GALE WARNINGS - NJ AUDUBON ON WHITMAN'S NOMINATATION TO HEAD EPA
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NJ AUDUBON ON WHITMAN'S NOMINATATION TO HEAD EPA
Date: 28 Dec 2000
From: bill neil billneil@njaudubon.org
Dear Legislators, Conservationists, Citizens:
On Friday, Dec. 22, 2000, President Elect George Bush nominated
Governor Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey to the nation's top
environmental job, Administrator of the US Environmental
Protection Agency.
New Jersey Audubon feels compelled to speak out after
participating intensively for seven years in many of the processes
and proposals of her administration. We believe that the Governor
of New Jersey is, by temperament, inclination, and management
style, poorly suited for this position.
Below please find our brief essay entitled "Gale Warnings." In it we
address the view of many that we could do much worse under
President Bush than Governor Whitman. We believe that view to be
"over-simplified fatalism." We also think the Governor gave us a
revealing insight into the way she approaches regulatory matters
with her statement in a recent interview that "...we'll lose to
business, because they've got more gumption, more dollars to put
behind efforts, more power to sway things..." We wonder whether
this might not lead - has not already led - to two classes of citizens
appearing and appealing to regulatory bodies. And offer a key
insight as to why she has tried to weaken so many NJ
environmental regulations.
Inside our essay, we try to give you the flavor and feel of what it
was like to sit around the many "stakeholder" meetings convened
under Governor Whitman, and we note that she never once, at
least at the scores and scores of meetings we attended, ever
showed up in person to tell us what she really thought. And some
of these processes have dragged out for nearly half a decade - like
the wastewater/watershed rules.
Enjoy. If you would like a hard copy, just give us a call at 908-766-
6446.
Bill Neil
Director of Conservation (and "Stakeholder")
NJ Audubon Society
* * *
GALE WARNINGS: GOVERNOR WHITMAN NOMINATED FOR
U.S. E.P.A ADMINSTRATOR
COMMENTS OF THE NEW JERSEY AUDUBON SOCIETY
By William R. Neil, Director of Conservation
December 27, 2000
On Friday, December 22, 2000, President Elect George Bush
nominated Governor Christine Todd Whitman of New Jersey to the
nation's top environmental job, Administrator of the US
Environmental Protection Agency.
New Jersey Audubon feels compelled to speak out after
participating intensively for seven years in many of the processes
and proposals of her administration. We believe that the Governor
of New Jersey is, by temperament, inclination, and management
style, poorly suited for this position.
We give all due respect to the Governor's achievements as a
preserver of open space, the preservation of Sterling Forest in New
York, and her 1,000,000 acre program, the idea for which originated
in a policy memo drafted by New Jersey Audubon Society on
March 4, 1996. But saving open space in a roll-of-the-dice pattern
is quite a different thing than systematically controlling sprawl in
New Jersey, where the Governor is visibly failing. That's because
she has been quite content with a toothless, voluntary State Plan
that lacks standards, leaving zoning and building densities in the
hands of municipalities which won't zone to effectively protect even
the most sensitive of the Garden State's natural resources.
Essentially, Governor Whitman is turning her back on our own best
land-use history. In our Pinelands, which have been shielded since
1980 by one of the nation's most innovative regulatory land-use
systems, votes of the Commission overseeing its regulations now
go 2-1 to weaken those protections, thanks to a spate of poor
appointments by Governor Whitman. Saving open space is not,
however, central to the mission of the USEPA, and it is the
reluctance of Governor Whitman to build upon New Jersey's good
tradition of land use regulation, that offers us a strong clue about
what is to come and worries us the most about her appointment to
the USEPA.
We appreciate the views of New Jersey's Senators and some
national environmental groups who reason that, given President-
Elect Bush's environmental record and views, we should consider
ourselves fortunate to have a moderate on the environment - we
could do much worse, they say. While this certainly is a plausible
position to take on the rather grim prospects for the environment
under President Bush, we respectively disagree with this rather
over-simplified fatalism.
