Government Executive - Authors - Cyril T. Zaneski

The Thin Green Line

Cyril T. Zaneski — Thu, 01 May 2003 00:00:00 -0400

Park rangers are increasingly outnumbered and outgunned by poachers, drug smugglers and other criminals.

ith its bucolic vistas and soul-soothing forest trails, Shenandoah National Park seems to be a perfect place to forget your troubles. But visitors who come seeking solace should remember that criminals frequent the park too.

There were 16 robberies and aggravated assaults in the park last year, 320 cases of vandalism and disorderly conduct and 98 drug violations. Some of the nation's most sophisticated poachers prey on the park's wildlife and plants. Dozens of poachers have been arrested in recent years for killing bears and selling their organs to manufacturers of Asian medicines and their claws to jewelry makers. And last spring, a man was indicted for the murder of two women hiking the Appalachian Trail through the park in 1996. The indictment was delivered as the accused killer was just starting to serve an 11-year sentence for the 1997 attempted abduction of a woman-at Shenandoah National Park.

Ranger Dixon Freeland tries to keep the bad guys at bay. And he seems ready for anything. The husky 45-year-old has been trained at federal police academies, packs a pistol and wears a bulletproof vest under his green and gray Park Service uniform. But Freeland's lifeline is the radio he is supposed to use frequently as he patrols the park's famous, 105-mile Skyline Drive or investigates reports of trouble in the backcountry. "Minimally," Freeland explains, "what a law enforcement officer wants is for someone else to know where he is."

But rangers can't always call for help at Shenandoah. Its 1950s-vintage radio system can't reach vast areas of the park. "Seven forty, one eleven," Freeland barks into his radio as he steers his patrol SUV along the highway. There's no response, so he tries again: "Seven forty, one eleven." And again: "Seven forty, one eleven." At last, the dispatcher replies through static: "One eleven. You're barely readable."

"We're at one of the highest points in the park, and they are having trouble hearing me," Freeland says. "You know what that means? If you're in one of the places a ranger needs to be in Shenandoah National Park, and you need help, you're screwed."

Freeland is not the only park ranger who's vulnerable. The Park Service's thin green line is facing a worsening crisis. Three rangers have been killed in the line of duty in the last four years. The latest, Ranger Kris Eggle, was shot to death by drug smugglers at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument on the Arizona-Mexico border last August. A 2001 Justice Department study showed that park rangers are assaulted more frequently than other federal law enforcement agents. Rangers are injured or killed in assaults at an annual rate of 15 per 1,000-three times the frequency of the next most vulnerable group, Customs agents.

IMMINENT DANGER

The threat to park rangers is no surprise to the National Park Service. Eggle's death came after four reports by government and outside investigators, all criticizing law enforcement in the parks. All the studies concluded that the ranger corps is understaffed, poorly managed and ill equipped. Unless the agency acts quickly, the reports warned, the nation's precious natural, cultural and archaeological resources-and the rangers themselves-face imminent danger.

Interior Department Inspector General Earl Devaney, in a scathing January 2002 report titled "A Disquieting State of Disorder," emphasized the dangers posed by drug trafficking and illegal immigrants passing through Organ Pipe and other border parks. Devaney noted that park superintendents frequently failed to adequately staff law enforcement positions in dangerous spots in an attempt to prevent rangers from appearing "too much like cops." To illustrate the Park Service's lax approach to law enforcement, Devaney told the Senate Finance Committee in January that Organ Pipe had, at that time, only three permanent law enforcement rangers-three fewer than when Eggle was killed.

"Out of 25 recommendations, we only used the word 'immediate' once to describe the urgency of a needed reform. This was with regard to our recommendation that staffing shortages, which pose a clear safety risk to law enforcement officers, be identified-immediately," Devaney told lawmakers. "Over a year has passed since that recommendation was formally made and, to our knowledge, no serious attempt has been made by the Park Service to complete this task."

Asked why the service hasn't acted, Devaney replied bluntly: "I have never seen an organization more unwilling to accept constructive criticism or embrace new ideas than the National Park Service. Their culture is to fight fiercely to protect the status quo and reject any idea that is not their own."

Devaney and the other evaluators recommended increasing the number of law enforcement rangers by at least 615 and up to 1,295 full-time employees just to keep up with the explosive growth of the park system over the last 20 years. During that time, the acreage of parkland, the number of visitors and the amount of criminal activity in parks exploded while the number of rangers rose just slightly. Since 1978, national park acreage has grown by 170 percent, to more than 84 million acres, while the number of law enforcement specialists rose by just 25 percent, to 1,465 rangers. Today, each ranger is responsible for about 61,000 acres, more than double the territory assigned in the 1970s.

Clinton administration Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt appointed an investigative panel to study law enforcement in the parks. The panel warned the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in a 1999 report that inattention to police work already was threatening the rich natural and cultural heritage sites the Park Service was supposed to protect. "Because the national park system is vast, criminal activity is often successfully concealed," the panel said. "The onslaught takes its toll incrementally, almost imperceptibly. To many park visitors it is so incremental that it is a nonissue. To the trained eye, however, it is a crisis. In time, it will be too late or too expensive to reverse."

TOO FEW RANGERS

But the Park Service's contingent of law enforcement rangers has declined since the harsh evaluations began in 1999. In fact, the agency has 18 fewer rangers than it did four years ago. Dennis Burnett, the Park Service's top law enforcement official, says the agency's efforts to expand its ranger corps have been undermined by a lack of money and an expansion of duties in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and last summer's Western wildfires. "Congress has not given us the money we need," Burnett says, "and we've been given two more No. 1 priorities-homeland security and wildfire protection."

Rangers have begun leaving the Park Service for better-paying jobs at other federal agencies whose need for law enforcement officers has exploded because of homeland security needs, Burnett says. Meanwhile, rangers who are committed to the Park Service are getting frustrated because staffing shortfalls are making scarce the kind of backcountry work that rangers love. People who became rangers because they wanted to help hikers, for example, are now spending almost all their time on patrol or being called off to sit with M-16s in front of important national symbols, such as Independence Hall and the Statue of Liberty, or critical infrastructure such as dams.

"We're going to have to spend $30 million this year for gas masks and other equipment for homeland security and send our rangers away from parks on security alerts. And we're also being told at the same time that fighting fire is our highest priority," Burnett says.

