What could go wrong?
Via Fox News:
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 letterto EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy voicing concerns over why they were created in the first place.
“These maps show the EPA’s plan: to control a huge amount of private property across the country. Given the astonishing picture they paint, I understand the EPA’s desire to minimize the importance of these maps,” he wrote, in the letter obtained by FoxNews.com.
But an EPA spokeswoman said the maps, from the U.S. Geological Survey and Fish and Wildlife Service, “do not show jurisdictional waters” — in other words, they do not show which waters are subject to EPA control.
Decisions over whether the EPA has authority over “particular waters,” Liz Purchia said, are almost always made in response to requests. She told FoxNews.com the maps in question would have to involve ground surveys to actually reflect the proposed rule, which she called “prohibitively expensive.”
At issue is a proposal that Smith and fellow Republicans, as well as farmers and other groups, say could endanger private property rights by giving the EPA a say over temporary waterways like seasonal streams, under the Clean Water Act. That the agency had highly detailed maps drawn up has raised suspicion about their purpose.
“While the Agency marches forward with a rule that could fundamentally re-define Americans’ private property rights, the EPA kept these maps hidden,” Smith wrote in his letter. “Serious questions remain regarding the EPA’s underlying motivations for creating such highly detailed maps.”
He added: “The EPA’s job is to regulate. The maps must have been created with this purpose in mind.”