[SUNDAY FEATURE] Family pond boils at center of a ‘regulatory war’ in Wyoming

Flanked by friends, family and supporters, Andy Johnson of Fort Bridger, Wyoming, speaks at the State Capitol in Cheyenne about his lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency. Johnson is suing the EPA for the right to maintain a stock pond he built on private property south of Fort Bridger. The EPA has said the pond violates the Clean Water Act and it is threatening to impose a $37,500 fine for each day Johnson doesn't demolish it. /James Chilton/Wyoming Tribune Eagle
Flanked by friends, family and supporters, Andy Johnson of Fort Bridger, Wyoming, speaks at the State Capitol in Cheyenne about his lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency. Johnson is suing the EPA for the right to maintain a stock pond he built on private property south of Fort Bridger. The EPA has said the pond violates the Clean Water Act and it is threatening to impose a $37,500 fine for each day Johnson doesn’t demolish it. /James Chilton/Wyoming Tribune Eagle

By Jack Healy | The New York Times

The sun was sinking and the brook trout were biting, so Andy Johnson and his daughter Aspen, 6, stepped onto their sun-bleached pier, hooked some mealworms and cast their lines into the most infamous pond in the West.

It is just a splotch of placid water amid endless ripples of grazing land here in western Wyoming. But in the two years since Mr. Johnson dammed a small creek running through his front yard to create the pond, it has become an emblem for conservative groups and local governments that are fighting what Senator Michael B. Enzi called a “regulatory war” with the Obama administration over environmental issues ranging from water quality to gas drilling, coal power plants to sage grouse.

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