Welder Andy Johnson and his wife have built a natural fishpond on their property for their Wyoming family. Now the statist regulators of Obama’s EPA are threatening citizen Johnson with $75,000/day in fines, saying Andy is not in compliance with federal laws governing, I presume, family fishponds on private land. (Andy’s pond is not on federal land.) Wyoming senators Mike Enzi and John Barrasso, along with Louisiana Senator David Vitter, are hot on the case in defense of the fishpond-building Johnsons. What kind of draconian federal laws have Americans allowed to pass that would place a $75,000/day fine on a Wyoming pond-building family? Hopefully the entire state of Wyoming will rise up in support of the Johnsons against Obama’s intrusive EPA. FoxNews.com explains here.
All Andy Johnson wanted to do was build a stock pond on his sprawling eight-acre Wyoming farm. He and his wife Katie spent hours constructing it, filling it with crystal-clear water, and bringing in brook and brown trout, ducks and geese. It was a place where his horses could drink and graze, and a private playground for his three children.
But instead of enjoying the fruits of his labor, the Wyoming welder says he was harangued by the federal government, stuck in what he calls a petty power play by the Environmental Protection Agency. He claims the agency is now threatening him with civil and criminal penalties – including the threat of a $75,000-a-day fine.
“I have not paid them a dime nor will I,” a defiant Johnson told FoxNews.com. “I will go bankrupt if I have to fighting it. My wife and I built [the pond] together. We put our blood, sweat and tears into it. It was our dream.”
But Johnson may be in for a rude awakening.
The government says he violated the Clean Water Act by building a dam on a creek without a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers. Further, the EPA claims that material from his pond is being discharged into other waterways. Johnson says he built a stock pond — a man-made pond meant to attract wildlife — which is exempt from Clean Water Act regulations.
