Rob Bishop: “I want to introduce you to Gene, who is a third-generation sugar beet farmer. That is a root crop that can't grow in…”

“I want to introduce you to Gene, who is a third-generation sugar beet farmer. That is a root crop that can't grow in wetlands. Nonetheless, his sugar beet farm was ruled by the Federal Government as a wetland. The reason it was a wetland was because the creek was connected to his farm by way of an irrigation ditch with a pipe in it. The water to his wetland went through an irrigation pipe which he allowed to pool so the higher end of his farm could actually be irrigated the same way. In our district, 8 days of irrigation is one of the criteria for a wetland. I don't believe that those who actually wrote the Clean Water Act intended an irrigation pipe to be considered one of the navigable waterways of the United States, but the act is written so loosely and the interpretation by bureaucrats on the administrative side has been so perverse that indeed those kinds of decisions have been made in reality. The SWANCC decision by the courts simply said enough is enough. We need to bring some element of logic, write some rules that actually are the intention of this particular act. So Gene, when he took the irrigation pipe away and the water dried up, was still threatened with fines because he had interrupted the navigable waterways of the United States.…”