"So we're being forced to pull armed rangers off the borders and elsewhere that they're needed. What else can we do with conflicting No. 1 priorities and a declining workforce?"

Even before the recent wildfire and terrorism crises, rangers have been instructed to enforce new laws strengthening protection of natural and cultural resources-the 1979 Archaeological Resource Protection Act, 1990 Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act and 1996 amendments to the Resource Protection Act. "And while we were being asked to do more, the money we needed to do the job never came through," Burnett says.

President Bush's $2.36 billion Park Service budget request for fiscal 2004 includes some additional money for improving security at border parks. The big budget item is the more than $700 million requested to reduce the backlog of facilities maintenance projects. Other than emphasizing the importance of protecting visitors at border parks, Park Service Director Fran Mainella did not mention any law enforcement problems in her March testimony before the House Appropriations Interior Subcommittee.

But Randall Kendrick, executive director of the U.S. Park Ranger Lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police, says Congress isn't giving the Park Service money to hire new rangers because the agency isn't asking for it. Indeed, a 2000 study of Park Service law enforcement by the International Association of Chiefs of Police notes that the agency increased overall spending by 56 percent and staffing by 2.5 percent between 1994 and 1999, but the number of rangers declined by 149 positions, or 8.7 percent, over that period. And the slide is continuing.

A frustrated Ginny Rousseau, chief ranger at Shenandoah and Burnett's wife, has had to cope with five vacancies on the park's 30-person law enforcement ranger staff. In addition, four law enforcement rangers have been dispatched to do homeland security work elsewhere. "We've always said we can do more with less," Rousseau says. "So in many ways, we became our own worst enemies. We can try to do everything, but that means we can't do anything very well."

Even before the Organ Pipe shooting sent shock waves through the ranger corps, Rousseau began implementing new patrol schemes to bolster the safety of rangers. The first thing she did was order rangers never to work without a supervisor knowing their whereabouts. In the past, she confesses, the park has had lightly trained seasonal rangers-temporary employees-patrolling Skyline Drive alone at night without any backup. "We just cannot let that happen anymore," she says. "When Shenandoah is particularly low on staffing because rangers have been drawn away on homeland security details, for example, Rousseau "shrinks the park" by closing sections of the main road. She took the steps to ensure safety with the backing of an unusually supportive superintendent, Doug Morris, a former law enforcement ranger.

The shifting of responsibilities to focus on greater law enforcement safety has led to some frustration among rangers at Shenandoah. They are all working overtime and not working the jobs that lured them to the Park Service in the first place. "There really isn't time anymore to patrol the backcountry," says Ken Johnson, a criminal investigator at Shenandoah. "This causes a morale problem among rangers who may have joined the agency to do just that. A ranger now isn't going to see the backcountry unless they are going back there to rescue somebody."

Rangers are known for being able to handle just about anything. Freeland, for example, began his career as an interpretive ranger-an educator and guide to park resources-before moving into law enforcement. He's now a full-fledged police officer, an emergency medical technician, a backcountry specialist proficient in rescuing stranded climbers and a naturalist capable of teaching visitors about park resources. "We like the challenge of wearing all the hats," Freeland says. "But some of our activities can conflict with one another. And they can sometimes prevent us from doing as good a job as we need to to protect resources. We're no longer doing a very good job of that."

TOO LITTLE LEADERSHIP

Shenandoah's law enforcement rangers answer directly to a superintendent with a background in law enforcement, which is unusual for the Park Service. Outside evaluators blamed the Park Service's law enforcement woes partly on poor law enforcement management by park superintendents, most of whom have backgrounds in concession management, facilities maintenance and engineering, not law enforcement.

The Chiefs of Police report in October 2000 described assignment of law enforcement rangers at national parks as "patently illogical and erratic." The asso-ciation recommended that management of law enforcement rangers become the responsibility not of park superintendents, but of a law enforcement specialist at Park Service headquarters in Washington. "The law enforcement function is not getting the leadership required to meet current and future demands," the association report says. "It lacks a sufficiently powerful champion and, at the national level, the organizational/structural position to exercise the voice it deserves." Rangers agree. They told association researchers that superintendents are not held sufficiently accountable for law enforcement conditions and practices and don't pay close attention to police work in the parks.

Interior IG Devaney says most park superintendents are not qualified to supervise law enforcement. "We do not consider a superintendent who has taken a two-week course in law enforcement at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia to be a professional law enforcement manager," he told the Senate Finance Committee in January. Devaney's investigators were told about superintendents who ordered rangers not to carry weapons so they would not offend park visitors. One group of eight rangers reported that their superintendent was diverting money appropriated for law enforcement to other activities.

Superintendents strongly oppose any move to take the responsibility for law enforcement management away from them. "A manager doesn't want anybody in the park that doesn't work for them," says the superintendent of a large Southeastern park who requested his name not be used. Devaney says the Park Service is unwilling to turn over control of law enforcement to a professional because it would be an acknowledgement of the importance of police work in the parks. "We simply do not believe that the service can bring itself to publicly say any national park is dangerous," he says.

But rangers are not afraid to speak out. They are concerned not only about their own safety in remote areas but also about the increasing threat to the natural resources they joined the Park Service to protect. The U.S. Park Rangers Lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police has begun releasing an annual list of what it considers the 10 most dangerous parks. First on its latest list-issued before Eggle was killed-is Organ Pipe. Shenandoah is fourth because of its dismal communications system. Freeland can't hide his frustration over the lousy radios in the park he loves. "It makes me angry that a bad radio system could put me in danger and make a widow of my wife," Freeland says. "It makes me angry because it can be prevented."

The cost of fixing Shenandoah's antiquated radio system is $4.7 million. And Shenandoah is not the only park with a bad radio system. In its 1999 report to Congress, the Park Service put the cost of fixing its communications systems at $115 million. The goal is to complete the conversions to modern narrow band technology in parks by Jan. 1, 2005, in keeping with a congressionally mandated goal for converting all federal radio systems.

TOO MUCH TO PROTECT

Park Service law enforcement is unusual even though all protection rangers have federal law enforcement training. The agency is first and foremost focused on protecting natural and cultural resources. The 1916 National Park Service Organic Act requires extraordinary protection of these resources-to preserve them "unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations."

