On the recordFebruary 18, 2011
For the past 2 years, we've seen the administration and the Environmental Protection Agency take overzealous action in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, with the potential to dramatically affect jobs, the economy, and local government budgets throughout the six-State region. The EPA has proposed arbitrary limits on the amounts of nutrients that can enter the Chesapeake Bay and how these nutrients enter the bay. At the same time, the EPA is seeking to expand their regulatory authority by seizing authority granted to the States and converting the bay's cleanup effort into a process that is a top-down approach with mandatory regulations. These overzealous regulations will affect everyone who lives, works, and farms in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, and the cost of complying with these requirements will be devastating during our current economic downturn, resulting in many billions of dollars in economic losses to States, cities, towns, farms and other businesses, large and small. The EPA's approach is far from the best approach to restore the Chesapeake Bay. I believe that each individual State and the localities in each State know better how to manage the State's water quality goals than the bureaucrats at the EPA.