Because of our first hand knowledge and experience under
Governor Whitman, we feel that we must issue "gale warnings" to
our representatives and the national environmental community. The
primary mission of the USEPA is to issue regulations and
standards governing the amount of pollutants that can be legally
discharged to our air and water and to protect human health from at
least some of the myriad of chemical products that appear in the
marketplace. EPA also has important oversight duties concerning
the regulation of wetlands. Thus regulatory concerns are at the
heart of the matter. But it is on regulatory issues that Governor
Whitman has serious philosophical and practical problems. It is her
attempts to weaken wetlands and water regulations that have
caused the greatest uproar in New Jersey. She herself set the
stage for struggles in these areas by coming into office with barely
disguised hostility toward environmental regulations. The code
words used in the fall campaign by President Elect Bush -
"command and control" - were heard early and often in the first
years of the Whitman administration.
Her Administration spent a great deal of time promoting the Dutch
model of environmental regulation which, among much else, sets
long term goals and gives businesses the freedom to pick the
methods. It sounded so good, until one stopped gazing at the
Dutch "heavens" and focused on the ground-level attempts in
Washington (the Contract with America and Congressman
Schuster's "Dirty Water" Bill) and Trenton to weaken water
pollution standards. We said it at the time and we worry about it for
the nation's sake now: while everyone sat around Whitman's
"stakeholder's" tables pretending they had no big differences and
promising not to sue each other (at least that was the Governor's
hope), sophisticated lobbyists for industry were hellbent on ripping
out the floorboards of our national and state protective standards.
While the Governor held a soothing green umbrella over the
processes, reassuring the public of her commitment to
environmental protection, and stressing the need for efficiency and
cutting red tape, water and wetland protection standards were
actually being weakened.
It was not as if clues were missing for what was about to unfold.
The water battles had been preceded by other policy initiatives that
should have given friends of the environment pause. As David
Halbfinger wrote in the New York Times on December, 26, 2000
("Two Grades, One Record," pps. 1& 26.):
...she cut its budget (NJDEP) by 30 percent and laid off hundreds
of workers. She ordered that state regulations be no more stringent
than federal rules. And she cut inspections, eliminated penalties
and introduced grace periods for violators, to the point that
collections of environmental fines plunged 80 percent.
Adopting the motto "Open for Business," Governor Whitman
eliminated the environmental prosecutors Mr. Florio had introduced,
and replaced a public advocate's office, which had at times sued
the state on behalf of environmental groups, with a business
ombudsman's office to guide businesses through the permitting
process. And she sought to move away from punitive measures
toward voluntary compliance. (P.26)
There has been a predictable pattern in Governor Whitman's
handling of environmental regulations. It began in early 1996 with
the publication of a massive rewrite and weakening of water-related
regulations, running to hundreds of pages in the February 5, 1996
issue of the New Jersey Register. The scope and sophistication of
the technical changes and weakenings placed comprehension of
the proposal out of the reach of most citizens. Thus began a long
battle of official denial of increased pollution, op-ed and
letter-to-the-
editor debates and gradual retreat and withdrawal of the proposal
for re- write under a growing storm of public protest, as the
technical and "legal" cover for the weakenings was exposed. The
same process, on a smaller scale, happened with the December 2,
1996 publication in the New Jersey Register of revisions to New
Jersey's Fresh Water Wetlands Protection Act rules, the nation's
strongest. Again, a storm of public criticism led to the rules
withdrawal. They would re-emerge, four years later, in the summer
of 2000, in a massive re-write that stretched to hundreds of pages,
much larger than the original, and again have come under a hail of
criticism that they are poor revisions and loaded with new General
Permits that trouble conservationists.
Most recently, this year, as the culmination of a process that has
dragged out since 1996, Governor Whitman's wastewater and
watershed rule proposal, again running to hundreds of pages, was
greeted with nearly universal incomprehensibility this past summer.
Builders, the state Business and Industry Association, and
municipal officials, all asked for more time to understand a rule that
they had had months to digest. And with all the legal and technical
help money can buy, they were still not sure they understood how
the rule worked - or didn't work. This was for a rule that was
supposed to help control sprawl and lend itself to predictability and
certainty in the crucial policy area of wastewater infrastructure
planning. Much of the environmental community, while lauding the
Governor's goals, found the rule much too weak and lacking in the
clarity and standards necessary to achieve this goal. As we write
in December, the NJ Legislature is on the verge of declaring the
proposal out of step with Legislative intent, very broadly defined.
