Going to Court, To Protect Clean Water
August 27, 2013
Riverkeeper Team
The headline in Bloomberg News says it all: our latest court case, "Riverkeeper vs. Cuomo" is a "billion-pound manure fight" over the Gov's decision to eliminate longstanding water protection rules for dairy farms.
The Governor's spokesman tells Bloomberg that the state is simply eliminating "overly burdensome" regulations, but that's just wrong: in 2012, state officials warned that deregulating these farms in favor of "voluntary" protections would be "neither credible nor effective" to protect state waters.
The truth is that Cuomo is doing everything he can to help the yogurt industry expand, including giving up on clean water rules that had protected our waterways for over a decade. As Riverkeeper's Kate Hudson told Bloomberg: “This is an inappropriate attempt to create an economic benefit by sacrificing environmental protection.”
And, that's why Riverkeeper, Waterkeeper Alliance and five other water-warrior groups had to go to court, to block this end run around our clean water laws.
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