. World population is 10 times today what it was 300 
years ago, and we are now doubling the population every 40 years. Yet 
we have no more fresh water on this planet than we had when our 
ancestors still lived in caves.
  The task of sustaining more and more of us, and at a higher and 
higher standard of living, on an unchanged amount of fresh water, is 
more and more of a challenge, and requires more and more effort on our 
part. There are more of us, creating more pollution at the same time we 
need more unpolluted water than ever before. And there is no substitute 
for water; there is no alternative to water.
  This is a challenge which is central to our lives and to the lives of 
our children. In the United States our attempt to meet this challenge 
has centered on the Clean Water Act, which regulates the pollution of 
our Nation's waters so that we can all continue to be sustained by the 
water available to us. That act has been in place for over 20 years, 
and it has accomplished a great deal.
  Lake Erie, which was once declared dead, today supports a thriving 
recreational fishing industry. There is no longer the fear of the 
Cuyahoga River catching fire. And in virtually any weather, people can 
be seen fishing in the Potomac River within a few miles of the Capitol, 
something that 25 years ago would have been unthinkable and foolhardy.
  But despite these success, the water quality goals we set for 
ourselves in 1972 have not been reached.
  Our efforts in the early years of the act focused on the worst 
problems of that time--point source pollution from factories and 
cities. And substantial progress has been made in two decades on the 
problems of point source pollution. But as a result, the nature of the 
pollution threat we face has changed. The Environmental Protection 
Agency's most recent report to Congress tells us that the largest 
single category of pollution into our Nation's waters is now nonpoint 
source pollution: the runoff which enters our waters following a 
rainstorm and brings with it pollution from our farmlands, forestry 
areas, urbanized areas, and so on.
  We have done relatively little so far to deal with this type of 
pollution. While additional pollution reduction can be achieved from 
point sources, it is increasingly difficult and expensive to get 
substantial reductions in this area, since we have already removed most 
of the pollutants from the point sources. The fact is that if we are 
ever to reach our 1972 goals of fishable and swimmable water throughout 
our country, nonpoint source pollution must be addressed--and 
successfully.
  The bill being introduced today has two central goals: to further 
reduce water pollution in this country, and to do it in a way which 
imposes the least possible burdens consistent with getting the job 
done. And we cannot accomplish both these goals without addressing 
nonpoint pollution, since this is the area where the most pollution 
reduction, at the least cost, can be achieved.
  Our bill would require the States to have their own nonpoint source 
pollution plans, which they could tailor to fit their own needs and 
priorities, but which would have to be sufficient to enable us to meet 
water quality standards in our streams, rivers, and lakes. The States 
would be required to make these plans legally enforceable like other 
State laws or regulations. We would also substantially increase the 
funding available to States to help them do nonpoint pollution work, 
more than doubling the funding levels over the life of the 
authorization. We would also clarify that the nonpoint plans and 
programs were intended to cover both rural and urban watershed runoff 
problems.
  Closely related to nonpoint pollution control is watershed planning. 
In many areas State and local governments lack the flexibility to 
achieve needed pollution reductions in the most cost-effective way, 
because they often cannot balance pollution reductions from one source 
against pollution reductions from another source. Watershed planning is 
designed to give them the tools they now lack. First of all, States 
would not be required to designate watersheds, but they would be 
authorized to do so where they believed it would be helpful. Second, 
once the watershed were designated, all point-source permits within 
that watershed, as well as the nonpoint source and watershed planning 
cycles in that watershed, would be made to coincide on the same 5-year 
intervals. In this way, the State would be able to make trade-offs 
between point sources, and between point and nonpoint sources, in order 
to achieve water quality standards in the watershed in the most 
efficient, least burdensome way. And third, we intend to provide a 
mechanism by which the various sources of pollution within a watershed 
could transfer between themselves some or all of the pollution they are 
allowed to discharge, so long as such transfers would be consistent 
with our water quality objectives throughout the watershed. We have not 
included this mechanism in the introduced bill, because we are still 
working on it to assure that it does what needs to be done. We expect 
to add this provision to the bill during markup.

  Many of the features of the 1972 act affect municipalities as the 
operators of sewage treatment works. The cost of cleaning up municipal 
sewage discharges through improved and expanded treatment has been and 
will continue to be very great. Despite all the expenditures of the 
past two decades, EPA recently estimated total water pollution control 
needs at the local level to be in excess of $137 billion. The cost of 
doing that work has always been primarily a local responsibility, but 
the Federal Government has in past years been a significant contributor 
of the funding to do this federally required work. In the late 1970's 
the annual funding to this effort peaked at about $7 billion per year; 
it has been in decline ever since. The Reagan and Bush administrations 
cut this funding back to $2 billion per year, as well as converting it 
from a grant program to a loan program.
