Obama Administration Announces a National Clean Water Framework

Water policy continues to be at the forefront of the Obama Administration’s environmental initiatives. In recent months, several federal agencies including U.S. EPA, USDA, DOI, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have taken numerous actions to ensure the availability of clean drinking water and protect water quality. On April 27, 2011, the Administration announced a national clean water framework that combines many of these water initiatives into a single policy statement. The framework sets forth seven broad initiatives that will be pursued by these agencies including:

• The promotion of innovative partnerships (e.g., the Urban Waters Federal Partnership Program);
• Ensuring water quality to protect public health (e.g., new strategy for contaminants in drinking water, use of green infrastructure to upgrade community water and wastewater systems);
• The restoration of important water bodies (initiatives to restore the Great Lakes, Chesapeake Bay, Gulf of Mexico, among other water bodies);
• Innovations for more water-efficient communities (e.g., Executive Order setting federal agency sustainability goals, WaterSMART and WaterSense programs);
• Enhancing the use and enjoyment of the nation’s waters (programs led by USDA and DOI);
• Updating water policies (e.g., proposed guidance regarding the scope of the Clean Water Act, modernization of guidelines for federal investments in water resources); and
• Using science to solve water problems (e.g., understanding emerging pollutants such as pharmaceuticals in wastewater, U.S. EPA’s ongoing study of hydraulic fracturing impacts on drinking water and surface water).   

The second initiative, ensuring water quality to protect public health, involves a new strategy announced by U.S. EPA in 2010 for addressing contaminants in drinking water under the Safe Drinking Water Act. As part of the new strategy U.S. EPA will be addressing contaminants in groups, which represents a departure from the previous approach of conducting a detailed assessment of each contaminant individually. In February 2011, U.S. EPA announced that carcinogenic volatile organic compounds, including trichloroethylene and tetrachloroethylene, would be the first group of contaminants for which regulations will be developed. U.S. EPA indicated it would begin to develop proposed rules in March 2011, and that it would take approximately 2 to 2.5 years for the proposed rules to be developed. Also in February, U.S. EPA announced its intention to develop the first national drinking water standard for perchlorate; a reversal of U.S. EPA’s October 2008 preliminary regulatory determination not to regulate perchlorate as a contaminant.

We also note that the U.S. EPA/DOE study of the impacts of hydraulic fracturing on drinking and surface water was cited in the framework. Hydraulic fracturing is currently exempted from federal underground injection control regulations, although it may be regulated under state laws. Hydraulic fracturing, which involves the high-pressure injection of water and chemicals into deep underground rock formations to stimulate the release of natural gas, has recently attracted attention in the environmental community as concerns have been raised about the potential for injected chemicals to contaminate groundwater aquifers. U.S. EPA has indicated that initial results of the study are expected by the end of 2012, and aims to complete the report in 2014.