"Park rangers have the most difficult job in law enforcement," says Skip Wissinger, an undercover law enforcement agent at Shenandoah. "They have to protect these areas that were set aside because of their extraordinary value to the nation. Our parks are the closest thing we have to holy places."

Preventing criminal or even accidental activity resulting in harm or loss puts intense pressure on law enforcement officers. It requires them to understand the root causes of crime. That means that Park Service officers must know a lot not only about criminal enterprises but also about unique resources at each of the Park Service's 388 units. It requires an understanding of the market forces related to the exploitation of natural resources. That can range from orchids at Big Cypress National Preserve in South Florida to the burgeoning drug trade on the Southwest border and the dumping of hazardous wastes at Mojave National Preserve and Death Valley National Park in California.

Because of Eggle's death and immigration concerns tied to homeland security, the Park Service's struggles in the Southwest have been in the national spotlight. The agency manages six units along the Mexican border for total of almost 1.2 million acres and 371 border miles, or 18 percent of the 2,069-mile border with Mexico between San Diego and Brownsville, Texas. Just 33 rangers work in those parks, and that includes naturalists and interpretative specialists as well as law enforcement rangers. Yet in the Tucson Sector of the border, which includes Coronado National Memorial, an estimated 30,000 illegal immigrants cross into the United States each month. A force of 8,000 Border Patrol officers also patrols the area, but few of them can reach rugged and remote areas of Coronado in time to assist the rangers.

Johnson says no one should be shocked that crime and other societal problems have moved into the parks. "When national parks were first opened, they were isolated Western entities," he says. Now, development has sprawled to the edge of parks and wilderness areas. "We can't consider ourselves isolated from the world," he says.

But Shenandoah, just a 90-minute drive from the Washington metropolitan area, never really was isolated from the world. Before Shenandoah became a national park in 1936, its lowlands were farms and pastures. To create the park, residents were bought out and oaks, hickories and other trees allowed to repopulate the once-cleared land. Reforestation allowed Congress in 1976 to designate 112 square miles of the park's almost 280 square miles as wilderness areas.

In recent years, the park has been under siege. Hazy air from power plants and traffic has clouded the park's famous vistas. Encroaching development along the park's edges is chewing away habitat for deer, bears, bobcats, turkeys and other animals. And poaching has begun to take a toll on the park's plants and wildlife. Well-organized poachers have depleted the American ginseng once common in the park-the plant is a critical ingredient in Asian medicines.

To fight increased poaching, Shenandoah has organized a three-member undercover investigative squad to supplement the effort of patrol rangers. The squad evolved from an investigation that began in 1996 and included the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the state of Virginia. Investigators targeted poachers who were killing bears to sell their organs, claws and teeth for Asian medicine and jewelry. The sting operation netted 52 arrests. A follow-up investigation in 2001 nabbed another 20 people. "These kinds of operations are continuing," Wissinger, the park's special agent, says. "We have only scratched the tip of the iceberg. In fact, we've only just learned that there is an iceberg."

Rousseau and criminal investigator Johnson have been trying to further develop police work in the park in cooperation with scientists and naturalists. "The theft of artifacts and resources has become a very big business-part of an $8 billion worldwide enterprise," Johnson says. "Our approach to law enforcement has to evolve to face that threat." Scientists at the park have developed plans to manage backcountry camping and limit illegal fires, enabling Rousseau to redeploy rangers to investigative work. "By working smarter," she says, "we have been able to spend less precious time patrolling for some of these routine problems."

But Shenandoah officials haven't been able to reassure a wary public spooked by the hiker murders that the park is not a dangerous place. Annual visits fell by 300,000 since the murders, down to 1.4 million last year. "Those were the kind of murders that make the hair stand up on the back of your neck," Johnson says. "So when people ask if it's safe to come back, they want us to tell them that we have plenty of rangers. And we can't assure them of that."

Cyril T. Zaneski is a senior editor at Congress Daily.

]]>

Swamped

Cyril T. Zaneski — Tue, 01 Apr 2003 00:00:00 -0500

The managers of Big Cypress National Preserve struggle to balance a wide range of competing demands on the preserve's resources.

oosting birds scatter from treetops as Bill Evans' helicopter whirs across Florida's Big Cypress Swamp. With herons, egrets and wood storks fluttering like brilliant white confetti below, he circles a stand of cypress trees, providing a glimpse down through the silvery canopy at a wild, hidden world.

With cool, parched winter winds drying the vast sea of wetland prairies that dominate South Florida's landscape, the water pounding around the bulbous cypress trunks lures thirsty native animals to drink and splash and to eat and be eaten. Birds and alligators, bears and white tail deer, frogs and turtles and snakes all gather at the watering hole. Even the most secretive and rare of creatures, the Florida panther, makes an occasional appearance.

The sight of just one cypress dome is enough to move a refugee from the snowbound North to tears of joy this February day. But the wild, subtropical landscape is not called Big Cypress for nothing. Evans, a helicopter pilot at Big Cypress National Preserve, swoops out over a sea of silvery gray cypress domes and islands of bright green slash pines and hardwoods floating in winter brown marshes. The treetops sprawl against a robin's egg blue sky and lend a look of rolling hills to the flat South Florida peninsula and-with so much biological wealth bubbling under the canopies of trees-assure the preserve's distinction as an ecological treasure.

Yet Big Cypress-2,400 square miles of forested swamps and grassy prairies-came very close to becoming another Florida development disaster. Thirty years ago, powerful local politicians and commercial interests were hell-bent on wringing dry this soggy landscape and building the world's largest airport. They came hot on the heels of land speculators, who by then already had sold tens of thousands of checkerboard-square lots here to sun-starved Northerners. The development scheme finally was derailed by an unlikely alliance of rough-hewn outdoor enthusiasts-hunters, fishermen and off-road joy riders-and silk-stocking conservationists. Congress and President Nixon hopped on the bandwagon in 1974, setting aside Big Cypress as the first in a new line of National Park Service preserves.

