The Fertilizer Institute (TFI) filed a legal challenge late Dec. 7 to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) final rule to establish numeric nutrient criteria for nitrogen and phosphorus for waters in the state of Florida.
The lawsuit, The Fertilizer Institute and White Springs Agricultural Chemicals Inc. v. United States Environmental Protection Agency, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida Pensacola Division and comes on the heels of a legal challenge to the EPA rule also filed that same day by the State of Florida.
White Springs Agricultural Chemicals Inc. has operations in Florida and is a subsidiary of TFI member Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan Inc.
In its complaint, the lawsuit contends that EPA’s final rule is unlawful and should be vacated because it establishes water quality criteria that ignore causation, regulates water bodies that are achieving their designated use, and restricts nutrients that do not cause impairment. The lawsuit also charges that by using simple and overly broad statistical principles, EPA’s rule will classify a certain percentage of water bodies as impaired when they in fact are not.
In addition, the lawsuit states that EPA’s new criteria usurp Florida’s statutory authority to develop standards and are fundamentally in conflict with Florida’s existing efforts to implement narrative water quality standard for nutrients. The lawsuit claims that EPA unlawfully ignored the requirements that water quality criteria be based on true biological impairment and instead established numeric criteria for nitrogen and phosphorus in water bodies where they would not actually cause such an imbalance.
The lawsuit further contends that EPA’s shortcut numeric criteria are not based on sound scientific rationale or scientifically defensible methods because they would unlawfully restrict nitrogen and phosphorus in lakes, streams, and springs that are not impaired. In other instances where the lakes, streams, or springs are impaired, the lawsuit claims EPA’s standards will unlawfully regulate nutrients that are not causing the impairment.
The lawsuit also argues that EPA’s regulation is wrong in assuming that nitrogen and phosphorus levels above EPA’s numeric criteria will cause algal growth and thus impairment, and claims that EPA has ignored its own Science Advisory Board and set nitrogen standards when in fact nitrogen is not limiting and thus not responsible for impairment in fresh water bodies.
TFI said in a Dec. 8 news release that the federally directed nutrient rule signed by EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson on Nov. 14, 2010, and published in the Federal Register on Dec. 6 would replace the narrative nutrient criteria that are already being applied by Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection with arbitrary standards.