Wayne Gilchrest

Mr. GILCHREST

Mr. GILCHREST. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Massachusetts [Mr. Olver]. (Mr. OLVER asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. GILCHREST. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. If I could, I would like to quickly respond to the gentleman from Missouri. Approximately 66 percent of the 1989 wetlands acreage at interagency test sites would have failed the proposed 1991 criteria comments of the Missouri River Division. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from the District of Columbia [Ms. Norton].

Mr. GILCHREST. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Oregon [Ms. Furse].

Mr. GILCHREST. Mr. Chairman, how much time do I have remaining?

Mr. GILCHREST. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, this amendment is extremely straightforward. It seeks to strike the bill's provisions for delineation and classification of wetlands. These are the provisions with which the National Academy of Sciences disagreed most strongly and they are the provisions which have driven the Association of State Wetlands Managers to oppose the bill. The provisions in question require that wetlands be inundated for 21 consecutive days in the growing season, that they meet a very strict vegetation requirement, and that they have hydric soils present. Under such a definition, an acre of land could be a swamp from October to March, saturated the first 20 days of the growing season and the last 20 days of the growing season, and not meet the hydrology requirement. It could be a swamp year round but not display the right sort of vegetation and not be considered a wetland. Or a landowner could simply wait for a drought year when very few acres will display wetland hydrology and again not have the parcel considered a wetland. Now I know that many of us have been eager for a statutory definition of what constitutes a wetland. But H.R. 961 contains a definition which is clearly wrong--it's definition will only protect a fraction of acres that function as wetlands in the United States. The National Academy of Sciences could not assign any scientific justification, let me say that one more time. The National Academy of Sciences could not assign any scientific justification to the wetlands definition contained in H.R. 961. Where did the committee get this definition, you might ask? Well, the definition is almost identical to the proposed 1991 manual revisions, but a little stricter. Those revisions were a agency team calling them ``technically unsound'' and urging that the manual be adopted. This definition was such an utter failure that the Bush administration had to abandon its own proposal. Now I've heard that States could provide higher levels of protection for wetlands than what is provided under the bill. With all due respect, the nutrients and toxics in surrounding States very often cause a tremendous amount of problems in my State, which borders on the Chesapeake Bay. Until we can make waterways respect State boundaries, wetlands are going to remain an interstate matter. Mr. Chairman, every time farmers from States bordering my State put down fertilizer in a non-best-management practice, they hurt watermen in the State of Maryland, and nobody's going to talk about compensating the State of Maryland fisherman, although if we adopt this bill I think we should gain that debate. My amendment also strikes the wetlands classification system in the bill. Obviously, we would like to say that this wetland is more important than that wetland, but according to the National Academy of Sciences, we do not have the science right now to make that determination. This bill blindly subscribes to the wetter is better theory, but the National Academy of Sciences essentially says, and we all want to deal with science and we have the report, the National Academy of Sciences report right here, it says we cannot do that. Under my amendment the Army Corps of Engineers would be required to publish regulations for wetland classification when sufficient science is available. This replaces the bill's requirements that classification systems be implemented whether the science is available or not. If we go along with this bill, we are going to determine what is a wetland without science. Is that OK? I do not think so. Let me take a minute about what this amendment does not do. It does not change any of the bill's provisions about permitting. It does not change the compensation provisions. It does not remove any of the six pages of exempted activities. All this amendment does is remove the two provisions that the National Academy of Sciences say are unworkable and unscientific. My friends from Louisiana, and they are my friends, from Louisiana will argue that Congress should decide which wetlands to regulate, and obviously that is our duty. But in delineating wetlands, literally drawing lines around wetlands, we should use an appropriate scientific definition of wetlands. Once we have delineated those wetlands, we may decide not to regulate them, and indeed, H.R. 961 contains about 80 other pages which deregulate various wetlands. But at the very least, let us keep a little science in the question of wetlands delineation. Most of the groups who oppose title VIII of the bill, the Governors, the State legislators, the fishermen, among others, oppose this provision more than any other. And while I cannot say they would support it with this provision gone, that means we take out the delineation criteria, and we inject it with science, at the very least it would temper their opposition. That means we would have support of the National Governors Association, we would have the support of fishermen, we would have the support of people who truly want clean water, who want to prevent flooding, who want wildlife habitat, who want a whole range of things that improve the quality of our lives. Last week the gentleman from New Jersey [Mr. Zimmer] told a story which I hope everyone heard. He talked about how a certain State legislature voted to change pi. Remember in eighth grade in your math class. It was not apple pie, it was a mathematical equation, the circumference for circles. The definition of what is a functional wetland is every bit as scientific as pi. If we have to deregulate wetlands, this bill does that. But at the very least, for delineation purposes, let us keep a scientific definition of wetlands in place. Let us talk some sense about what we do today for tomorrow's children. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. GILCHREST. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. GILCHREST. I thank the chairman of the committee. Mr. Chairman, I urge support of the Gilchrest-Dingell amendment.

