>However, if you're insinuating that the Clean Water Act is made by "slimy politicians and big picture ignoring environmentalists" then you're wrong. That's about the best common sense environmental reform in the last 100 years aside from removing lead from gas.

I'm more than insinuating it. The cause may be noble but the state and local implementations have been perverted by all the minutia and business interests and NIMBYism. I would go so far as to say that (state and local implementation of requirements within) the clean water act is a non-negligible contributor to the decline of manufacturing and agriculture in the northeast and upper midwest.

We basically took "thou shalt not dump for that is bad for our surface and ground water" and over 50yr turned it into a blank check for all manner of leeches to make a buck and all manner of NIMBYs to make things unnecessarily expensive.

Petty 1.5-acre "I want my lightly forested former field to be a field again" and "business is going great I want my gavel parking lot paved" being stalled by five figure costs and even with those costs incurred it doesn't guarantee compliance. That's a far cry from the "yeah we just dump this stuff in a settling pond, IDK where it goes after that but man that river over there sure is a weird color" type 1960s industry behavior that it was meant to really curb. And the big industrial offenders still get to do what they want, not as bad as before of course, but still bad. Some Megacorp's runoff might turn the fish neon green or their 1k unit condo development might turn the river brown with silt but of course they'll be right there with their lawyers and experts who'll tell you why it's fine even when it's not to anyone with a brain and two eyeballs. The layman can't pay off people like that be on their side and neither can the regulators. (I assume this frequent fact pattern what you refer to by "living in the stink")

I think it ought to be revamped at the state and local level into something that's substantially more "results based" rather than the proactive red tape "make the bureaucrats feel like their ass is covered if someone ever complains about what they approved" based system we have now.

(And just to be clear for any readers who aren't familiar, the clean water act basically doesn't do much to affect the average person or business at a federal level. The local implementations and all the key definitions, industry standards, etc, are where the rubber really meets the road)

Edit: Basically I'm saying that in the past 50yr the interests the CWA was supposed to stymie learned how to pay their way around it, the parties who make a buck doing that have gotten themselves all but written into the compliance process to the detriment of the interests the CWA was supposed to not seriously burden. It needs to be replaced or revised to solve those two big problems.