Today, nutrient pollution impacts 35% of Montana’s river miles and 22% of lakes, according to the state of Montana’s own records. Unfortunately, despite increasing degradation of our waterways from pollution, and with more demands on water resources every day, Gov. Greg Gianforte and Montana’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) are removing fundamental protections that safeguard healthy waterways.
A law passed and signed by Gianforte during the last legislative session will put Montana in the unenviable position of being the first and only state in the union to roll back nutrient protections for our valuable and finite water resources. Tragically, the same waterway protection standards that DEQ is attempting to repeal are the very standards that scientific experts, including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), have urged states to adopt to better protect local water quality.
For the past six months, during the rulemaking stakeholder process, regulated polluting interests have worked with DEQ to roll back strong clean water protections under a new rule. Despite DEQ’s insistence that this process was about gathering input from knowledgeable participants, it’s time for the public to know what the process fundamentally represents: a partisan effort to relax pollution controls for the state’s largest polluters and remove existing scientific metrics for judging harm, or health, of waterways. This winter, the public will see the fruits of special interests’ labor in a rule that proposes the adoption of an unproven, ambiguous, and open-ended process focused on loosening pollution controls.
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What’s been absent is a meaningful discussion of the known risks of DEQ’s unprecedented pollution control rollbacks, which will allow increased nutrient pollution in our water. Nutrient pollution, in the form of excess nitrogen and phosphorus, comes from septic tanks, sewage treatment facilities, laundry detergents, fertilizers, manure, and stormwater runoff. Excess nutrients perpetuate ongoing algal blooms that negatively impact stream health and aquatic life. It also jeopardizes the second-largest sector of Montana’s economy — the outdoor recreation industry — and the health of the waterways that attract visitors. Finally, by removing standards that determine whether a water body is polluted, the health of thousands of Montanans’ drinking water sources becomes that much more uncertain. Eliminating proactive, science-based pollution controls represents a critical failure to protect local water quality in our streams, rivers, and lakes, as well as human health.
The new rule incentivizes a race to the bottom, where point source polluters (treatment plants, refineries, mines, and other direct discharges into water) won’t be held accountable for the pollution they contribute to local waterways. While gutting science-based protections, DEQ has also been paying lip service to controlling the known, negative water quality impacts of sprawling development or irresponsible fertilizer use, omissions that can only be attributed to a lack of political will.
The nutrient pollution rollback has been a high-stakes game of brinkmanship, with clean water advocates and even the EPA — which is legally required to review and approve the proposed rule — on record opposing the pending rule, because it ignores the baseline reality that it is diametrically at odds with science, our right to a clean and healthful environment, Clean Water Act requirements, and our clean water values. On the other side, DEQ and special interest polluters have stood together opposing common sense, science-based pollution standards.
Montana was a national leader when it adopted numeric nutrient standards in 2014; now we’re poised to be the first state in the country to roll back pollution controls that protect our waterways and inform when, where, and how to restore waterway health. In the face of climate change, warming water, development pressure, variable snowpack, and persistent drought, Montana should be investing in proven strategies that build local resilience and protect cold, clean water, not threatening it with more pollution.
An opportunity for public comment on the pollution standard rollback opens on Dec. 24 through the DEQ website.
Guy Alsentzer, executive director, Upper Missouri Waterkeeper.
Derf Johnson, clean water program director & staff attorney, Montana Environmental Information Center.
Andrew Gorder, legal director, Clark Fork Coalition.
Joanie Kresich, board chair, Northern Plains Resource Council.
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