Month: July 2015

‘Waters of the U.S.’ would expand regulations to smaller tributaries

by Andy Marso, KHI News Service

The EPA wants to clarify what waterways it has authority over. Some say that could increase its reach on agricultural land.

Fresh off a win in one multi-state lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency, Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt announced he will join another.

Schmidt’s office said Tuesday morning he was joining attorneys general from eight other states in fighting the “Waters of the U.S.” rule intended to expand the scope of the Clean Water Act to smaller tributaries.

“Congress never intended for the federal government to regulate ditches or farm ponds,” Schmidt said. “This regulation grossly exceeds the authority granted to federal agencies by the Clean Water Act — authority that rightfully belongs to the states and that is limited by private property rights protected by the Constitution.”

The new rule is based on a January EPA report on connectivity of smaller bodies of water to the interstate “navigable” waterways that the EPA traditionally protects from certain levels of contaminants.

Environmental groups like the national Waterkeeper Alliance praised that report, saying it more realistically accounted for the damage caused when waste is disposed of in small bodies of water that leach into others.

Kelly Foster, a senior attorney for the alliance, said EPA rules should not exempt all ditches, “which often transport animal waste generated by industrialized meat production facilities to downstream waters.”

“The report finds that buried and ditched streams have eliminated aquatic habitat, increased downstream export of runoff and contaminants, and eliminated stream functions that could benefit downstream water quality,” Foster said.

The EPA has said that under the new rule most ditches will remain exempt and the water supply necessary for farming and ranching will not be disrupted.

Still, agricultural groups have largely opposed the rule, and more states are likely to join the lawsuit against it. By Tuesday afternoon, the number of states involved had grown to 13. The Republican-controlled Congress also is mulling a rewrite of the rule.

Schmidt and other attorneys general narrowly prevailed in a suit against a 2011 EPA rule regarding power plant emissions. The 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision in that case was announced Monday.

The nonprofit KHI News Service is an editorially independent initiative of the Kansas Health Institute and a partner in the Heartland Health Monitor reporting collaboration. All stories and photos may be republished at no cost with proper attribution and a link back to KHI.org when a story is reposted online.
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Restaurant, business owners say concerns about statewide smoking ban largely unrealized

by Bryan Thompson, KHI News Service

When it took effect five years ago, the Kansas Indoor Clean Air Act had some restaurant and business owners concerned.

But their worries about the state law prohibiting smoking in most public places — including workplaces, public buildings, bars and restaurants — have largely gone unrealized.

The law had its start in cities such as Salina, where in 2002 city commissioners began debating an ordinance to ban smoking in restaurants, with an exception for late-night hours.

“It generated more response from the community than any other issue that I ever had to deal with while I was on the commission — and I was on the commission for six years,” said Debbie Divine, a former Salina city commissioner and mayor.

Many restaurant owners were worried that they’d lose customers who smoked, Divine said.

Those Salina restaurant owners included Tom Dick, who has operated Tom’s Appletree Restaurant for 30 years.

“We had a lot of customers from Lindsborg and McPherson,” he said. “We still do. We had some of them that flat told me, ‘We won’t be eating in Salina anymore because of the smoking ban.’ And they didn’t. They stopped coming in.”

But overall, Dick said his business didn’t suffer. In fact, he didn’t see any difference at all.

Soon, other cities followed suit with smoking bans of their own: Lyons, Lawrence and Hutchinson had smoking bans within two years after enforcement started in Salina. By the end of 2009, more than three dozen Kansas cities, towns and counties had enacted smoking bans.

Reagan Cussimanio, government relations director in Kansas for the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, credited that grassroots movement for passage of the statewide law.

“The state itself saw that communities, and residents in those communities, wanted clean indoor air,” Cussimanio said.

Public support

In December 2013, Cussimanio’s organization commissioned a survey of 500 likely Kansas voters that found 86 percent approved of the smoke-free law, while only 12 percent disliked it.

While the public may like restrictions on smoking in public places, the Kansas Restaurant and Hospitality Association long argued against government enacting such policies.

The association told the Salina City Commission in 2002 that such decisions should be left up to the owners of the affected businesses. The association’s president and CEO, Adam Mills, declined to comment on the indoor smoking ban’s five-year anniversary.

Larry Conover has a different view of the government regulation. His family has operated the Town & Country Restaurant in Wichita since 1957.

“I was a little nervous, because we had such a strong group of people that smoked here,” Conover said. “The whole building was smoking. We didn’t even have a non-smoking section.”

On the other hand, Conover knew he was losing business from families who didn’t want to breathe secondhand smoke. Wichita officials took the decision out of his hands by passing smoking restrictions in 2008.

“We were back-sliding, and if they hadn’t helped us, it would have been hard for me to make the decision on my own to just go non-smoking, because I had all these other customers I was already loyal to,” he said.

“But once the city helped us, it was citywide, so it was fair, and nobody could get mad at anybody. Most of them, at some point, said, ‘I’m going to go somewhere else,’ but there was nowhere else to go. So it actually helped, I think.”

Health improvements

But the Indoor Clean Air Act, at its core, isn’t really about business. It’s about making Kansans healthier.

Statistics from the Kansas Department of Health and Environment show decreases since 2009 in Kansas hospital discharge rates for patients with lung diseases like asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Discharge rates for heart attacks also declined, but not as much.

Those improvements can’t be directly linked to the smoking ban, however, because other possible causes can’t be ruled out, said Kimber Richter, tobacco treatment researcher at the University of Kansas Medical Center.

“We can’t prove that we can attribute them to the Clean Indoor Air Act, but all of the studies published that have looked at health effects would suggest that the ban contributed to those reductions,” she said.

Richter said the next step is to protect people from secondhand smoke at outdoor venues, like college campuses and outdoor youth sports facilities. That would provide health benefits and prevent children from becoming smokers, she said.

The nonprofit KHI News Service is an editorially independent initiative of the Kansas Health Institute and a partner in the Heartland Health Monitor reporting collaboration. All stories and photos may be republished at no cost with proper attribution and a link back to KHI.org when a story is reposted online.

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