Interview by Seanica Otterby, American Farm Bureau Federation
The comment period for the proposed Waters of the U.S. rule ended in November, and well over 1 million comments were submitted. However – not all of those comments were substantive. Seanica Otterby has the story.
CLICK HERE to listen to the interview. Transcript is below
Otterby: Comments made on Twitter, such as I like Clean Water, were counted by the Environmental Protection Agency as substantive comments supporting the proposed Waters of the U.S. rule. American Farm Bureau regulatory specialist Don Parrish says there were more than 20,000 unique, substantive comments delivered.
Parrish: Technically that’s only about two percent of that 1 million. But of those people who actually read the proposal, EPA’s own contractors said 68 percent of them opposed the regulation. That’s unprecedented. That is pretty amazing because when people bothered to look at the details of the proposal, they overwhelmingly opposed it.
Otterby: Parrish says EPA has posted about 20,000 comments on the website, but they are not all of the substantive comments.
Parrish: They haven’t even posted for the public to be able to review and or check the agency’s math in terms of what people have actually said about this proposal. All indication is that the Administrator and EPA intend to ram this proposal through, regardless of the important comments that were made on it, and try to do so as quickly as possible.
Source: American Farm Bureau Federation
