Blueprint for water ‘control’? Pol says EPA made secret maps for new regulatory push

Fox News ^ | August 27, 2014 | Judson Berger

[Twotone]

A top House Republican is charging that the Environmental Protection Agency secretly drafted highly detailed maps of U.S. waterways to set the stage for a controversial plan to expand regulatory power over streams and wetlands, a claim the EPA strongly denies.

Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, released those maps on Wednesday, while firing off a letter to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy voicing concerns over why they were created in the first place.

[madison10]

See Toledo, Ohio for reference.

[C210N]

Perhaps there is some connection to this map that came out awhile ago... an interactive map allows one to pick any stream in the US and find its sources and its descendants.

USGS national waterway map, under foia

[Twotone]

In the past couple of years we’ve been fighting our county commissioners who (being far left democrats) wanted to institute really restrictive rules on riparian areas, including partial year creeks & streams. They would’ve had set-backs from 25 to 75 feet from the high water mark where you couldn’t do anything to your property without a permit. Of course, they were saying these new rules were required by DEQ but they were actually coming down from a higher source. We managed to beat them back by forcing them to acknowledge that they had no scientific basis for such restrictions. They finally settled on a five-year ‘educational’ program, but with a promise the rules could be implemented if improvements aren’t seen.

I didn’t expect to have to spend my retirement years fighting this kind of nonsense, but so it goes...

[Eagles6]

Save

[jmcenanly]

If they did that around here, there would be no place to live.