Publication

On October 18, 1997, the 25th anniversary of the enactment of the Clean Water Act, the Vice President called for a renewed effort to restore and protect water quality. The Vice President asked that the Secretary of Agriculture and the Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA), working with other affected agencies, develop a Clean Water Action Plan that builds on clean water success and addresses the following three major goals:

    (1) enhanced protection from public health threats posed by water pollution;
    (2) more effective control of polluted runoff; and
    (3) promotion of water quality protection on a watershed basis.

On February 14, 1998, U.S. EPA Administrator Browner and Secretary Glickman, U.S. Department of Agriculture, submitted the Clean Water Action Plan to the Vice President. A key component in the Action Plan involves a watershed approach that identifies the most critical water quality problems and focuses on a cooperative approach to develop and implement effective strategies to solve those problems. The Action Plan provides a blueprint of more than 100 specific actions that are designed to support continued progress toward clean water across the nation. One of the specific actions calls on the state environmental agency and Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) State Conservationist to provide leadership in bringing all levels of government, the private sector, and the public together to undertake the process for conducting unified watershed assessments.

The unified watershed assessments provide the foundation for this cooperative approach to restoring and protecting water quality, and support the setting of watershed restoration priorities. The objective of the unified watershed assessments is to combine assessments and build on current, cooperative efforts to identify common priorities - not to create a new activity that competes with existing processes. As indicated in the Clean Water Action Plan, draft watershed assessments and draft watershed restoration priorities are to be scheduled for public comment by August 1, 1998, and final assessments and final watershed restoration priorities are scheduled to be completed by October 1, 1998.

These are Adobe Acrobat PDF documents. You will need the free Acrobat Reader software, available from Adobe's web site, to view them. Important Note: This report includes numerous maps, so some of these files are quite large. You can download the full report, or individual files. If your computer is having difficulties displaying a file over the web, try storing it locally and then displaying the local copy. Right-click on the link Select "Save Target As..." or "Save Link As..." from the menu Note the name of the file and the directory where it is being stored. Run the Acrobat Reader software and open the stored file. Full Report (95 pages, 8.3M file)

Unified Watershed Assessment

I. Clean Water Action Plan - Unified Watershed Assessments (4 pages, 530K file)

Geographic Scope and Scale
State of Illinois Natural Resources Coordinating Council-Watershed Management Committee

A. Identification of Watershed Priorities (15 pages, 3.9M file)

Process for Identifying High Priority Areas

Illinois Environmental Protection Agency
Illinois Department of Agriculture
Illinois Department of Natural Resources
USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
The Nature Conservancy
Comparing Priority Areas Among Agencies/NGOs
Integrating Priorities Among Agencies/NGOs

B. Categorization of Watersheds for the Unified Watershed Assessments (2 pages, 17K file)

CATEGORY I – Watersheds in Need of Restoration
CATEGORY II – Watersheds meeting goals
CATEGORY III – Watersheds with pristine/sensitive aquatic system conditions on lands administered by federal, state, or tribal governments
CATEGORY IV – Watersheds with insufficient data to make an assessment

II. Clean Water Action Plan -- Defining Watershed Restoration Priorities (19 pages, 940K file)

Watershed Restoration Priorities for Illinois

III. Public Participation

Appendix A - Finding Your Watershed (35 pages, 2.7M file)

Appendix B - Unified Watershed Assessments for 1998 (19 pages, 40K file)