WRC Releases
a Press Statement on CEQ Revisions to Water Resources Guidelines
On December 2, 2010, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) issued a report finding
that the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) needs to
define more clearly the purpose of its revisions to the nation's
chief water resources planning document.
"The 2009
proposed revisions lack clarity and consistency in several
respects," the NAS said of the CEQ's draft proposal to rewrite
the Economic and Environmental Principles and Guidelines for Water
and Related Land Resources Implementation Studies (called the
Principles and Guidelines or P&G).
In its most
pointed criticism, the NAS said the CEQ proposal does not spell out
clearly enough which agencies are supposed to follow the
P&G. "The proposed revisions to the P&G should
more clearly specify the agencies, programs, studies, and water
projects to which they will apply," the NAS said.
"If the new document is to apply solely to the four
traditional construction-oriented agencies [the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers, the Bureau of Reclamation, the Natural Resources
Conservation Service, and the Tennessee Valley Authority], the
proposed revisions should reflect the fact that these agencies
today are constructing fewer new projects."
The Water Resources Coalition has
expressed similar concerns with the proposal from CEQ and
calls on CEQ to revise the draft Principles and Guidelines
document. The Coalition urges a new draft to be released for
another round of public comments and peer review before the
document can come close to final release. On Friday afternoon the
coalition sent a press statement to media outlets detailing its
concerns with CEQ's control over the P&G.
The full press statement can be viewed here:
http://www.waterresourcescoalition.org/files/pdf/WRCStatemenet_NAS_FINAL.pdf
The P&G were
first adopted in 1983 and are badly out of date with modern
economic and environmental thought. In November 2007,
Congress adopted the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) of 2007
over a presidential veto. Section 2031 of the Act directed
the Secretary of the Army to revise the P&G adopted by the U.S.
Water Resources Council in March 1983. The revisions must be
completed by November 8, 2009. The CEQ took control of the
project in 2009.
Under the
P&G, the four agencies weigh the tradeoffs between a project's
benefits to the present generation against those benefits that
accrue in the future through benefit-cost analysis. If this
analysis shows that a project's national economic development (NED)
benefits exceed its NED costs, the Corps seeks project
authorization from Congress.
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