Mr. GILCHREST. Mr. Chairman, I yield to the distinguished gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Shuster], the chairman of the committee.

Mr. GILCHREST. If the gentleman will continue to yield, the confusion on that, the Boehlert amendment completely eliminates that.

Mr. GILCHREST

Mr. GILCHREST. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, what I would like to do is show a few illustrations to my colleagues in the Chamber this evening that show some contradictions to the, I guess, to some of the testimony we have heard here. First, I want to offer a perspective to the Clean Water Act to the Members of the House and the American people. That is, this is an act to clean America's water. Usually when we look at lakes, rivers, streams, we have no sense of the small amount of water that we actually have for the purposes of human consumption. If you took all the water on the planet and put it into a 1-gallon jug, you would see that you would have less than a teaspoon of that gallon of water for use and purposes that we as human beings need it. So water, regardless of what the planet looks like, is a very scarce resource. I would like to refer to this chart here showing the complexity of the permitting process under the existing Clean Water Act regulations. The complexity of the process that someone has to go through to get an individual permit is rather complex. I have to admit to my colleagues that a general permit is extremely, or actually well over 95 percent of all people who apply for general permits get them with no problem at all. They do not have to go through this lengthy process. What I would like to tell you that is in the Boehlert amendment, and I would encourage everybody to do this, is to pick up the Boehlert amendment and turn to pages 22 to 24 and see how pages 22 to 24 just about completely eliminate much of the complexity in the permitting process by a whole series of exemptions. What I would like to do is go back to the reason we have a Clean Water Act. I want everybody to look at this picture. This was not an untypical picture of pollution coming out of a pipe like this 20 years ago. I know we are debating wetlands. We are not debating nonpoint or we are not debating point pollution, which is what this was. What the Clean Water Act did over the many years was to eliminate problems like this. Problems of point source pollution, which the Clean Water Act has eliminated over the last 20 years, the point source pollution caused problems such as this. We are trying to get rid of this. We do not [[Page H4948]] want to bring this back. We are dealing with wetlands, we are dealing with a much more complicated situation than point source pollution, we are dealing with nonpoint source pollution, and we do not want our rivers to look like this. The Clean Water Act, to show you its success, and to show you that same picture, has cleaned up that river. We all recognize there are problems with the complexity of getting a permit, or there are too many agencies involved in getting the permit. These kinds of things can be eliminated and they can be solved. Mr. Chairman, what I would like to explain, and one of my problems with the existing bill, is if we want our rivers to look like this, the Clean Water Act up to this point has adhered to a large extent to science. We do not want to get rid of the science. I will hold this picture up. Mr. Chairman, if we abide by the regulations that are in the act or in the bill before us now, this particular picture, which everyone in here would agree is wet, this particular picture would not be considered a wetland. It would not be protected. The reason for that is, it is a little complex, it deals with science. The existing bill calls for 21 consecutive days' saturation at the surface, which this meets. It calls for hydric soil, which this meets. Also, it calls for an obligate wetland species which is not present here, because in a few weeks after this picture was taken this begins to dry out. It begins to dry out because the forest here, it is a forested wetland, begins to take up the moisture. Rather than getting into, like I said, some of the science here which is a little too complex, one of the major problems with the bill before us is that it excuses, it eliminates, it has nothing to do with science and the criteria on which we base what a wetland is. If we want clean water, we have to get, I admit, rid of some of the regulations, which this amendment does, but we have to hold onto the science. I want to give one other example, and I will do this for the farmers and people that live in urban areas. If Members will bear with me just for a moment, I am going to draw another picture. This is the land. On the left side of the picture, we are going to see corn. When farmers put fertilizer and a bunch of other things on their fields, there is a certain amount of nitrogen that goes through the soil that is not taken up by the corn.

