New Clean Water Act Guidance

The EPA and Army Corps of Engineers recently released a memorandum that is meant to provide revised guidance as to jurisdictional questions regarding the Clean Water Act resulting from recent Supreme Court rulings. The revised guidance defines protected waters as those that are determined to be navigable-in-fact by the courts, are currently being used or have historically been used for commercial navigation, or could realistically be used for commercial navigation in the future. The document also clarifies what constitutes a protected, adjacent wetland, noting that a wetland must have an unbroken hydrologic connection to jurisdictional waters, be separated from those waters by a berm or similar barrier or be reasonably close to a jurisdictional water….more EPA