Alpacka Raft leads the pack supporting clean water

Photo courtesy Alpacka Raft

Alpacka Raft is a small, family-owned manufacturing company in Mancos, Colo. They make packrafts — tiny, portable boats designed for big adventures. Their staff of 25 in a rural Colorado town of roughly 1,400 builds the boats that define and refine the sport of packrafting. Every Alpacka Raft is made by hand and shipped from the factory nestled against the base of the beautiful La Plata mountains in rural southwest Colorado.

Thor and Sarah Tingey are co-owners of this growing small business. And they are concerned about plans to roll back protections on tributary streams and other bodies of water that provide habitat for fish and places for their customers to use their products.

“It all begins with clean water," Sarah says. "Nobody ever bought an Alpacka Raft to experience the joy of polluted rivers and streams. For this reason, we are strongly opposed to the changes to the Clean Water Act recently proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers through the reversal of the 2015 Clean Water Rule.”

The Clean Water Rule was put in place in 2015. It protects tributary streams and other bodies of water that provide feeding, spawning and brood rearing habitat for fish all over America. Now, the current administration wants to do away with that protection. And Alpacka Raft is standing their ground on this issue.

“We all live downstream," Sarah says. "Our water is only as clean as what happens to it upstream. It’s critical that the Clean Water Act control pollution at its source — the headwaters and upstream wetlands that give rise to the rivers below. The Act — and the 2015 Clean Water Rule supporting it — were designed to ensure that our nation’s small waters remain intact, and that the water flowing from them is fresh and clean.”

This flawed proposal would impact businesses across America. It may impact your business. We’re urging you to register your opposition minutes today and go to http://standup.tu.org/cleanwater/ to comment on this proposal. Here are some things you might want to mention:

• Clean water is critical for healthy fish and wildlife populations.
• Rolling back widely supported and scientifically sound protections is unacceptable.
• We all live downstream: You should have the peace of mind in knowing your water is protected upstream. (No matter where you live, you live in a watershed.)
• The 2015 Clean Water Rule includes long-standing exemptions for farmers and ranchers.
• Clean water is the lynchpin of the outdoor recreation economy which creates millions of jobs and brings in billions in consumer spending, federal, state and local taxes.

The deadline for comments is April 15, 2019. But don’t wait – do it now!