While the term "preserve" might suggest that use of an area would be strictly limited, Big Cypress has welcomed just about every kind of practice that environmentalists now are fighting to exclude from public lands. Unlike its older and more famous neighbor, Everglades National Park, where a canoe is the only means of transportation allowed off the pavement, Big Cypress accommodates free-wheeling riders of airboats, all-terrain vehicles and swamp buggies-home-built contraptions that rumble along on monster truck tires. Its lands also are used by hunters and gatherers of all kinds, oil drillers, cattlemen, two Indian tribes, owners of dozens of backcountry hunting camps, and pilots of aircraft-from the single-prop planes that use three private airstrips to the Boeing-747s that make training runs and land on the one large runway built during the great 1970s fight over the airport. "Nothing's easy down here," says the preserve's beleaguered superintendent, John Donahue. "Over at Everglades National Park, the answer to questions about use is usually 'no.' Here, everything is 'yes, but.' It's what comes after the 'but' that gets you in trouble."

Donahue and his predecessors have had plenty of trouble. They learned the hard way that it's impossible to manage so many competing uses in one place-even a very big place-and not step on toes or smudge one of the nation's ecological jewels. The swamp's designation as a preserve doesn't relieve the Park Service from having to protect and restore natural resources, which at Big Cypress include 34 endangered species of plants and animals afforded special protection under federal and state laws. Of the 98 surviving Florida panthers, 58 roam in Big Cypress, federal biologists say.

The conflict between maintaining a playground for people and protecting natural resources is at the heart of every fight in Big Cypress. In recent years, the preserve has been sued by environmentalists who want to curb off-road vehicular access to the backcountry; by sportsmen angry about efforts to limit their freewheeling ways; and by the Miccosukee Indian tribe, upset by the preserve's allegedly lax management of natural resources. A politically wired southwestern Florida family has been pushing to dramatically increase oil production in the swamp. And the Miccosukee and Seminole Indian tribes have applied for permits to build a small number of houses in the preserve, saying the legislation that set aside Big Cypress allows for reoccupation by the tribes, who were driven into the Everglades by the Army in the 19th century. Donahue says preserve officials will study the proposals. "This is a living, breathing, evolving cultural landscape," he says.

OIL AND BUGGIES

Managers of federal lands everywhere are taking note of what happens in Big Cypress. Mixed use of federal lands is important to the Bush administration, which has embraced a philosophy of making off-road riders, ranchers, miners, oil drillers and others feel at home. "Everything I ever heard the president or Interior secretary say about public land is embodied in Big Cypress National Preserve," Donahue says.

But in two important cases, the Bush administration has acted to restrict activities in Big Cypress that are allowed elsewhere. Last year, the administration proposed paying $120 million to purchase the rights to oil and gas extraction in the part of the preserve controlled by the families of Barron and Miles Collier. They are the sons of Barron G. Collier, a tycoon who once owned 1.25 million acres in Southwest Florida. The families, which own mineral rights to more than half the preserve, had been moving ahead with plans to drill 26 exploratory wells in addition to the nine rigs they now control in the preserve. Congress approved $40 million of the payment in January in the fiscal 2003 omnibus appropriations bill.

And while it has reversed a Clinton administration ban on snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park, the Bush White House is defending Donahue's plan for managing off-road vehicles against a challenge in federal court from sportsmen's groups. Donahue wants to limit buggies to 400 miles of designated trails-many hardened with packed limestone-in the soggy prairies where riders have had free rein for decades.

Environmentalists accustomed to battling the administration's land management policies have praised Bush's efforts to preserve Big Cypress, while whispering that the campaign is aimed largely at winning votes in a state where environmental issues consistently score high in the polls. The cynics note that the administration made its moves on Big Cypress in the months before voters were to decide whether President Bush's brother Jeb would get a second term. And Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., a presidential candidate, said he was "mad as hell" about the administration's oil deal, questioning its price tag and a lack of congressional scrutiny.

"I have a hard time believing oil development in Big Cypress would do $120 million worth of damage. Period," says Florida environmentalist Nathaniel Reed. As an assistant Interior secretary in the Nixon administration, Reed engineered the initial Big Cypress deal. "It's pretty damn hard to believe federal taxpayers are going to bail out the Colliers," he says.

The oil deal has attracted national attention, but it has been less of an issue in Florida. Most environmentalists and Park Service officials weren't alarmed by the Colliers' oil-drilling plans, viewing them simply as an effort to engineer a land swap or cash deal. Oil fields have been active in Big Cypress since 1943, and most locals believe federal and state rules that require restoration of oil sites are adequate.

The off-road vehicle issue is generating more heat locally. From above, wetland prairies on the west side of the preserve seem covered by tread marks. It looks like several giant cats have used the ground as a scratching post. Some of those treads are deep enough to swallow a leg to the knee. They hold standing water even in the dry season. About 20,000 miles of such ruts stretch through the preserve, according to an analysis by University of Georgia. The trails are almost 10 times the distance between Washington and Los Angeles.

Ron Hostetter, a wetlands expert at the University of Miami, says the ruts, which last a long time, can dramatically alter water flow and degrade wildlife habitats by encouraging infestations of exotic weeds. Anything that messes with water flow in Big Cypress is serious, because the preserve contains some of the cleanest water in the region. Its flow is vital to the booming recreational fisheries in the Everglades. "When they surveyed the future Everglades National Park in the early 1940s, there was a swamp buggy trail around the perimeter. And the scars of that trail are still visible today," he says. The buggy damage at Big Cypress, he says, may take as long as a century to heal.

In response to a 1995 lawsuit by environmentalists angered about the off-road vehicle damage, Donahue's staff completed a management plan in 2000. It designates 400 buggy trails and restricts off-road access to the preserve to 15 places instead of 70. The cost of implementing the plan over 10 years is $30 million. "What we did here is a model for Yellowstone and other places with off-road vehicle issues," Donahue says. "The key difference in what we did here from what was tried elsewhere is that we didn't ban any uses. We regulated them." The plan raises the price of an off-road permit from $35 to $50-about 100 times less than what the preserve needs to cover the costs of overseeing off-road use and implementing the plan, Donahue says.

EXPANDING ACCESS

Beyond limiting damage from off-road vehicles, Donahue says, a third of the plan's cost would go toward expanding access to Big Cypress from U.S. 41, a two-lane highway known as the Tamiami Trail, which crosses the southern third of the preserve. The plan calls for parking lots, boardwalks and picnic tables along the road. "Millions of people go to Naples and Marco Island each winter, and they're not visiting us," Donahue says. "We'd like to encourage them to hike and bike here."

