Kayaker quits Army Corps of Engineers

A U.S. Army Corps of Engineers staffer who was facing discipline for joining a protest on the Los Angeles River has said goodbye to government work.

In the settlement of a whistle-blower complaint, Heather Wylie left the Ventura office of the corps earlier this month but admitted no wrongdoing in her weekend kayaking trip down the L.A. River last July. According to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which represented Wylie, the biologist is preparing for law school and will learn how to file environmental lawsuits against her former employer.

Wylie paddled down the L.A. River to prove that the much abused, runoff-filled waterway was traditionally navigable, a legal distinction that determines whether Clean Water Act protections apply to upstream, seasonal tributaries. The corps had concluded that most of the river was not, weakening protections.

The navigability standard is part of a national fight over a 2006 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that muddied the application of federal clean water regulations. In a memo released last week, the majority staff of the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform reported that enforcement of the Clean Water Act had suffered since the court’s decision.

The staff reviewed 20,000 pages of documents from the corps and the Environmental Protection Agency and found that in the wake of the ruling and the Bush administration’s interpretation of it, there had been a “dramatic decline in the number of Clean Water Act inspections, investigations and enforcement actions.”

The memo also outlines some political meddling in navigability determinations for the Santa Cruz River in Arizona.

-- Bettina Boxall