Deery Talks About Proposed Water Protection

State Sen. Spencer Deery (R-West Lafayette), who represents Senate District 23, which includes portions of Montgomery and Tippecanoe counties and all of Fountain, Parke, Vermillion and Warren counties, shared his reaction after Senate Bill 4 was voted on.

“I have long suspected that the first legislation we would pass to expand water protections in our state would not accomplish everything I, or our community, wanted. That is certainly the case with Senate Bill 4. However, my committee amendments significantly improved the bill. Under these changes, if an entity attempts to build a pipeline from Tippecanoe County to the LEAP district in Boone County, or any other distant location, the project would need to be studied and evaluated against the public interest. The flow of water would be capped, and the permit could be revoked if its terms were not followed. These were meaningful wins, but their impact was initially limited because they only applied to pipelines with a capacity exceeding 30 million gallons a day. I am grateful to the chairman of the Senate Committee on Utilities and my colleagues for hearing my argument that it made no sense to establish a regulatory framework and then apply it only to such large pipelines. The amendment I presented on the floor Monday, which was approved by the Senate, reduced the trigger threshold threefold to 10 million gallons a day, which is the amount I advocated for last year. With these changes to the bill, I decided to vote in favor of the legislation.”