Clean Water Fund Facing Major Cuts - Action To Call Off

This is certainly not a good news for all of us in US.

I am calling all like mind concern to write to your Congressman & State govewrnment's for the President Bush to Call off this action.

Clean Water is a important live line for American. Cutting of funds would put more lives at risk for Water Contaminations.

More people get ill because of water pollution would cause more expenses in Medical bills. Then there would be more bankruptcy in America.

More lives would be loss.

Clean Water Fund Facing Major Cuts
FELICITY BARRINGER

The discretionary budget of the Environmental Protection Agency would be cut by 5.6 percent, to $7.57 billion, under President Bush's budget.

The greatest single cuts would be in federal payments to a joint state-federal fund that underwrites projects to improve water quality.

The fund is now worth $52 billion.

The $369 million cut in the Clean Water State Revolving Fund would leave the fund with annual federal payments of $730 million, down from $1.98 billion four years ago, said Linda Eichmiller, a spokeswoman for the Association of State and Interstate Water Pollution Control Administrators.

"The infrastructure needs that relate to clean water are well over $200 billion," Ms. Eichmiller said. "We have a fund that is not adequate to meet those needs. If we don't build up the fund to take care of those needs, there are going to be problems."

The budget proposes increasing the sum to clean up urban industrial sites, or brownfields, by $46.9 million, to $210 million.

Congress allocated $163 million to it for the current fiscal year.

The amount allocated to the Superfund, the fund established to clean up major toxic waste sites, was slightly increased, to $1.28 billion from $1.25 billion.

At the Interior Department, $90 million in cuts in the National Park Service budget for land acquisition and state grants were among the major items leading to a proposed overall 1 percent reduction.

The proposed total cut of $119 million would reduce the department's budget, to $10.65 billion from the $10.77 billion that Congress approved for the 2005. fiscal year.

In a budget briefing on Monday, Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton emphasized the administration's support to open the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve for oil and gas drilling.

Ms. Norton said the department anticipated that bids for the rights to exploit the first tracts open in the reserve would total $2.4 billion in the 2007 fiscal year.
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