The preserve draws an estimated 500,000 visitors a year, about a third of the number who visit Everglades National Park and far short of the 1.6 million visitors projected for Big Cypress when it was created three decades ago. The estimate includes people who take tours and educated guesses about the number who stop alongside the highway to gawk at birds and alligators in the canal at the northern edge of the road.

The preserve's new trails seem unpopular with everyone. Environmentalists are pleased with the effort to regulate off-road riders, but they worry that drivers of sport utility vehicles will start using the 12-foot-wide limestone roads, ruining the wilderness and damaging habitats of endangered animals. The preserve limits backcountry permits for use of the roads to 2,000 a year. But Brian Scherf of the Biodiversity Project, which filed the 1995 lawsuit, says the next superintendent might be under pressure to allow more use of the trails to justify their $30 million cost. "These trails have a lot of the characteristics of regular roads," he says. "They can carry the weight of a 22-ton dump truck. They could easily handle SUVs."

An SUV would be put to the test on one of the oldest trails-a former farming and logging road known as the Concho Billie Trail. The Park Service improved nine miles of the trail with limestone as a test case for the rest of the system. The ride along the trail in a swamp buggy is slow and rough. On some stretches, the buggy bounces up and down on rocks jutting out of the sand. It feels like sitting in a rowboat tied to a dock during a high wind.

"We have to think about what these roads will bring in 20 years," Scherf says. "There could be backcountry development of campsites and comfort stations. The buggies will be replaced by high-powered SUVs, and before you know it, the whole wilderness nature of the preserve has gone down the drain."

Local swamp buggy clubs aren't any happier with the new rules. Along with a national group, the U.S. Sportsmen's Alliance, they sued the National Park Service in U.S. District Court in Naples last year. They accused the preserve's managers of violating the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act by failing to prepare a detailed assessment of the buggy plan's potential impact on natural resources. The clubs also said preserve officials played a "bait and switch" game by releasing a draft that did not resemble the final document. The plan, they argue, doesn't differentiate between wheeled buggies and airboats, and doesn't make adjustments for changes in the landscape. "The plan that was adopted is asinine," says Bill Horn, a Washington attorney who represents the swamp buggy riders. "It's going to create more problems than it solves."

Horn, a former assistant secretary of the Interior under President Reagan and a former member of President George W. Bush's transition team, decries the preserve's vehicle management plan as a political gift to conservation groups from the Clinton administration. "It was nothing more than a chance for the Clinton administration to pay homage to a core constituency," Horn says.

Issues such as the swamp buggy rules are particularly important to sportsmen's groups because the preserve was supposed to assure them they could enjoy the area forever, says Horn, who also represents snowmobile enthusiasts and dune buggy riders in disputes involving other federal lands. "Big Cypress wasn't made part of Everglades National Park, it wasn't made a wildlife refuge, it was made a preserve," Horn says. "The problem is that here we are 28 years later, and the original players from the environmental groups are gone. Now, there are animal rights groups and others who weren't aware of the original deal. We say, a deal is a deal. This is a very unique unit, and the political understandings and agreements need to be honored."

FULL OF SURPRISES

The Big Cypress off-road issue speaks volumes about the changes in America since the preserve was created. The new management plan reflects the population's shift away from rural areas to the suburbs. Swamp-buggy riders and hunters are on the decline, but the ranks of hikers, bikers and bird watchers are growing rapidly. Local sportsmen go so far as to characterize the preserve's efforts to attract suburban visitors as "cultural cleansing."

"The sporting community sees itself as founders of America's conservation movement, and it continues to be mystified that so many environmental organizations have become anti-sportsman, anti-hunter," Horn says. "Why would you take this well-organized group and systematically alienate them on issues like this? You need off-road vehicles in Big Cypress. You just don't stomp around on foot in that territory. Not if you want to live very long."

Reed, the former assistant secretary of the Interior under Nixon,sharply disagrees with Horn's characterization of the off-road management plan. "In the last 25 years, usage of off-road vehicles in the backcountry has gone up, and despite modifications and weight restrictions of those vehicles, the damage they have done is extraordinary," Reed says. "For a National Park Service area that is unacceptable.

"The new rules, I'm sure, are vexing to those who are used to going in any direction, at any speed they want to," Reed adds. "But rules are necessary if we are to keep the integrity of Big Cypress intact."

The management plan ultimately may be drowned in federal red ink. The preserve already has spent $5 million in the last two fiscal years getting equipment and preparing the first 35 miles of hardened trails. But the fiscal 2003 budget provided only $1 million instead of the $5 million the Park Service had requested.

Money's always an issue at Big Cypress. Employees at the preserve resent the larger budget and staff at Everglades National Park. Big Cypress had 85 full-time employees and a $5.3 million budget in fiscal 2003, compared with the 330 employees and an $18 million budget at the Everglades. Donahue says the preserve has managed to get by in recent years by not filling vacancies in its ranger corps. "In a place like this, we live on lapses in jobs," he says.

Given the demands of overseeing off-road riders, the preserve needs to fill ranger slots now. It won't be easy. "This is a tough place to work, a tough place to patrol," Chief Ranger J.D. Lee says. "You get one ranger making a stop with four guys who are carrying multiple guns. And alcohol is often involved." Many of the people stopped have some connection to the 500 to 800 squatters' hunting camps the Park Service razed and burned when the preserve was founded. "Every hard-core group on every single issue has some link to those camps," Lee says. Rangers stay an average of two years in Big Cypress, half the normal stay throughout the Park Service. "We get them just long enough to get them trained up," Lee says. "They figure out how to get around and then they're gone."

To lure rangers, the preserve boasts "beautiful white sandy beaches" in its job ads and offers some of the best housing in the National Park Service. Preserve officials have purchased first-rate equipment. But there are catches. The beaches are 30 miles away, the houses back up to canals whose alligators can gobble children and pets and, in the summer, the preserve is infested by mosquitoes. "It's not an easy sell," Donahue says.

But people who have been sold on Big Cypress are passionate about it. They love that the place survived the land speculators, the airport schemers, farmers and loggers. They love the spooky intimacy of a trail in a dark, dense cypress swamp. One such section of the Concho Billie Trail is decorated by spiky pineapple-like plants and guarded by a 6-foot alligator, which sits in a rare patch of sun on a sandbar at the swamp's entrance. "That's his spot. He's always there," says John Adams, who's been hunting and buggy riding in Big Cypress "for eons" and is now overseeing trail construction.

