The Tennessee Clean Water Network is the only organization that watches the activities of the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, the Water Quality Control Board, state and federal legislation to ensure that they are all complying with current state and federal requirements. We do this by commenting on pollution permits that industry wants from TDEC. Many times permits are changed due to our comments.
 
We also monitor enforcement actions and lobby to make them strong enough to deter bad behavior. We help communities facing threats to their clean water resources by helping the with policy questions, helping them prepare for hearings, and helping them attract new members to their issue.
 
This directly affects water quality because we are making sure that those that are allowed by law to pollute, can only pollute to the minimum. When polluters destroy water quality we lobby for greater enforcement actions so that the polluter will think twice before polluting. One bad permit and one bad actor can ruin a $10,000,000 property acquisition. It can ruin a river for years. It can ruin public and aquatic health. Now that we have a staff attorney, we are able to do enforcement ourselves through our Clean Water Defense Fund.