Many Pennsylvanians probably don’t know (or care) who Florida’s governor is. Or Alaska’s. Or Louisiana’s.
But governors in those states, and 18 others, are sticking their nose into Pennsylvania’s business. They’re trying to torpedo a multi-state pollution-fighting plan that involves cleaning up the Susquehanna River.
That plan is designed to cut pollution flowing into the Chesapeake Bay. The Susquehanna, the Chesapeake’s largest tributary, dumps huge amounts of sediment, phosphorous and nitrogen into the bay. Together the three pollutants are a big part of why the bay’s fish, shellfish and native plant life struggle to recover to more normal levels, even after 30 years of cleanup efforts.
Cutting the three pollutants means controlling runoff from farms, feedlots, roads, stormwater systems and suburban lawns throughout the entire Chesapeake watershed. The six states in the watershed, including Pennsylvania, have signed onto a pollution control plan toward that end, in cooperation with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
In that plan, developed through give and take with the states, the EPA puts caps on how much of the pollutants the bay can tolerate and sets targets for how much comes from various sources. States then determine exactly what steps are needed to make sure the caps will be met.
In a reaction as discouraging as it was predictable, powerful special interests in the agriculture industry balked.
Fertilizer runoff and animal waste are some of the biggest pollutants that need to be reduced. All that federal-state cooperation could set a precedent for how they might be expected to clean up their pollution in other river watersheds across the country.
Agriculture lobbyists didn’t get their way before the Chesapeake plan was issued, so their groups filed suit to block it.
One of those suing, the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau, says on its website that the “EPA is imposing an incredibly complex and detailed prescription” – a “pollution diet” – that illegally micromanages what states are supposed to be doing.
That “diet doesn’t just tell us to lose weight – it tells us when to eat peas and when to eat carrots,” whines the Farm Bureau.
Those arguments didn’t get very far in court.
Here in Harrisburg, federal judge Sylvia Rambo ruled last fall that the EPA was well within its authority in setting the Chesapeake Bay plan.
Since 1985, the court found, EPA has used elements of the questioned approach in “more than 25,000” cases. The court said the Chesapeake plan reflects commendable cooperation with states, exactly as federal law requires.
But when you’ve got legions of well-paid lawyers, you don’t give up easily.
The agriculture groups are appealing, and they recently got governors of 21 states to sign a legal brief supporting their cause.
Apparently, the governors worry that the big, bad, mean ol’ federal government might press them to do more than just shrug off all that pollution running off their states’ farms and feedlots.
Let those states fight that battle if and when the time comes.
Pennsylvania would not presume to tell Florida how to clean up the Everglades. Pennsylvania would not tell Louisiana what it can and can’t do to keep the chemical industry’s deadly stews out of that coastal state’s bayous. Pennsylvania would not look at those oil pipelines that keep leaking on Alaska’s North Slope and tell Last Frontier regulators what they’re allowed to do.
So, with all due respect to the governors of those fine states who’ve stuck their nose into the agriculture industry’s lawsuit, don’t tell us here in the Chesapeake Bay watershed how we should go about cleaning up our own backyard.