Evans, the preserve's helicopter pilot, also loves the place. He routinely enjoys glorious views and rarely has to get his feet wet. Heading south over the prairies of dwarf cypress trees in February, he can see the 10,000 Islands and the Gulf of Mexico.

"The place is full of surprises," Evans says. In fact, a few days earlier, a local fireman and his girlfriend went biking and got lost in the swamp. They wandered for hours until the fireman finally was able to find a spot where his mobile phone got a signal. The couple was wet, cold, scared and just one and a half miles off the trail. "They were," Evans says, "very happy to see us."

]]>

Taming The West

Cyril T. Zaneski — Wed, 01 Jan 2003 00:00:00 -0500

Once sworn enemies, Western loggers, ranchers and environmentalists are learning to work together to manage public lands.

he federal government's new land preserve is a breathtaking beauty in northern New Mexico's Jemez Mountains, an hour's drive from Santa Fe. Dubbed "the Yellowstone of the Southwest" by outdoors enthusiasts, Valles Caldera, which translates roughly to "cauldron valleys," is a mammoth crater, the collapsed dome of a volcano that erupted more than a million years ago. Fifteen miles across at its widest point, the caldera's rim encircles hot springs, gas vents and lava domes, including the 11,250-foot Redondo Peak. Its high-elevation forests and mountainside meadows provide homes for one of the country's largest elk herds and 17 threatened and endangered species, including peregrine falcons, Mexican spotted owls and Rio Grande cutthroat trout.

But the visual splendor of the Valles Caldera National Preserve is deceptive. The caldera is not a pristine wilderness, but, until recently, part of the sprawling Baca Ranch, a private, working ranch for generations. Sheep have been grazing the caldera in large numbers since the early 1900s, and ranchers added several thousand cattle in the 1970s. Logging that continued into the late 1970s nearly choked trout streams with silt. And the 4,000 or so elk roaming the caldera today are descendants of animals transplanted from Yellowstone. Hunters had wiped out the caldera's native elk herd by the end of the 19th century.

A Texas oil family saved the Baca Ranch from environmental ruin in recent years, but later decided to sell the 95,000-acre property to the federal government. The family, heirs of the late Texas oilman James Dunigan, wanted to honor his wishes by putting the land in the public's hands. In 2000, Congress agreed to buy the ranch for $101 million and create a new 89,000-acre wildlife preserve. But the deal was aimed at more than protecting an ecological treasure. Congress wanted to use Valles Caldera to blaze a fresh trail through the tangled politics of managing federal land in the West.

Agencies in Washington manage 535 million acres, 54 percent of the land, in the eight westernmost states and Alaska. That's almost double the percentage of land owned by Uncle Sam nationwide. Federal control of the western landscape irks many Westerners and has sparked furious exchanges in Congress and angry confrontations between landowners and federal officials. But of late, the tensions have begun spurring grassroots efforts to find creative new ways to give communities a larger role in managing the federal resources in their backyards.

The Valles Caldera Preservation Act, signed by President Bill Clinton in July 2000, is the first major bottom-up management effort approved by the federal government. The law puts the caldera in the hands of a nine-member board of trustees-five of whom must be from New Mexico-charged with managing the preserve as a government-owned corporation overseen by the Forest Service. The law requires the trustees to allow the preserve to be used many ways, for livestock grazing, timber harvesting and elk hunting as well as hiking, camping, cross-country skiing, photography and fishing. The idea is to protect natural resources while making enough money to make the preserve financially self-sufficient within 15 years.

Western Republicans and Democrats alike have praised the Valles Caldera law. Illustrating the breadth of its appeal, a congressional odd couple-Rep. Scott McInnis, R-Colo., and Rep. Tom Udall, D-N.M.-wrote a letter in November 2001 to Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth urging the agency to use Valles Caldera as a model for a series of pilot, community-based management projects in federal forests. Under other circumstances, the two might be foes: McGinnis is one of the loudest critics of federal restrictions on the mining and timber industries, while Udall, an ardent environmentalist, is the son of Stewart Udall, Interior secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

"While reasonable people continue to disagree about national forest policies," McInnis and Udall wrote, "people on the ground in Western communities and watersheds are gaining experience at working toward solving public lands problems by bridging ideological divides and concentrating on what is best for their communities and surrounding ecosystems." The goal, they explained, would be to solicit proposals from local groups or communities for projects with nearby national forests or ranger districts and let them proceed under close monitoring by Congress and the Forest Service.

The Bush administration hopped aboard the Valles Caldera bandwagon in February by proposing a "charter forest" program in its budget request for the Agriculture Department. The program would draw on proposals for federal forest management pilot programs offered by the Idaho legislature and some private think tanks, in addition to the Valles Caldera project. Mark Rey, the Agriculture undersecretary who oversees the Forest Service, said the charter forest plan might offer a way out of the gridlock caused by the agency's "archaic and conflicting and burdensome" management procedures.

But charter forest legislation hasn't materialized because environmentalists and Democrats have opposed the plan. Its prospects improved with the Republican Party's success in the November elections. Opponents say a charter plan would be no more than a Trojan horse opening national forests to increased timber harvesting and road construction. "I see the real motivation of the charter forest proposal to be little more than circumventing federal laws," says Mike Dombeck, the Forest Service chief in the Clinton administration and now a professor of environmental management at the University of Wisconsin.

"What concerns me most is that there is a focus in charter forests on turning national forests into moneymakers," Dombeck adds. "National forests were never established to make money. Many of the values they generate are not commodity values that we turn into hard cash, they're ecological values. While we know the value of a ton of timber or a barrel of gold, we don't place a monetary value on water. But 66 million people get drinking water from national forests."

The national attention focused on Valles Caldera worries Ernie Atencio, an anthropologist who coordinates the Valles Caldera Coalition, which consists of 15 environmental groups and a few ranching organizations. The coalition was formed in 1997 to push for federal acquisition of the Baca Ranch. But political pressure could rush the delicate and complicated process of forging a consensus about how to create an "ecologically sustainable working landscape," Atencio says. "There's nothing wrong with going slow, since this is completely new territory and it holds such great potential," he says. "This could really turn into a model of public lands management if it's done right. If it's done wrong, it could be a nightmare."

