We continue our series on the Southeast Region WOTUS Roundtable, which was hosted by the North Carolina Farm Bureau. Kate English, who is a farmer and an attorney who is also a part of the Florida Farm Bureau, was one of the speakers. She said states like Florida already have similar water regulations.
“In many instances, Clean Water Act regulations from the Army Corps are duplicate and involves many additional months or years of effort, and money to secure permits while they’re protecting the same resources, just considerably less efficiently,” she said. “Further, south Florida, where I’m from, is heavily engineered to provide both flood control and water supply. The approach to these kinds of systems in the Navigable Waters Protection Act works well for farmers and ranchers in the area because it allowed them to work within their existing permitted water control systems without a fear of WOTUS violations. These areas should never be considered jurisdictional for WOTUS.”
She echoed other comments and said, “We need to be very careful about what we do with constructed systems.
She said they shouldn’t be regulated through the WOTUS process.
Sabrina Halvorson
National Correspondent / AgNet Media, Inc.
Sabrina Halvorson is an award-winning journalist, broadcaster, and public speaker who specializes in agriculture. She primarily reports on legislative issues and hosts The AgNet Weekly podcast. Sabrina is a native of California’s agriculture-rich Central Valley.