Mr. GILCHREST. Mr. Chairman, when the nitrogen goes through the soil, some of it is taken up by the corn, but much stays in the soil and will go down into the groundwater. On the other side we might have an urban area, on the other side of that cornfield. The urban area has a problem with stormwater runoff. Let us say in the middle of these two places you have a forested wetland. That forested wetland could have been the picture that I showed you that does not meet the criteria, but what a forested wetland does, what all wetlands do, as the groundwater moves underneath it, it takes up that nitrogen, purifies the water, adds to the quality of it, so people do not have to worry about drinking water that is polluted. Wetlands filter out well over 90 percent of the pollution. Forested wetlands are some of the most important. Wetlands have different characteristics from one part of the country to the other. My time is up, Mr. Chairman. I strongly urge my colleagues to support the Boehlert substitute.

Mr. GILCHREST. I have one quick question for the gentleman from Louisiana, one question about the Florida Rock case. It is a situation where the gentleman bought a parcel of land for about $3,000 an acre. It was going to be a type of gravel pit. If he could have sold it for this type of gravel pit, he could have gotten $10,000 an acre for it, but since it was delineated as a wetland, the value was reduced so he could only get $6,000 an acre for it. My question is, since it is delineated as a wetland and protected as a wetland, if it was not preserved as a wetland and he did use it and it diminished the value of someone else's property downstream, who would have paid for the devaluation of the property owner downstream?

Mr. GILCHREST. The gentleman from California said, ``What are we afraid of?'' Why do we not use the classification or the delineation criteria from the National Academy of Sciences, which I think we all, after looking at it, would have some sense that is a good classification, and then we can use their criteria in this bill, and then we can regulate or not regulate, whatever we want to.

Mr. GILCHREST. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. GILCHREST. One comment and one quick question. The comment is we want to get rid of the bureaucracy that creates the kind of horror stories.

Mr. GILCHREST. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. GILCHREST. The other thing is I really wish some of the Corps and EPA people from California could come to Maryland and see how we work out our problems, and we really do work the problems out in apparently a much simpler manner than it is done in some of the Western States, but looking at the picture I would like to ask, it really looks like there is some farming activity being done there. It looks like tractor tires and the field has just been plowed up. I would like to ask the gentleman if that is a farming area. Then it is now without either one of the bills exempt from regulatory jurisdiction of the Corps as far as wetlands is concerned because of the prior converted cropland; also the Corps allows people to farm wetlands if they have been farming wetlands.

Mr. GILCHREST. If the gentleman will yield further, I think if you destroy those kinds of wetlands, a number of people whose property would be devalued because their ground water would be contaminated, the vast number of people who would have their property devalued, there is not enough money in America to pay for all that property.

Mr. GILCHREST

Mr. GILCHREST. First of all, the Federal regulators should be on the farm and talk about possom hunting, then have a cup of coffee and a piece of pie, and the Federal regulators ought to be good neighbors and talk about how we can solve some of these problems, but unless the allocation is there, unless the funding is there, unless the awareness is there that this kind of thing exists, we are not going to stop the greater problem that we have today of nonpoint source pollution and help those people who need to be a part of the solution.

