At his annual town meeting in Chestertown on Monday, Congressman Andy Harris (R-MD1) said environmental regulations were killing job growth, especially in the agricultural community of the Eastern Shore. He said he currently supports parts of a bill moving through the House that would limit EPA regulation of the Clean Water Act to “navigable waters” and steer the EPA away from regulating agriculture, which he said serves as the Shore’s biggest job creator.
“The Clean Water Act originally applied to navigable waters,” Harris said. “To me the common sense meaning of ‘navigable waters’ is I can put a boat in it and I can navigate it.”
The EPA has attempted to expand the definition of navigable waters since 2011 to include geological formations that eventually drain into tributaries and wetlands–under fierce opposition from Republican leaders in the House who say the Obama administration is avoiding the rule-making process by expanding EPA authority without congressional approval.
“The [EPA expansion] is any geologic formation that carries water for one day a year,” Harris said to a packed audience at the Kent Public Library. “So basically…if a farmer’s drainage ditch has water in it one day a year, it is now subject to the same means of regulation as the Mississippi River. That is a huge expansion of regulatory authority, because everybody’s back yard has water it in one day a year.”
He said in his conversations with job creators, “the regulatory environment in Washington is one of the main reasons why they find it difficult to create jobs,” He said. “The economy has to be our number one consideration.”
Harris said the economy needs to be “humming along” to produce the “spinoff revenue” to implement extension of the CWA and that businesses must first be able to absorb the costs of the new regulations. He left the door open to revisit the issue of expanding CWA regulations in five or ten years when the economy has recovered.
“Without an economy that is working, I just don’t think it works,” he said. “Extending the definition of the CWA to include [other than navigable waters] is going to impair job formation right now.”
Chester River Association Policy Specialist Isabel Junking took exception with Harris on the issue job creation and said the cost of “dirty water” in Kent County could be an impediment to job growth and a detriment to a local economy that depends on clean water. She told Harris that Congress needed strong leadership to help implement Water Implementation Plans that are currently being devised in Maryland to reduce nutrient pollution into the Bay.
She asked for Harris’s support.
Harris answered Junkin’s in typical fashion, with another question.
“You have to tell me acutely how we’re going to pay for it, and whether it is worth borrowing a dollar from China to pay for it?” he asked. He said he was against borrowing money from China that will have to be repaid by our children and grandchildren.
The video exchange is about four minutes.
Lainey Harrison says
Dirty water equals sick seafood. So much for supporting the seafood industry.
joe diamond says
Did not the Army Corp of Engineers attempt exactly this sort of thing years ago?
Now comes the EPA with the same need to expand their domain. In both cases they did not seem to understand that water moves through the earth in a cycle. It exists as a liquid for a time, evaporates and goes elsewhere in a dynamic system. They seem to ignore the concept that bodies of water also move, exist and vanish. It is this fixation on assigning blame and penalties that pisses off people who would be willing helpers if they did not feel intimidated. If they would become a resource and demonstrate good science they would get better results.
Joe
DLaMotte says
Please leave your bubble, Mr. Harris. I still find it absolutely scary that people voted for this man.
Keith Thompson says
Well neither major party candidate for the Eastern Shore Congressional seat in the 2012 election actually lives on the Eastern Shore. What does that tell you about the Eastern Shore’s political standing in the state of Maryland?
Michael Hildebrand says
Please elect a democrat or a republican to office. China will appreciate it!
Charlie says
I don’t understand where you are going with this thought.
Tom Zolper says
It’s an unfortunate the Spy devoted 95 percent of the article to Mr. Harris’ view of this very important issue, and 5 percent to Ms. Junkin’s. Perhaps Spy could follow up with a Q&A format or something to provide better balance. In the meantime, let me say that this idea that environmental initiatives kill jobs has been debunked repeatedly in study after study. Look back over time and you’ll see the scary predictions don’t come true. Critics of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments said the tighter pollution limits would mean “a quiet death for business across the country.” In fact, the amendment produced a benefit-to-investment ratio of more than 40 to 1, including over $70 billion in human health benefits annually. In Maryland, Constellation Energy and other power companies said the state’s 2006 Healthy Air Act would foce the closure of power plants, cause layoffs, and cripple the reliability of the regihn’s electric system. Today, Constellation’s own executives have been quoted saying the Act not only caused no layoffs, but actually increased employment. And of course there were no power outages, etc. connected to the Act. I could go on and on, with examples in the agricultural industry and elsewhere. Good journalism shouldn’t be a mouthpiece for public officials. Carl Berstein once said good journalism gives as close an approximation of truth as is possible.
