Protecting the Bay From Trump's EPA

http://www.baycrossings.com/dispnews.php?id=3991



The watery red salt ponds on the Redwood City shoreline of San Francisco Bay. The Trump administration has made it easier to build offices, condos and retail spaces there. Photo by Doc Searls, Flickr/CC

BY SEJAL CHOKSI-CHUGH

Published: October, 2019

The Trump administration has reached a new low in its assault on clean water. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is claiming that San Francisco Bay water isn’t water. The agency recently decided that the South Bay salt ponds are land and don’t need Clean Water Act protection.

Corporations created the South Bay salt ponds by building levees in the Bay before the Clean Water Act was enacted. In an abrupt reversal of its own 2016 draft opinion, EPA says the timing of those levees now means that the ponds are land instead of water.

It’s a thinly veiled scheme to allow Cargill, the multinational corporation that owns the area, to pave over the ponds without worrying about meeting Clean Water Act safeguards. In reality, if the levees are removed, Bay waters will flood the area again and eventually return the ponds to their former wetland state.

That’s why Baykeeper is suing the Trump administration in federal court, fighting to overturn this decision.