wetlandguy I am a natural resources attorney. The CWA - section 404 is a pile of junk as it relates private lands not on large navigable rivers. We almost got rid of that with the last US Supreme Court case - Rapanos . Maybe we will succeed with a new Congress or the Court next time.
So...do you sue fore or against natural resources
. Again I agree with you on that. I think the CWA, especially 404, needs to be completely scraped and started over with. Take out all mention of the word navigable. That's just wording originally adopted from Section 10 River and Harbors Act. It seems to me that the problem the courts have is interperting the CWA as it is written to protect the waters of the U.S. (including all wetlands) that most everyone knows for a fact are important on several levels. That's why we had the Plurality decision and Signficant Nexus decision with Rapanos.
I'm all about private property rights, but I would think that many of the folks on here would understand the importance of clean water. If your neighbor dumps dirt, chemicals, etc into the stream feeding your pond and makes it useless, wouldn't you want to be able to have a legal means to defend your water? That's what the CWA is for ultimately, protecting everyones right to clean water. Like I said before though, what this forum is all about, in my opinion, should not be regulated like building a Wal-mart on wetlands. Sure some regulation is appropriate, because honestly I don't think you can trust anyone to do what is right everytime. But to make people mitigate for relatively small scale stuff like this goes too far in my opinion.
Anyway...this is UpaTree's post and I wasn't trying to hi-jack it, I just wanted to point out a couple of things for him to be aware of before he started construction. Namely the involvement of the Virginia DEQ.
