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Last modified
8/11/2009 11:21:58 AM
Creation date
8/10/2009 4:25:22 PM
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UCREFRP
UCREFRP Catalog Number
7913
Author
Freshwater Society.
Title
Water Management in Transition, 1985.
USFW Year
1985.
USFW - Doc Type
Navarre, MN.
Copyright Material
YES
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<br />"You have to bring everyone <br />into the process and. make <br />them partners. The federal <br />government is just not going <br />to provide it all anymore." <br /> <br />"We're all in this together. We <br />are one nation. We must sit <br />down and carve out a <br />regulatory scheme that is <br />driven by a sense of restraint <br />combined with some <br />standards at the federal <br />level. " <br /> <br />18 <br /> <br />. . . and a Loss of Structure <br /> <br />Under the present administration, federal policy-making is nearly at a standstill. <br />James G. Watt, former Interior Secretary, did away with most of the federal and <br />regional planning structures that did exist: the Water Resources Council, which <br />the Carter Administration had attempted to use as a water project review board, <br />and five river basin commissions. <br /> <br />"One of the clear losses is the demise of the Water Resources Council," notes <br />David J. Allee, professor of agricultural economics at Cornell University. "It <br />exercised what you might call the technical ombudsman role. <br /> <br />'1\11 water agencies deal essentially with local problems, And if you have a <br />problem, the business of coordination basically happens there. And it's in the <br />nature of water, which is so ubiquitous and involves so many agencies, that <br />coordination is always the problem. <br /> <br />"So if you have a problem and you're having trouble with the people you are <br />dealing with directly in the agencies, where do you go?What do you do about <br />it?You could go to your congressman, but that often is like trying to kill a gnat <br />with a baseball bat. <br /> <br />"The Water Resources Council provided a way to get to the federal agencies that <br />was legitimate, If there's one thing the folks out there miss, it's the link the Council <br />provided. And nothing has supplanted its role. In the meantime, cooperation <br />among the water agencies has decreased." <br /> <br />Interagency Conflict <br /> <br />Some water laws require cooperation among federal agencies to be <br />implemented, In the realm of water management, however, such agency <br />coordination has an uneven record. <br /> <br />At the beginning ofthis year, for example, EPAand the Army Corps of Engineers <br />disagreed over the Corps' proposed revision of how it should carry out the 1969 <br />National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) concerning wetlands protection, <br />This environmental statute requires anyone receiving federal money to predict <br />the environmental impact of his actions. The required document, which can <br />take years to prepare, is called an environmental impact statement, or EIS. <br /> <br />In March 1984, EPA reviewed and rejected the Corps' proposal, which sought <br />to streamline some of the EIS procedures to simplify the often time-consuming <br />and costly process, EPAargued that the Corps' proposal lacked coherency and <br />specificity, and that it reduced the scope.of the EIS analysis too far. The Corps, <br />rejecting EPA's rejection, ordered that the changes be submitted to the Council <br />of Environmental Quality (CEQ), which manages EIS procedures under NEPA. <br />The White House is presently faced with handling this interagency conflict. <br /> <br />Another example of federal agency conflict involves the Army Corps of Engineers - <br />and the Interior Department's Bureau of Reclamation. The focus of the conflict <br />is cost -sharing, the policy area which sets the governmental boundaries of water <br />project financing: who pays for what and how. <br /> <br />William R. Gianelli, former assistant Army secretary for civil works, attempted <br />to institute a federal cost -sharing policy that would have created uniform ratios <br />between federal and non-federal money sources, He sought, for example, to <br />require state and local governments to pay for at least 35 percent of all irrigation <br />and flood control projects, regardless of whether they were built by the Corps <br />of Engineers or the Bureau of Reclamation. <br /> <br />(Historically, the Corps of Engineers ,has relied on the U.S. Treasury to pay for <br />all its projects, whereas the Bureau of Reclamation, established to "reclaim" the <br />arid lands of 17 Western states, has required repayment -about 85 percent -over <br />long periods at low or no interest.) <br />
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