Our view is that despite having had nearly 4 years to decide what
she wants to do, Governor Whitman has once again made nearly
all parties dissatisfied and still has not made up her mind on key
policy calls that are necessary to end its utter confusion.
That was what led us to make our "osprey" comparison. The
osprey is a new Marine Corps hybrid aircraft that is both plane and
helicopter, but which seems to do neither one very well, and
crashes frequently. It looks like it has a design "identity crisis." So
does Governor Whitman when it comes to environmental
regulations. These are not good omens for someone heading into
the top job at EPA.
Neither is the fact that the Governor keeps quite a distant, hands-
off approach to these matters. In the four years of the watershed
process, involving scores of meetings with stakeholders, the
Governor never set foot in any of the meetings. In the first wetland
regulations' revision proposal, when it was withdrawn under
withering criticism in 1997, the press accounts made it sound like
the terrible rule must have been issued under some rogue
administrator from a different administration, not her very own at the
New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. It was as if
she was totally unaware that her own DEP Commissioner was
publishing gutting regulations that she would later have to disown.
There seemed to be no connection, no responsibility. Indeed,
throughout the numerous meetings we've attended through the
Whitman Administration's massive regulatory revision processes,
we don't ever recall seeing the Governor attend, sit down once and
get her hands dirty and share her thoughts and ideas with all the
suffering stakeholders. It may be one reason why these have been,
despite her soothing sounds and wishes, time after time, rather
fruitless stalemates that leave participants with a bitter aftertaste.
And, we should note, these have ended in stalemates after
conservationists have exhausted themselves in blunting the worst
of the weakening provisions.
We have heard quite of few comments recently about how Governor
Whitman has protected New Jersey's coast. We think you should
know that her revisions of New Jersey coastal law (called CAFRA)
started out pretty well, weakened year by year as they dragged out
between 1997-1999, and have ended with both builders and
environmentalists suing on grounds so convoluted that they make
the recent election issues in Florida seem straightforward. And the
Governor flatly refused to campaign with us to get the Legislature
to close an infamous coastal law loophole, which greatly
compromises the effectiveness of the regulatory changes she
proposed. Time after time on major environmental issues, this
Governor has refused to take up any issue that might give her a
difficult road in the Legislature.
Recently, in an interview with the Star-Ledger, (December 20,
2000, "Terms of Triumph and of Frustration," page 32, ) the
Governor spoke some revealing and troubling words about her
views of those that will be competing before her at EPA, and have
been competing in the policy arena before her as Governor for the
past 7 years. She said that
If you let it be seen that you can only have an either/or, we'll lose to
business, because THEY'VE GOT MORE GUMPTION, MORE
DOLLARS TO PUT BEHIND EFFORTS, MORE POWER TO
SWAY THINGS. We've got to show that we can strike the balance,
and we've done that and done that successfully. (Our emphasis).
Now that's a marvelously revealing comment, and one that troubles
us for someone heading into EPA. We thank Governor Whitman for
her candor about who has more power and money, which is a frank
and correct observation about this political era, as advocates for
campaign finance reform never cease in telling us. But as for
gumption, defined as courageous or ambitious enterprise, as
opposed to just shrewd common sense (from the context it seems
the governor meant courage and ambition), we can only note that
based on the state of the environmental community in NJ over the
past ten years, we might forgive her for this observation. That was
not always the case however, because it took a lot of gumption to
get the Pinelands legislation and the nation's toughest wetlands
protections passed, in 1979 and 1987, respectively. Since then, on
land-use regulatory tools, the state's gone South and West with a
vengeance.
But it also seems that this is a clear personal and philosophical
preference with a troubling implication: one can't oppose business
interests on major regulatory or legislative matters and it's futile to
try, we guess even when it's in the public interest to do so. And on
some matters of great importance at the EPA involving questions of
human and ecosystem health, it is often necessary to impose
substantial costs on business interests. Notice we didn't say
always or in every situation. But this Governor's preference is clear,
and it can well lead to a lack of necessary objectivity - objectivity
which the EPA Administrator post demands.
