Long-Awaited End to WOTUS Arrives

President Trump signed an executive order recently to roll back rules enacted during the Obama administration that expanded the federal government’s jurisdictional scope under the Clean Waters Act.

The effort to enlist the Environmental Protection Agency to fully rescind the Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule and replace it with a new one could take years, however, leaving companies and landowners not only with a lot of uncertainty in the interim but also with an opportunity, said one attorney who specializes in environmental and land-use issues.

The rule, which added rivers, streams and wetlands to the waters protected under the Act, was criticized as being too onerous by those affected, said Paul Beard, counsel in Alston & Bird’s environmental, land use and natural resources practice group.

“In the short term, developers, property owners, farmers, industry groups, even the states, are going to find that there is still some risk of a lack of certainty about what jurisdictional waters are,” he said. “In the longer term, it will prove beneficial to those groups because the rule will be written or revised in ways that makes it more limited. But that is going to be a long slog.”

Reaction among industry groups was swift.

“Farmers and ranchers have been calling for a common-sense approach to regulatory reform, and today the Trump administration responded to that call,” said Zippy Duvall, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation. “Today’s action is as much a beginning as an end, and there is much work to do to ensure that any revised rule is transparent and fair for America’s farmers and ranchers.”

National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) President John Weber said: “We all want clean water, but this regulation was just a big government land grab that would have allowed activists to micromanage all kinds of farming and business activities. We applaud President Trump for taking this action.”

Sources: Wall Street Journal and industry groups