The Environmental Protection Agency has been exercising its muscle in trying to take control of virtual all water supplies in the United States, including those on private property. In the process, they are making it difficult to near impossible for land owners to use their property if the EPA finds as much as a bucket of water on it.
In the western US, numerous land owners and municipalities have been told they can no longer use their wells for water as they are tied into groundwater that may drain into a stream, river or lake elsewhere. Tombstone, Arizona is a prime example of how the EPA and the Obama administration have cut off the town’s main water supply.
Now the EPA is using the Clean Water Act to seize control of lands throughout the country, often in violation of law and the Supreme Court. In the early 2000’s, John Rapanos wanted to build a shopping mall on his land in Michigan. Some of the land was swampy, so he drained it and filled it in so he could build. Even though he was 20 miles away from a waterway that was designated as ‘waters of the United States’, the EPA told Rapanos that his property was navigable because it was connected to a tributary that flowed in to the waters of the US. They levied millions of dollars in fines against him and ordered him to return the land to its original state.
Rapanos took the case to court only to have a lower court rule in favor of the EPA, but they did reduce the fine to $5,000 and ordered him to serve 3 years of probation. He appealed and the case ended up in the US Supreme Court who ruled in 2006 to overturn the lower court’s ruling. In a 4-1-4 vote, the court ruled that isolated waterways such as that on Rapanos’s land are not considered ‘water of the United States.’