  The Clinton administration came in on a wave of promises about 
increased environmental cleanup and increased infrastructure 
investment, but this key program has seen neither. The already slashed 
Reagan-Bush funding levels were further cut to $1.2 billion in fiscal 
year 1994. The administration recently proposed a level of $1.6 billion 
per year in fiscal year of 1995 and they propose phasing the program 
out entirely after the late 1990's. The reasoning given for the phase 
out is that by the late 1990's the loan funds in each of the States--
State revolving funds--would be sufficiently capitalized to go on 
thereafter making loans at the $2 billion per year rate.
  However, the reality here is that a $2 billion per year program will 
never make a dent in needs which are $137 billion and constantly 
growing. The fact is that the Federal Government has been reduced to 
being a very minor contributor to the solution to this very large 
pollution problem, and it is trying to become a noncontributor.
  That is not right.
  The Federal Government interest and role in cleaning up water 
pollution, which flows back and forth across State boundaries, is 
sufficient for the Federal Government to play a very substantial 
regulatory role through the Clean Water Act. And the Federal Government 
interest and role is sufficient for the Federal Government to 
contribute a meaningful part of the municipal costs of that cleanup.
  Our bill therefore proposes a substantial increase in the Federal 
Government's contributions to the capitalization of the State revolving 
funds: to $3 billion in fiscal year 1995 and an increase of a half a 
billion dollars per year thereafter.
  We would also allow State and local governments increased flexibility 
in utilizing the limited SRF dollars available to them. In particular, 
we would remove the existing 20 percent restriction on the use of SRF 
loans for combined sewer overflows and collector sewers. It makes no 
sense to tell a community whose greatest pollution problem is CSO's 
that it will be most restricted in the use of SRF money if it attempts 
to deal with its greatest problem.
  Another flexibility feature which is perhaps one of the most 
important provisions of the bill is the new hardship communities 
provision.
  At present, the SRF loan program works very well and gets multiple 
uses out of each Federal dollar contributed to the SRF's. However, the 
limitation of this approach has been that the communities with the 
greatest needs relative to their economic capability are precisely 
those communities least likely to be able to repay an SRF loan and 
therefore do not get the loan in the first place. This has denied SRF 
support to some of the communities which most need it.
  We can preserve the benefits of the SRF mechanism while solving its 
limitations by giving the SRF special features which apply to hardship 
communities, and that is exactly what the bill would do. The bill 
provides that when a community's wastewater treatment costs exceed 1.25 
percent of median family income in that community, special hardship 
features of the SRF come into play. These features are that the maximum 
allowed term of the loan would be extended from 20 to 30 years, and 
that interest rates, which now cannot be less than zero, would be 
allowed to be negative. The States would have the flexibility to use 
any combination of longer terms and lower rates necessary to get the 
cost burden as low as 1.25 percent of median family income.
  While in some cases the beneficiaries of this hardship community 
provision might be large communities with unusually high costs to meet 
water quality goals, in most cases the beneficiaries will be smaller 
communities, for which the costs of compliance are often 
disproportionately high because the economies of scale work against 
them. This provision should be a significant help in bringing many 
smaller communities into compliance with water quality requirements.
  Another provision designed to make the SRF work better--despite its 
limited resources--at meeting the water pollution needs all across our 
country would be to revise the allocation formula to better reflect 
current needs. The current formula is based on needs assessments and 
population data from the mid and late 1970's and no longer reflects the 
needs we know of today. We are still at work on that revised allocation 
formula, and so it is not included in the bill as introduced. However, 
we expect to add a new allocation formula to the bill in the near 
future.
  Another issue with respect to getting the greatest possible benefits 
out of the SRF program is the encouragement of treatment technologies 
and designs which are more efficient and less costly. Our review of 
this issue showed that the greatest problem facing particularly smaller 
communities considering innovative or alternative technologies was lack 
of knowledge and certainty that these alternatives would meet pollution 
reduction requirements. The bill therefore would require EPA to publish 
a report, and update it annually, on innovative and alternative 
technologies. This should serve as a central clearinghouse for 
information about these technologies and about their performance where 
they have been constructed.
