In just the type of ruling one has come to expect from the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court, a panel of the 29 Idiots Who Think They Are The Real Government has ruled that every boat that floats on any water of the US must be regulated the same as if it was a large, ocean-going freighter. They have ruled that the EPA must require every boater to go through the same inspection and permitting process (known as the "800 Permit" if you are familiar with such things), pay the same $1,000 fee and follow all the same rules as ocean-going vessels.
The rules that the EPA has for boats in the present are reasonable enough: they require vessels from foreign ports to NOT discharge their bilges or ballast water in US inland waterways (this is how invasive species such as the Zebra Mussel or the Mitten Crab got here). They have exempted recreational vessels, because they don't have ballast tanks, don't fill those ballast tanks which they don't have in foreign waters, and don't maintain huge tanks for oily wastewater, which freighters generate in the hundreds of tons (a junker recreational vessel with even poorly-maintained engines might discharge a couple of gallons of bilge water occasionally with maybe an ounce or two of oily waste, but very few recreational vessels are this poorly maintained).
So, our supposed friends in the boating industry rush off and have a Bill introduced in Congress to re-exempt us from the ruling of the Ninth Circus.
The only problem is, the Bill, HR 2550, is flawed, because it leaves out a number of things, not the least of which is TREATED sewage. I have a state-of-the-art sewage treatment system on my boat. It takes the toilet sewage, holds it, mixes it with just enough salt to make it conductive, then zaps it with a huge electrical charge to kill all the bacteria in it. What is discharged is just sterile solids and water. I pay/paid a lot of money to keep this system up because I AM a good steward of the environment, even though I'd gut-shoot Gaia if she appeared in front of me (copper bullet required, I have a magazine full of them). HR 2550 leaves out nice guys like me, so, because I have a sewage system, instead of a holding tank (which many people discharge, untreated into the river anyway because there aren't enough pump-out stations), I will have to go through the EPA "800-Permit" process.
If we boaters are lucky, the Ninth circus will get reversed by the SCOTUS, because their ruling is absurd, putting recreational boats all the way down to canoes in the same class with freighters.
Your (and my, unfortunately) Ninth circus at work. Aren't they geniuses?
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UPDATE: 072407 1323 PDT: I just spoke with an executive at BoatUS, the major voice for recreational boating in our nation. She was very friendly, and seemed anxious to have me on board with HR 2550. She told me that since sewage treatment effluents come under different laws than are addressed in the Ninth Circus ruling, I need not worry. I countered with the list of effluents that IS mentioned in HR 2550, wondering why there couldn't at least be a mention of the other effluents being regulated by other divisions of the code. She said that she would contact the sponsors' legal counsel and see if she could arrange that, just so as to slam the door on a "re-interpretation" of the regulation expressly forbidding MSD discharges. I then told her I would wait and see.
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