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Show OWENS CRITICIZES EPA FOR DELIBERATE SLOWING OF GRANTS Rep. Wayne Owens today criticized the Environmental Environment-al Protection Agency for deliberately de-liberately slowing down the flow of waste treatment facility grants to needy municipalities mu-nicipalities across the country. coun-try. Owens said that the Clean Water Act of 1972 established establish-ed a national goal to clean up the nation's waters by 1985. He said it also authorized auth-orized $18 billion to be spent in fiscal years 73,74 and 75 to construct and update municipal mu-nicipal waste treatment facilities. fa-cilities. As a resultof this bureaucratic bureau-cratic footdragging, only $17.3 million of the $5 billion authorized had been spent as of the end of 1973 Seven Utah communities currently have grant applications appli-cations pending in EPA some have been held as long as 10 months: Beaver ($590,000), Castledale Orangeville ($250,000), Cedar Ce-dar City ($1,047,000), Gunnison Gun-nison ($756,000), Huntington Hunting-ton ($281,000), Heber City ($230,000) and Wellsville ($517,000). "In the meantime, while the applications pile up, cities cit-ies all over the country continue con-tinue to spill raw sewage into this nation's waters," said Owens. In a letter to the Administrator Admin-istrator of EPA "Russell Train, Owens requested detailed de-tailed information of what the agency has done to streamline the grant processing pro-cessing system since the hearings were held. He expressed ex-pressed hope that the program pro-gram will soon begin to move in the direction |