E.P.A.
ORG
E.P.A.
The government, backed by major environmental groups, federal and state regulators, and a bipartisan group of former administrators of the Environmental Protection Agency, says that the theories of Mr. Rapanos and his fellow developer, June Carabell, would remove more than half of existing waterways perhaps as many as 99 percent, by one estimate from federal water pollution controls. Mr. Rapanos defied state regulators, who, acting with federal authority specifically delegated by the E.P.A., told him not to fill his wetland without a permit. That brief argues that it is the federal control over navigation that gives the E.P.A. and the corps authority over navigable waters and that unless their regulations directly prevent impediments to navigation unless, for example, they deal with issues like the level of river flows the issues fall to the states.