[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 122 (Wednesday, July 26, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E1518]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                 THE SAN DIEGO COASTAL CORRECTIONS ACT

                                 ______


                         HON. JAMES L. OBERSTAR

                              of minnesota

                    in the house of representatives

                        Wednesday, July 26, 1995
  Mr. OBERSTAR. Mr. Speaker, yesterday the House debated its first 
Corrections Day bill: H.R. 1943, the San Diego Coastal Corrections Act.
  The British poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in ``The Rhyme of the 
Ancient Mariner,'' evoked ``the mystique of the ocean, dark, 
mysterious, heaving and endless.''
  Mysterious and heaving it is; endless it is not.
  H.R. 1943 is assumes that the ocean is endless, that it can absorb 
any amount of pollution. But, just as we are finding that it is not an 
inexhaustible store of fish to be mined with impunity, so we will find 
that it cannot assimilate all man's insults.
  This bill is a fitting first Corrections Day bill. H.R. 1943 amends a 
law which already weakened the Clean Water Act, to weaken it even 
further. It provides a waiver that the city of San Diego has not 
sought, ignoring relief the city has been assured by EPA under last 
year's law, rejecting any discharge standards, permitting the city to 
provide less treatment for its sewage than it is doing now and 
discharging almost raw sewage into the Pacific Ocean.
  The Ocean Pollution Reduction Act of 1994 (P.L. 103-431) last year 
gave San Diego the relief it sought from requirements which every other 
municipality in the country has met or is in the process of meeting.
  EPA is ready to grant the waivers to the Clean Water Act, as required 
under that act.
  The House has already passed this bill as part of H.R. 961, this 
year's amendments to the Clean Water Act.
  Mr. Speaker, the Clean Water Act Amendments of 1977 opened a brief 
window for cities with long outfall pipes discharging into deep ocean 
to continue to do so. San Diego chose not to avail itself of this 
relief at the time. The window has long since closed. Now, Congress is 
asked to reopen that window in a way to let all the flies in.
  The Committee on Public Works and Transportation, now the Committee 
on Transportation and Infrastructure, held hearings on the ocean waiver 
in connection with the 1977 amendments. Some witnesses supported ocean 
discharges as a way of enriching the nutrient-poor depths of the 
Pacific. But they didn't advocate discharging virtually raw sewage, 
with its toxins and pathogens, as this bill would permit.
  The 1977 language in section 301(h), hard-fought-out between both 
sides, contained numerous assurances that water quality standards and 
aquatic life would be protected, and defined primary treatment to mean 
treatment by ``screening, sedimentation, and skimming adequate to 
remove at least 30 percent of BOD and suspended solids.''
  Even those requirements may not apply in this case.
  At the committee markup of H.R. 1943 the Committee on Transportation 
and Infrastructure rejected an amendment that would have imposed at 
least some standards on the discharge.
  Under H.R. 1943, San Diego would be free to discharge almost raw 
sewage. The bill requires chemically enhanced primary treatment only. 
The problem is that there is no definition of ``chemically enhanced 
primary treatment'' in the bill, or in any law. Does this mean that the 
city doesn't even have to run its sewage through a screener? That they 
can just dump a bottle of chlorine into it and call it enhanced primary 
treatment?
  This bill rewards almost two decades of foot-dragging by the city, 
granting San Diego more bounty than it asked for, while your 
constituents and mine have paid, and are paying, the full costs of 
achieving clean water.
  How fittingly ironic it would be if the beaches of San Diego had to 
be closed during the Republican Convention because of pollution--
disease-bearing bacteria, viruses and floatables--washing up on the 
beach.


                          ____________________