The EPA was started in the early 1970's by none other than Richard Nixon. It was the days that we all can remember the "Give a hoot, don't pollute" and of course the Indian paddling through a trash filled lake and the moving ending of the close up of the tear on his cheek. I remember those commercials CLEARLY and they moved me, even as a little kid. I was a conservationist before anyone was talking about it. I picked up trash, collected aluminum cans and turned OFF the water while I was brushing my teeth. We never did a half load of laundry and dear God knows how many times we reused a zip lock bag (considered precious) or a piece of tin foil. We turned lights off in rooms that we weren't using or it came out of our allowance. I still do all of these things today.
The EPA has its fingers in almost everybody's pie. Take for example the lead based paint measures that must be taken when you remodel a house built before 1978. If you are hiring a contractor he must go to extreme measures to make sure no particles become airborne if he disturbs more than 6 square feet of anything. These extreme measures can add hundreds of dollars to the expense of a very small job but will lead to thousands and thousands on a larger job. Do you have thousands of dollars extra to spend? But if you are an owner-builder or a do-it-yourself person you don't need to comply -- you can tear up as much as you want! If it is truly THAT dangerous why wouldn't everyone have to do it? The irony of this sort of mandate is that it will drive jobs like this underground -- where there will be no permits and no controls. Remember back alley abortions -- they happened anyway.
Today's EPA is an organization that has run amok. It has its fingers in literally everything we do because everything we do has some perceived impact, directly or indirectly on the environment. I am going to give you a couple of examples of what the EPA is up to and how it affects us locally. But when I am done, make sure understand that I am talking about a FEDERAL mandate so it will affect you too.
First I will note that the EPA is now a cabinet level-organization. In its requirements for changes in the law it must submit those changes to Congress. There is no language that requires Congress to APPROVE anything! So all they do is say "This is what we are going to do" and they can do it. NO checks and balances. This is the beginning of "amok".
The EPA manages how towns, municipalities and states deal with storm water runoff -- among MANY other things -- but we will narrow our focus on just this for now. In many eastern cities the storm runoff enters the sewer system and then becomes a part of the sewer treatment process. If that is the case I understand a strict set of management rules around it. In the west and the mid-west that is almost NEVER the case. Storm runoff is distinctly separate from anything other than storm runoff. The two systems have nothing, no pipes, no controls, nothing in common. In fact the local laws around development require that they be kept separate.
The EPA also issues permits for municipalities, counties and states and has the right to audit all the past projects of those entities and make decisions about whether or not they were done properly, an entity that performs badly on an audit risks losing its permit or will not be renewed. Without that permit the entity cannot issue citizens any permits to build anything.
So now the EPA wants to mandate that all run off from a storm in every state in the nation handle that run off as if it were water pollution. So they are now saying that water is a pollutant to water. Not only do they want this moving forward but they want to require that all developments be retro fitted to comply with these new standards. Our county engineers did a study on a single, medium-sized commercial development in Highlands Ranch, Colorado. It was a small strip shopping center with a Safeway as the anchor store. The retrofit on that development alone would cost $1.2 million dollars and that does not include the purchase of the land that the newly constructed retention pond would have to be on. What commercial land owner has that kind of money? If the Horse Park had to retrofit for all if its barns and arenas we would close the doors. The EPA wants this to apply now to everyone -- residential and commercial in EVERY state whether your land sits inside a city limit or is in the middle of nowhere. So now if you build a home on a city lot or on 40 acres or 640 acres in Huerfano (BFE) County you must have a storm water mitigation plan. This entails building a retention pond and making sure that all run off from every roof, driveway or impermeable surface of ANY kind goes into that pond. Keeping the water that comes off your structure IN the pond and only releasing it back onto the ground at historic flow rates (this means in Colorado very slowly). So now you have to dedicate land for nothing other than a storm event. What happens if you don't have that much land to set aside for this pond? Tough doo-doo, you can't develop. The city lot won't be large enough anyway -- where would your pond go?
The cost for all of this pond building and retro fitting lands squarely on the shoulders of the land owner or the developer. Any of the economic recovery we have seen (if there has been any) will stop cold. Oh and there are already requirements for "pond owners" to control mosquitoes -- so now you have yet another thing to manage. The EPA makes suggestions about now using that pond for irrigation. What they don't realize is that in the state of Colorado it is against state law to trap rain water and put it to use (dumb, I know -- but true). The state wants all water to return to the aquifer. The other thought that comes to me is this, I am trapping the water because it is now considered pollution. If that water in the pond is considered "pollution" why would you allow me to now water my grass with it?
Another amazingly costly mandate concerns road building. The EPA is now asking that anytime a road is being re-surfaced and a mile or more of the surface is removed for the laying of new asphalt that the road be considered NEW development. The road is not changing at all. The road bed and the grading and subsurface are still totally intact. The path of the road is not changing. The difference between new development and redevelopment is HUGE where the EPA is concerned. This would require new EISs (environmental impact studies) to be done for all resurfacing projects. All the engineering to be redone and every hoop that is out there to be jumped through again. So not only does this add amazing expense to road building it stalls the process mercilessly. I don't know about your state but here in Colorado we have a narrow window in the seasons for road building. If we thought the roads were bad now…just wait, they'll get worse!
So the EPA is mandating from Washington requirements for states that have nothing in COMMON with Washington to change the way they do business. The EPA is taking away a state's right to manage itself and is passing laws at the federal level that don't take the unique physical, legal and environmental factors OF a particular state into account.
I had a long meeting with one of our county engineers. Our county is going to lead the charge against the EPA. We are going to demand that when the EPA goes before Congress that they MUST get Congressional approval. Our county had experienced unparallel growth in the last decade -- most occurring in the first part of the last decade. In 2007 it was ranked in the top ten of the fastest growing counties in the nation. Over that decade our water quality has steadily increased. Despite the growth the local ground water and the stream water has gotten better; in fact it is outstanding. This is because the county cares about itself. It is one of the reasons people choose to live here. The EPA doesn't care that the practices already in place exceed the goals and standards of most of the nation. Whatever the county is doing now WORKS. Who knows if the new EPA standards will positively or negatively affect the stellar record of Douglas County? This sort of blanket law very likely will have negative unintended consequences. They obviously haven't tested them in environments like ours -- heck they don't even know our state's laws around water and water use. I guess it won't matter though -- no one will be able to afford to build. Thank you EPA for cutting our throats yet again.
What I don't get is, why? In this case I know that the EPA does not care about the record of water quality. In the case of Douglas County they have not even looked at it. I know in Colorado, Douglas County is not the only one doing things well -- the state as a whole is doing this very well. We think that the EPA is motivated by environmental concerns and protecting it. We all know it requires balance to do so. We must allow growth and economic recovery and attempt to mitigate negative impacts on the environment. But we know we can't eliminate them altogether and be a society of civilized people. Flush toilets are far better than outhouses for ground water and public health. If the EPA continues its control and mandates -- who is going to be able to build anything? The EPA has being running so far and so fast without any sort of checks and balances that they have both lost sight and lost perspective. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Other than having "power", extreme power, I am not sure what the EPA gets out of all of this. But we see tyrannical dictators all through history acting in bizarre ways -- the EPA at this point is no different.
These are just a few of the things that will be directly affected by new EPA standards. It is by NO MEANS and exhaustive list.
Protect the environment YES but we must stop the EPA.
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