Gary Ziehe, the executive director of the Valles Caldera Trust, which administers the preserve, chuckles at the idea of Valles Caldera being held up as a national example for resource management. Ziehe, who has doctorate in livestock breeding as well as extensive Capitol Hill experience, has struggled since his appointment in September 2001 to get Valles Caldera up and running. He's had to overcome a tight budget, bureaucratic snafus and a shortage of clerical help under the intense scrutiny of environmentalists and ranchers alike. "At this stage," he says, "I don't think anybody's looking [to] us for any answers."

But everybody's eager to find a better way to manage the nation's forests. Fierce political fights pitting environmentalists against Western timber interests flare each summer during the fire season. As devastating wildfires sweep across the West, arguments rage over road building, timber harvesting and fire suppression policies. The issues have grown more intense in recent years as Western demographics and economies have changed. The West is no longer a monoculture of communities dominated by timber or mining interests, Dombeck says. "There's now a wide variety of people with different values living in rural areas," he says. "They value forests for more than just their timber."

As clashes between old resource extraction industries and environmentalists have grown and intensified, the federal government has struggled to craft new land management policies. "Forest management used to be an engineering problem for technocrats," says Jim Burchfield, director of the University of Montana's Bolle Center for People and Forests. "The technocrats managed forests as tree farms. That was quite straightforward, but there were needs and demands that forests be managed for other values-protecting species, biodiversity, fire protection, beauty. The 'technocracy' couldn't negotiate these values. There was tremendous frustration. There wasn't a system to solve multi-dimensional problems."

The nation watched the old system grind to a halt in the early 1990s in the Pacific Northwest, when loggers and environmentalists clashed over the spotted owl-and the federal government was not quite up to the task of sorting it all out. The Bolle Center, a part of the University of Montana's School of Forestry, opened in 1994 to help reconcile new environmental needs with commercial timber harvesting-"to promote a harmonious relationship between people and the land," says Burchfield, the center's director. A trained forester and former Peace Corps volunteer, Burchfield is now a self-described cheerleader for new forms of forest management slowly evolving out of crisis and conflict. "What we try to do is take it one step at a time and learn from what's going on," he says.

Strange-bedfellow coalitions, such as Atencio's, are the driving force that brings groups with conflicting interests together to deal with Washington's perceived inability to manage resources. "The appeal and power of these coalitions comes from the fact that they involve former adversaries and that they are local," Burchfield says. "Local people are able to deal in specifics, rather than abstract concepts like resource protection or jobs and reinvestment. When you deal in specifics, you can see where there is space for some kind of compromise." Most grassroots coalitions shun the limelight. "Most have consciously decided to stay beneath the radar screen and to work behind the scenes to find solutions to problems," Burchfield says. "They just want to be able to accommodate these multiple interests and have their communities come back together again."

The Bolle Center is studying a range of so-called collaborative resource management efforts between government agencies and citizen groups in the interior West-from the effort to reintroduce the Bitterroot grizzly bear in Montana and Idaho to conservation planning on state and federal lands in Arizona's Sonita Valley. The results have been uneven. Some are successful-"citizenship at its very finest," Burchfield says-while others never get beyond what he calls "a wild cacophony" of competing views.

One of the most successful projects is the Quincy Library Group in Northern California. Frustrated by battles over logging in the early 1990s, the local coalition of environmentalists, loggers and other community groups came together in 1993 to craft a wildfire prevention strategy for thinning brush and prescribed burning in the Plumas and Lassan national forests northwest of Lake Tahoe, near the Nevada line. The Forest Service provided $18 million in 2002 to fund the group's project as part of its National Fire Plan.

National environmental groups only recently have begun paying close attention to this trend toward collaborative management. "This trend has been occurring with little evaluation of [its] impact on natural resources," says Collaboration: A Guide for Environmental Advocates, a booklet published in 2001 by the Wilderness Society, National Audubon Society and the University of Virginia's Institute for Environmental Negotiation. "The experience of environmentalists in these [collaborative] groups has been decidedly mixed," according to the booklet. "Some report positive environmental gains as well as improved community relations and environmental awareness. Others report that the groups are a significant drain of time and resources and serve as a forum for inappropriate compromises, exclusion of some environmental interests, and weakening or avoidance of environmental protections."

The Bush administration is trying to champion the collaborative resource management movement as a way of fulfilling a conservative goal of turning responsibility for environmental protection to state and local governments and private landowners. "We believe in conservation through cooperation, communication and consultation," says Lynn Scarlet, the assistant secretary for policy, management and budget at the Interior Department. The Bush administration, she says, is trying to encourage such efforts with grants and by scaling back federal regulations that might hinder entrepreneurial conservation programs.

One of the best Interior cooperative programs, Scarlett says, is the $40 million Partners for Fish and Wildlife program, which involves about 27,000 private landowners who are enhancing natural habitats on their lands. Interior provides technical advice and grants to carry out the projects. "There are so many of these efforts now, our challenge is to decide how we can make them centerpieces rather than an afterthought," Scarlett says. "We are working with a nation of self-motivated stewards."

Atencio is concerned that the administration's eagerness to trust the private sector could affect the Valles Caldera project when Bush appoints three new trustees to replace Clinton appointees whose terms expire in January. "The board of trustees that is now balanced could be easily stacked with a lot of industry interests or large-scale commercial ranch, timber or recreational interests," Atencio says. "That would upset the science-based approach the current bunch of trustees are following."

The law says the nine-member board will have two federal resource managers-the supervisors of the federal properties that surround Valles Caldera on three sides, the Santa Fe National Forest and the Bandelier National Monument-and seven presidential appointees with expertise in preserve management. The board must include one trustee each with expertise in livestock, fish and wildlife, forests, financial and cultural management, and the natural history of Northern New Mexico. One trustee must be a member of a conservation organization and another must be active in state or local government. Three appointees serve two-year terms, and four serve four-year terms.

