Topeka ? Creeks and streams across Kansas are disappearing from an important map, and it has nothing to do with drought.

The streams still exist, but they are in line for possible removal from the state list of bodies of water that require periodic monitoring for pollution problems.

Rural and pro-agriculture lawmakers are calling this reduction in environmental regulation a sign of common sense.

“We are on the right track,” said state Sen. Janis Lee, D-Kensington, who pushed for legislation two years ago that set up the process of taking certain streams off the Kansas Surface Water Register.

But environmentalists are calling it a major setback.

“There could be virtually an unlimited amount of pollution that goes into these streams,” said Charles Benjamin, an attorney for the Kansas chapter of the Sierra Club.

A report released last week by the Kansas office of the U.S. Geological Survey, based in Lawrence, showed the rates of flow of thousands of miles of stream segments in Kansas.

Under a bill approved by the Legislature in 2001, the Geological Survey report is the starting point for removing streams from most environmental regulations.

The legislation said that a stream with a 10-year median flow of less than one cubic foot of water per second was essentially no longer a stream. Imagine standing by a stream and 7 1/2 gallons of water run by every second. That is one cubic foot of water. The 10-year median would be the middle measure of flows over a 10-year period, so sometimes the stream could be flooding and sometimes it could be dry.

In the study, 30 percent of the 2,232 stream segments have a stream flow of less than the one-cubic-foot-per-second standard and potentially could be freed from environmental monitoring. The study said that if all flow data were used instead of just a 10-year period — some Kansas stream gauges date to 1895 — then 40 percent of the stream segments had median flows of less than one cubic foot per second.

In western Kansas more than half the stream segments could be stricken.

¢ 6News video: The Capitol Report — State water woes reach beyond drought¢ USGS report on median stream flows for streams on the Kansas Surface Water Register¢ Kansas Surface Water Register (pdf document)¢ Sierra Club, Kansas Chapter¢ Kansas Natural Resources Council

To agricultural interests, removing these stream segments from environmental regulations makes sense. Many of the stream segments are simply low places that are dry most of the time and occasionally fill with water. It would be impossible, they say, to keep these streams clean enough to drink.

But Benjamin said that argument was false. Streams eventually flow into bodies of water for human drinking, swimming and fishing. That is why, he said, the federal Clean Water Act governs all waters, even those called intermittent and ephemeral streams.

Benjamin has accused rural lawmakers, who dominate the legislative environmental committees, of pushing for the relaxation of environmental regulations to protect the cattle industry. But Lee and others say they are trying to focus limited state resources on regulation of more significant streams.

“I don’t think this is something that should frighten environmentalists,” she said.

Benjamin questioned how lawmakers could be concerned about the efficient use of resources when the process of removing streams from the register would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The Geological Survey study alone cost the state $191,000, and it is only the start of the process.

Now, the Kansas Department of Health and Environment must determine which of the streams identified by the study can be removed from the list. Other criteria can keep them on the list, such as whether a wastewater treatment plant dumps into the stream, or if there is an endangered or threatened species that needs the stream. Also, if there is pooling that provides a refuge for aquatic life, there will have to be a cost-benefit analysis of that situation.

In addition, the whole process could come tumbling down if the federal Environmental Protection Agency says the legislation runs afoul of the Clean Water Act. State and EPA officials are meeting to discuss these issues..