Clean Water Current

Last week, the House overwhelmingly passed their version of the Water Resources Development Act of 2022, H.R. 7776, placing Congress on track to conclude by fall this biennial piece of legislation.

The focal points of H.R. 7776, similar to WRDA 2020, is the authorizations of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) policies and projects related to ports, harbors, and inland waterway navigation.  However, this cycle WRDA also once again included Environmental Infrastructure (EI) projects, which are essentially authorized earmarks intended to support POTWs and municipalities with local water supply, wastewater, and stormwater projects unrelated to direct and normal USACE focused projects.  New EI projects had effectively been excluded from WRDA bills from 2007 until this year.

Sec. 337 of H.R. 7776 lists all the new and modified EI projects for water and wastewater.  The Senate WRDA bill, S. 4136, which passed out of the Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee in May and is expected to come up for a full chamber vote this summer, includes similar new and modified EI water and wastewater projects under Sec. 301.  

While some past WRDA bills have had more robust policies and EPA programmatic authorizations related to wastewater and clean water, NACWA and the sector worked to secure many of those provisions in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), that was signed into law by President Biden late last year.

Please contact Jason Isakovic, NACWA’s Director of Legislative Affairs, to discuss further.