Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi and 20 other state AGs are asking a federal appeals judge to throw out a ruling letting the federal government enforce clean water standards in the Chesapeake Bay area. The president of a Maryland-based environmental group says he’s outraged the unaffected states have gotten involved.
Bondi and the other attorneys general are from a geographically diverse group of states including Alaska, Indiana and Georgia. They filed the brief last week. They support an appeal by a coalition of farm industry groups trying to reverse a ruling that would allow the Environmental Protection Agency to enforce industry-specific pollution quotas and a timeline for cleanup.
Will Baker is president of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, an environmental nonprofit involved in the suit. He says he’d like Bondi to visit.
“We’d like to invite the Attorney General Bondi to come up here and meet with us. If she feels that Florida should intervene in our case and be party to this case, why doesn’t she come up and let us show her the Chesapeake Bay?” he says. “Let us have her talk to people whose children have been affected by dirty water, whose grandparents have been affected by dirty water. Why doesn’t she come up here and talk to us before she goes to court to try and stop us from cleaning up our water?”
The brief Bondi and others filed says the EPA has overstepped states’ rights to make their own land-use decisions in order to meet pollution standards.