Steve Payne says
This reminds me of the “Farm Dust” Bill. They take a non issue and use it to gut existing laws. What he is talking about is removing existing law and it goes far beyond “Navigable Waters”. It proposes taking away federal jurisdiction over Wetlands with few exceptions and even makes it illegal for any federal employee to enter upon a property where wetlands exist. It orders the EPA to ignore a Supreme Court Case. Check out the title of this bill.
Here’s the House Bill they proposed:
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/112/hr4304/text
S Pennington says
If you’re a Democrat and you don’t like Harris (from Baltimore County if memory serves), you have only your own party to blame for the boundaries of the 1st CD. It’s a gerry-mandered nightmare designed to pack as many Republicans on the western shore into Gov. Schaefer’s “cesspool” in order to make safe districts for Democrats. That map, if you haven’t been reading the news, was drawn by Democrats.
Democrat or Republican, I’d prefer a representative from the Eastern Shore.
What I’d prefer most would be a 51st state from the Susquehanna and the Bay east to the Delaware state line, but I don’t think enough people are ready for that.
Ron Pagano JD says
Andy Harris says that farming is the biggest revenue producer on the ES…the problem is that farming is not the future JOB CREATOR on the ES! Andy, as usual, is stuck in a past, where there was no protection for ANYTHING, let alone our water and air! He has already voted to withdraw all funding for the EPA! If it was up to Andy, he would love to dispose of the EPA altogether, along with OSHA, Depts of Labor and Education, Energy, the FDA…let’s face it, ANYTHING that protects us from the greed of corporations who have shown us, through past actions, that they cannot be trusted to ensure the public’s protection (As State Senator and now Congressman, Harris has had an environmental rating of “9”…not out of “10”…but, out of “100”!!!!) Our children and grandchildren deserve better!
His question of “How do we pay for it?” is ludicrous and meant to distract us from the real question: Why are people like Romney allowed to invest $100s of millions of dollars in offshore accounts, while paying an average tax of 13% on millions in income? Legal? Probably? Patriotic? ABSOLUTELY NOT! We balanced the budget (and created a surplus) in the ’90s, with huge growth in the economy and jobs. When did that end? With Bush and his vendetta against Saddam. The top 2% need to pay a fair share…13% is NOT fair…they use the highways and infrastructure (for commerce and profits) more than the average American.
Harris is out of touch with the average person, wanting to destroy every program and regulation his puppet masters (the Koch Brothers and Karl Rove) order him to, so they can continue adding profits at the expense of ours and our children’s health and futures! Wake up, Eastern Shore…we need to get rid of Dr. No and bring in someone who will re-energize our communities, helping to grow our entrepreneurs and small businesses across the Shore!
Keith Thompson says
If you’re saying that Andy Harris is out of touch with the average person, then aren’t you implying that the majority of voters in the district are not average? What exactly do you mean by average? For all of the invective that is voiced against politicians of all political stripes, one must keep in mind that they are actually elected by the voters. Perhaps the problem shouldn’t be placed on the politicians themselves, but on the people who vote for them. For good or for bad, we tend to get the government we deserve.
Norm says
This is more Republican frog manure. To them, ANY regulations on ANYTHING kill jobs. As long as we have this representative, in my view, we have no representation.
Carol Kilmon says
Would you care to be a bit more specific? Liberal generalities carry no more weight than a handful of that frog manure that you’re loaded down with.
Andy Harris is doing exactly the job he was voted in to do…working on cutting the deficit and cutting spending so our grandkids will be able to make more than frog manure in their lifetimes.
Steve Payne says
Farming is a very important industry on the ES and for the most part farmers are not strident anti EPA people. I think even the water conservation organizations in the area would agree on this.
This was originally a Rand Paul bill and I suspect it’s a coal/energy bill more than a farm bill.
https://www.jbs.org/legislation/defend-property-rights-against-epa-navigable-waters-overreach