  In recent years there has been a tendency to make site-specific 
funding available in a few chosen locations, while leaving the basic 
program to wither away. In some cases these site-specific actions were 
justified on the grounds that the basic program was not well-designed 
to accomplish that particular project. For example, for many CSO 
projects, often a key part of estuary cleanup and urban watershed 
problems, a key problem was the 20 percent limitation on the use of 
SRF's for CSO work. We are removing that limitation. Similarly, 
communities with very high treatment costs argued that the SRF loan 
program imposed unduly high cost burdenson their citizens. The hardship 
community provisions in this bill are designed to address that problem.
  In short, our approach has been to solve the problems which have 
inclined some communities to seek funding separate from the program. We 
want the program itself to be the vehicle for addressing water 
pollution problems, and we want the program to be reinvigorated and 
expanded. Therefore, we are ending in this bill the practice of making 
site-specific funding for projects. This is being accomplished through 
a phaseout of existing funding for projects. The fiscal year 1994 
appropriations bill has already appropriated $500 million, subject to 
the designation of the locations by this bill. We make those 
designations in this bill, and we have done so on the basis of funding 
the kinds of projects which have been getting funding in the past few 
years and which were therefore relying on it. However, as a general 
rule we will expect these projects in the future to participate in the 
basic SRF program and not to receive separate site-specific funding.
  Projects receiving the fiscal year 1994 funding are, first, the 
coastal communities group, which are cities which face very high 
secondary treatment costs because they deferred secondary treatment 
while pursuing the secondary waiver option, ultimately did not obtain 
that waiver, and have not committed through consent agreements or 
similar means to achieve secondary treatment under relatively demanding 
schedules. Second, the Rough River Project in Michigan, which is 
primarily a CSO project and which has received separate funding in each 
of the past few years. And third is the establishment of a fund to help 
deal with the very serious problems of the Colonias.
  One of the most important benefits of this bill, both to communities 
and to the environment, is in the flexibility the bill would create 
with respect to CSO's and stormwater. The administration estimates the 
cost savings of these two provisions at about $30 billion, yet neither 
would diminish our water quality goals.
  Existing law will require stormwater drains in many instances to be 
dealt with through very expensive treatment systems designed to achieve 
numeric standards. However, it is not clear whether that degree of 
burden will prove necessary to deal with stormwater pollution, and the 
likelihood is for greater conflict than cleanup. This bill therefore 
requires larger communities to move ahead with management practices, 
rather than treatment facilities, to deal with stormwater pollution, 
and assures that the stormwater problems of smaller communities will be 
dealt with through the nonpoint source program. It would then be 
determined whether those measures were in fact sufficient to achieve 
water quality standards, and if so, treatment facilities would not be 
required.
  Similarly, CSO needs facing some cities are enormous, EPA has 
identified needs of over $41 billion. Yet questions of how much storage 
capacity will really be needed to meet water quality objectives are 
often hotly debated. Consistent with EPA's new CSO policy, we would 
allow cities to move ahead with the portion of the work is clearly 
necessary, and then judge whether additional work is required to meet 
water quality.
  An issue which has been of particular interest is the issue of 
chlorine. The administration recently proposed an in-house study of 
chlorine and the advisability of restricting or banning its use, and 
also proposed a broader National Academy of Sciences study. While the 
first of those two studies has been quite controversial, it does not 
require any legislative action and we have included none in this bill. 
We have authorized the NAS study, which would take a broader look at 
many different kinds of chemicals which may have certain specific 
health effects.
  The bill contains a number of other important features, among them a 
general strengthening of enforcement of water pollution laws, changes 
in EPA's process for dealing with toxics to make that process less 
cumbersome, creation of pollution prevention plans at larger companies, 
and greater scrutiny of water pollution emanating from Federal 
facilities.
  One issue the bill does not deal with at this point is wetlands. We 
are still considering how best to approach that issue.
  Mr. Speaker, in sum, this bill will further reduce pollution and will 
accomplish that in a way that involves the least possible additional 
burden. While a great deal of work remains to be done, this bill is a 
major step forward.
  We will not be holding any additional hearings, since the Water 
Resources and Environment Subcommittee held extensive hearings over the 
past 3 years. We will, however, allow a period of 2 weeks for written 
comment. So as not to lose momentum, I specifically request that any 
comments be submitted in writing to the Water Resources and Environment 
Subcommittee within 2 weeks.

                          ____________________