We think that the Governor's attitude translates all too easily into
two classes of citizenship and standing before the regulatory
bodies. We said as much in watching her Administration give the
cranberry growers of New Jersey the go ahead to destroy 300
acres of wetlands even though more than 90% of the written
comments from the public opposed her General Permit proposal
and the industry was facing a known supply glut. Not only has her
stance on this permit sanctioned the unnecessary destruction of
wetlands, now taxpayers at the state and federal level now are
kicking in some $73 million dollars to aid price-stricken growers
and landowners in the cranberry industry, when it was the
industry's own relentless pursuit of expansion which caused their
market to crash. Because of massive amounts of campaign
contributions and the fact that the heads of the regulatory agencies
are political appointees, we testified bluntly in 1999 that the
environmental community implicitly did not have equal standing
before the agencies considering the proposals.
We do think, however, that plenty of gumption was on display when
one of the state's largest political donors and cranberry growers,
A.R. DeMarco Enterprises, Inc. was accused of filling 22 acres of
wetlands without obtaining a permit so that he could expand his
cranberry bog operations. New Jersey's new Inspector General
issued (November, 2000) a very critical report on New Jersey's
proposed settlement of this, the largest freshwater fill in the law's
history. And this under a DEP Commissioner who was trying to do
something very generous for a industry to which he had very close
ties. Governor Whitman had no problem with this, and never replied
to our letter asking her to withdraw the permit because of
Commissioner Shinn's conflicts of interest. This also has some
troubling implications for the role that she will play at EPA.
Similarly, in the face of overwhelming citizen opposition, the
Governor has given her full support to the biggest proposed
wetlands fill in the Clean Water Act's history in the Northeast, more
than 200 acres to be filled to allow a new massive new shopping
mall to be build in the Meadowlands (Meadowlands Mills), just
outside New York City. Here the common sense of citizens is on
sounder ground than the Mills Corporation's marketing experts:
"just what New Jersey needs," citizen after citizen sarcastically
remarked at the public hearings, "another shopping mall." The
Governor just can't seem to see that the EPA chief needs to bring
a healthy skepticism to the table about some of the business
community's proposals. When we see how the cranberry industry
has wrecked its own market, driving small growers under, and the
trends in energy "deregulation" (where are those three consecutive
years of lower prices we were all promised when it was being
marketed in New Jersey?), we wonder whether the Governor knows
that the bloom is off the rose of the era of deregulation?
We would be unfair to the Governor and to environmental history in
New Jersey if we didn't mention and thank the Governor for her
rapid protection of the horseshoe crab from over-harvesting. Her
actions stand in stark contrast to the horrendous anti-
environmental positions of Virginia's Governor James Gilmore III,
who stonewalled, year after year, in limiting his state's harvest of
the horseshoe crab, before he finally relented this past year - the
last holdout on the eastern seaboard.
But the full context of Governor Whitman's action on the horseshoe
crab issue needs to be stated. The business interests supporting
continued massive harvesting were, by comparison to other issues,
a narrow segment of public opinion, truly a special, special
interest. So there was no huge political or financial fall-out to her
decision. Compared to the financial stakes linked to decisions she
will have to make at EPA, this was, as the saying goes, a "piece of
cake."
We conclude with a plea to our Senators, to our delegation in
Congress: be forewarned on what the Whitman record, relevant to
EPA's regulatory mission, has been in New Jersey. We wonder
aloud whether we would not rather face someone going to EPA
who was an upfront, open regulatory "gutter." Now we hope that we
are wrong about what Governor Whitman will do at EPA, but we
think our officials and our colleagues at the national environmental
organizations are just a bit rosy eyed if they think, based on the
historical record we have laid out, that this is a happy choice to
head the federal EPA. We sincerely hope that Governor Whitman
realizes the implications of her new role and does an about face
from her regulatory history in New Jersey. But the record really
cannot support that optimism.
So if you see that inviting green umbrella go up, or hear talk of the
Dutch model, our advice is to get your magnifying glass out and
legal funds ready, and brace yourselves for grand regulatory
revisions - with stealthy weakenings buried deep within. And all
done, mind you, with a gracious smile and long denials that
anyone so environmental friendly would even consider such
actions. Gumption indeed.
William R. Neil
Director of Conservation
* * *
NJ Audubon Society
POB 693
Bernardsville NJ 07924
Tel: 908-766-5787
Fax: 908-766-7775
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