A rule proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency would strip federal protections from seasonal and intermittent wetlands, including streams and waterbodies in Maine.
Anya Fetcher, federal policy advocate with the Natural Resources Council of Maine said the rule could impact more than 200 miles of streams in the state.
Wetlands are protected from unpermitted pollution or destruction under Maine environmental laws. But Fetcher said there have been efforts in the past to dilute those safeguards and the could be rolled back in the future.
"Without the safety net of the federal protections that is where we would see more risk of pollution or loss of these streams and wetland areas," Fetcher said.
Maine Department of Environmental Protection spokesperson David Madore said the state's Natural Resources Protection Act would continue to give state agencies "jurisdiction over activities proposed in, on, over and sometimes adjacent to wetlands and waterbodies in Maine, regardless of any federal rule changes."
The proposed rule would redefine "waters of the United States" - WOTUS - to include only "relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing bodies of water" such as streams, oceans, rivers and lakes and wetlands connected and indistinguishable from those waterbodies, according to the EPA.
That means Clean Water Act protections would only extend to waters that flow year round, or at least during the "wet season" the agency said. The proposal implements the U.S. Supreme Court's 2023 decision in Sackett v. EPA, which narrowed wetland protections under the Clean Water Act.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, in a press release, said that Democrat administrations had "weaponized" the definition of navigable waters of the U.S. to seize power from farmers, landowners, entrepreneurs and families.
The agency "is delivering on President Trump's promise to finalize a revised definition for WOTUS that protects the nation's navigable waters from pollution, advances cooperative federalism by empowering states, and will result in economic growth across the country," Zeldin said.