Mr. GILCHREST. Mr. Chairman, it may be done in places like Ohio, but it is not being done across the Nation. If we are looking at watershed ideas and keeping water going from one State to another State and raising the awareness of nonpoint source problems, especially in agriculture, I think the gentleman from New York [Mr. Boehlert] has the right idea.

Mr. GILCHREST. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. GILCHREST. Mr. Chairman, I yield to the gentleman from Louisiana.

Mr. GILCHREST. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. I rise in support of my colleague from New York. What I would like to do for the Members, especially for Members who might be from a suburban area or an urban area, is to give them some idea what nonpoint source pollution is. Nonpoint source pollution happens in suburbs. It happens in urban areas. It happens in rural areas on agricultural farms. You have all kinds of farms. You have dairy farms. You have chicken farms. You have grain farms, et cetera. There is a variety of farms. I want to show you what the problems are with nonpoint source pollution on farms in any one of these areas. Most farms, especially if there are cows, chickens, grain farmers, cattle farmers, they have a barn. Somebody said pig, OK. Now we have a barn. Somewhere around a farm generally you are going to have a river or some waterway. This is the Clean Water Act that we are talking about. We are trying to prevent pollution from a source to get into the water. So what we see here, whether you have pigs, cows, chickens, grain, or whatever, they have manure. So it very often costs money, if you are going to put a manure shed for composting purposes next to the farm. That composting shed could cost $5,000. If you have dairy farms and cows, you will have to put a holding area for the cows sometime before you take them in for them to milk. That holding area is concentrating manure which gradually will get into the ground water unless you build a holding area which prevents the manure from leaving that area. That is about $10,000 on this side. The other things you need for a farm is fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides. All of these things, if they leach or flow into the waterway, are going to cause a problem with the quality of the water. So what do you need to do to hold those things? You need certain things called waterways, if you have any contour on the land. A waterway is a grassy area that helps absorb the runoff to prevent the silt or the fertilizer from getting into the ground water into the waterway. You need other things called buffer zones. A buffer zone is a grassy area around the waterway and that, again, prevents the pollution or the silt or a variety of other things from getting into the ground water. There is something else you need. If you plant corn or wheat or rye or soybean, very often you do not put anything on the ground during the winter months and the nitrogen that you put on the ground in the spring and the summer, unless it is taken up into these plants during the winter months, gets into the ground water so that costs more money. In essence, for one farm, if this is a dairy farm or a pig farm or a chicken farm or a grain farm, every single farmer, whether they own 10,000 acres or 100 acres, has a certain amount of cost if he is going to prevent nonpoint source pollution. And all of this costs money. Generally speaking, farmers have not gotten enough aid in this area. So I strongly, I am a big football fan and all opposition to the gentleman's amendment.

Mr. GILCHREST. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, I rise in reluctant opposition to the amendment of my good friend, the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Lipinski], and in support of the amendment offered by the gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Bateman]. In my judgment, Mr. Chairman, the allocation formula of the gentleman from Illinois would virtually wipe out in less than a year almost half of the State clean water programs in this program. Maryland would lose money under this formula, but as many of us here have discussed in the last few minutes, it is not the focus of one State versus another State. We are not in competition. If we are in a mode to understand the necessity for watershed management for clean water, where a number of States in a particular watershed have to work together to clean their water, to reduce the problem of nonpoint source pollution, to do all those things that are necessary for States to improve the quality of life for impact that, the formula of the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Lipinski] does not do that. In my judgment, under the allocation of the gentleman from Illinois, over 20 States or a third or more of the States with SRF grants would largely be eliminated. The States that gain under the amendment of the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Lipinski] would still gain under the committee bill and under the gentleman's amendment, they just would not gain as much. To be fair to the many States that may potentially lose large portions of their programs, this amendment should be defeated. I encourage Members to vote for the Bateman amendment.

Mr. GILCHREST

Mr. GILCHREST. Reclaiming my time, Mr. Chairman, even if that is true----