This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, March 18, 2013 - WASHINGTON – Following through on an earlier threat, U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt placed a temporary “hold” Monday on the nomination of the top Environmental Protection Agency official until there is progress on an impact statement for a controversial levee proposal in Missouri’s Bootheel.
“Once again, the government is arguing with the government while nothing is accomplished,” said Blunt, R-Mo., in a statement announcing his “hold” on EPA administrator nominee Gina McCarthy. “These agencies missed their own self-imposed deadline, which is entirely unacceptable.”
Blunt and U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., had asked the EPA, the Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to come to an agreement by March 15 on a draft environmental impact statement (EIS) for the St. Johns Bayou and New Madrid Floodway Project, which would close a 1,500-foot gap in the levee system at the floodway’s southern end.
But the three agencies told senators Friday that, while they were closer to agreement on a draft EIS for public comment, they couldn’t yet set a date for its release. However, the agencies saw the potential for progress in the coming weeks.
“We’re incredibly disappointed and frustrated that a final resolution is still caught up in ridiculous and unnecessary government bureaucracy. These agencies missed their own self-imposed deadline,” Blunt and McCaskill said in a joint statement Monday. They pledged to “keep up the pressure” on the agencies and said they had been “promised real movement on this issue in the next few weeks.”
Blunt, who had threatened to place a Senate procedural hold in mid-February, followed through on Monday, saying he would block a vote on the EPA nominee until the administration of President Barack Obama “can provide us with a concrete timeline for progress on the St. John's Bayou and New Madrid Floodway Project.”
Last month, McCaskill had described an EPA hold as “very premature” in this case, and she did not specificially endorse Blunt’s action Monday. A McCaskill spokesman said only that both senators were “working closely to keep pressure on these federal agencies in order to achieve a final resolution and give some needed certainty to folks in southeast Missouri after decades in limbo.”
A Senate hold is a parliamentary procedure allowing one or more senators, who notify their party leaders in advance, to prevent a motion – in this case, the EPA nomination – from reaching a vote on the Senate floor. McCarthy’s nomination to head the EPA was not expected to reach the full Senate until after the two-week spring break, which was scheduled to start this weekend.
For Blunt – a harsh critic of the EPA under outgoing administrator Lisa Jackson – blocking McCarthy may fit into his anti-regulatory agenda as well as placate constituents in southeast Misssouri, who will elect a new congressman in June to replace former U.S. Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, who left Congress last month.
The nomination of McCarthy, who is now assistant administrator of the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, is being questioned by several GOP senators because of her role in overseeing air emissions regulations in recent years that have led to industry backlash. The Senate Environment and Public Works committee has yet to schedule her confirmation hearing.
Environmental groups, several of which support McCarthy’s nomination and oppose the St. John’s Bayou-New Madrid project, criticized Blunt’s action Monday.
George Sorvalis, a National Wildlife Federation expert who coordinates the Water Protection Network contended Monday that “the Corps should stop the New Madrid levee once and for all.”
Noting that a federal court had stopped the project in 2007 – ruling that the the draft EIS had “unacceptable, adverse and unmitigatable environmental impacts” – Sorvalis argued that “building the New Madrid levee could collapse the fishery of the middle Mississippi River and intensify development in a federally designated floodway complicating federal flood relief efforts.”
Brad Walker, the rivers and sustainability director at the Missouri Coalition for the Environment, criticized Blunt’s advocacy of an “unjustified project (that) has cost the taxpayers tens of millions of dollars while being rejected six times by federal agencies whose job it is to protect both the environment and the taxpayers.”
But Missouri lawmakers have been pushing for the project for months. Blunt and Emerson called on the Corps in September to explain the delay in developing a new draft EIS for the project, which a federal judge had struck down in 2007 because the previous EIS was inadequate.
In December, McCaskill asked the heads of the EPA and Fish and Wildlife to reach a resolution and present a new EIS with the Corps in 60 days. When that failed, the two senators met in person with representatives of the three agencies last month.
Environmental groups are mainly concerned about the levee portion of the project; some of them do not oppose the part of the project that would bolster pumping stations and take other control measures in the St. John’s Bayou area, to protect East Prairie and surrounding homes.
“Rather than attack those agencies for doing their job, we should be resolving the primary shortcoming of the project by the removal of the wasteful and environmentally damaging New Madrid Floodway levee portion that serves only to increase the financial gain of a small number of farmers who farm within the legally designated floodway,” asserted Walker.
“Then the St. John's Bayou portion that is actually intended to address community flooding in the area might be able to proceed.”