Betty Olson fingers neighbor for violations of Clean Water Act

This blog trolls earth hater former South Dakota legislator Betty Olson and her Facebook page pretty relentlessly. Nearly all of her FB friends are off the wall sovereign citizen rancher types and she normally posts her Grand River Roundup column there before it goes to the Rapid City Journal.

She's actually a pretty good recorder chronicling the extreme wrong wing of the Republican Party in the state's flyover frontier.

But, this week marks a time when she actually comes out as a whistle-blower.

Daryl Thompson called me from over by Mobridge to tell me that the site of another town of Moreau is under Lake Oahe. Daryl runs cows right next to where the Moreau River runs into the Missouri River on the Cheyenne River Reservation and during one of the dry years he rescued a highway sign that had been submerged along a road under Lake Oahe. [Betty Olson]

Most grazing land in South Dakota is privately owned or managed by the US Forest Service. Water quality within the Moreau basin is already marginal to poor due largely to livestock-caused E. coli contamination but development and prioritization for the watershed are affected by unique jurisdictional issues.

It turns out the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe has a letter (pdf) sitting before US Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt pursuant to their appeal of a denied injunction the tribe believes violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

The letter reminds EPA that the Waters of the United States rule cites upstream polluters with violations of the Clean Water Act and even casual reading suggests Daryl Thompson is breaking the law thumbing his nose at indigenous religious freedoms grazing livestock depositing hormone-laden manure upstream of a sovereign tribal nation.

US Bureau of Land Management officials announced Friday they are loosening grazing restrictions originally put in place to protect land from possible over-grazing and to conserve the quality of native grasses.