The Valles Caldera corporation is structured along the lines of the one that runs San Francisco's Presidio, says Ziehe, the Valles Caldera Trust's executive director. "But other than that, we're kind of blazing a trail here," he says. "We're in uncharted territory." Ziehe was chosen to help chart a course for the preserve because of his extensive political, scientific and practical experience. With a Ph.D. and a master's degree in animal breeding, Ziehe came to the trust from a wildlife resources post in the New Mexico Agriculture Department. But Ziehe also has extensive experience with political animals. He worked on Capitol Hill from 1993 to 2000 as a congressional science fellow, a legislative aide to Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., and senior analyst for the Senate Budget Committee. At the budget committee, Ziehe worked with the New Mexico delegation in Congress to craft the Valles Caldera law.

"There's been some frustration in getting started," Ziehe says. The trust did its contracting and procurement through the Forest Service, even though the trustees were unfamiliar with the process. The transition from Forest Service to the trustees, expected to take 90 days, took more than a year. Money's also an issue. The preserve had a $2.8 million budget in fiscal 2002 with only a little more than $1 million proposed for 2003. "Just like any small business, if you're under-appropriated you're doomed to fail," Ziehe says. There is pressure on the preserve to start raising money for programs and facilities by stepping up grazing and hunting. Because the caldera was heavily logged into the late 1970s, timber harvests hold less promise for generating revenue.

The trustees raised more than $400,000 by selling permits in a worldwide raffle for fall elk hunts. More than 4,700 hunters paid $25 a ticket for a chance to bag a bull elk; only 85 winners were picked during the raffle while another four hunters paid $12,000 to $15,000 each for permits during an e-Bay auction. A trial grazing season for about 1,000 head of cattle ran from mid-August to Sept. 30, over protests by environmentalists who said the preserve's trout streams and grasslands have not had enough time to recover from decades of overgrazing and a devastating summer drought. Ranchers, on the other hand, argued that more cattle should have been allowed, given that 6,000 or so steers grazed the preserve each summer when it was part of the Baca Ranch. The preserve allowed ranchers, who were chosen in a lottery, to bring up to 25 head of cattle each. The preserve charged ranchers 35 cents a head per day for grazing rights, or $270 for 25 head for 30 days.

The preserve does not yet have adequate roads, drinkable water or facilities to accommodate visitors. The only public recreation allowed in the last two years has been organized, guided group hikes that began in August. Thus, "it's been controversial that we planned to open for elk hunting and grazing before we open to people," Ziehe says. "But you have to remember the preserve is basically an old ranch. People are a bit more difficult to manage than animals."

Cyril T. Zaneski is a senior editor at CongressDaily.
]]>

Split Personality

Cyril T. Zaneski — Wed, 15 May 2002 00:00:00 -0400

EPA tries to spawn innovation in a sea of red tape and political pressure.

here are two Environmental Protection Agencies. One is an enthusiastic innovator that has won awards for finding electronic solutions to regulatory problems. Visit EPA's online Compliance Assistance Centers (www.assistancecenters.net) to see how the agency has teamed up with trade associations and local governments to stanch the flow of industrial pollution. The virtual centers, which focus on small businesses, such as metal finishers, printers and auto repair shops, help business people exchange information about environmental problems.

"People need to talk to somebody that understands their business," says Larry Zitko, president of ChromeTech Inc., a company that designs electroplating systems in Windsor, Ohio, and a volunteer "answer man" on environmental rules for the metal-finishing Web site. "They are looking for somebody they can trust." The centers, launched three years ago, are a hit. Though EPA has yet to determine the centers' impact on pollution, the agency knows that more than 485,000 people-more than 1,300 a day-visited the site in 2001. EPA figures the $1.3 million program helps multiply the effect of its regulatory compliance office, which has seen its staff and budget shrink in recent years.

Then there's the other EPA-the one that's a feather in the swirling political winds. This EPA repeatedly has missed deadlines for assessing cancer risks and reassessing pesticides. It has flipped and flopped since the mid-1970s over how much arsenic should be allowed in drinking water. Administrator Christie Todd Whitman finally stopped the agency's embarrassing hand-wringing over the arsenic standard last fall, deciding that the maximum allowable amount of the naturally occurring carcinogen would be dropped from the 1942 standard of 50 parts per billion to 10 parts per billion.

"I wish I could say how EPA handled arsenic was extremely unusual, but it's pretty typical of how the agency undertakes major rule-making," says Erik Olson, a former EPA researcher who is now senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit environmental organization. "You name a major rule and you see the same pattern of excessive delay in the face of industry opposition. It's almost impossible to get the agency to do its job without somebody from the outside holding a gun to its head."

EPA's split personality is hardly a secret. The story emerges in assessments of the agency published in recent years by government analysts and think tanks. And the tale was told again and again in dozens of Federal Performance Project interviews with EPA employees and former employees and observers from industry groups, environmental organizations and universities. They portray an agency with an unusually bright, dedicated workforce whose efforts are all too frequently undone by EPA's rigid statutory requirements, crippling bureaucracy, funding shortfalls and fierce outside political pressure.

EPA's two previous administrators-William K. Reilly and Carol Browner-tried to revamp the agency by reordering its priorities and crafting innovative approaches to regulation, which produced mixed results. Whitman likewise has pledged in appearances before Congress that she intends to follow a reform agenda that would not weaken environmental protections. Whitman expressed her commitment to reform in her fiscal 2003 budget overview, which described EPA as "limited, uncoordinated and inflexible" and promised changes to make the system "as efficient and low-cost as possible while at the same time maintaining environmental progress."

But bold reform at EPA will be difficult to accomplish in the Bush administration, which has clashed repeatedly with environmentalists on a wide range of issues. With Congress divided between the two parties, it's impossible to restructure EPA without winning over environmentalists who have the ear of the Democrats who control the Senate.

Environmentalists and congressional Democrats have joined, for example, to battle Whitman's proposal for abolishing an enforcement program aimed at reducing air pollution from old power plants. Owners of utilities and other industrial facilities hated the so-called "new source review" enforcement effort, under which the Clinton administration sued nine utilities in 1999. Siding with the industries, which argued that threat of enforcement and legal action stifled innovative approaches to controlling pollution, Whitman proposed the "Clean Skies" initiative, which called for significant pollution reductions but allowed polluters flexibility in how they met emissions goals. Whitman says the proposed program would get cleaner air without lawsuits. But the senior official in charge of EPA's Office of Regulatory Enforcement disagreed publicly with her. Eric Schaeffer, who had directed air enforcement efforts for 12 years, quit in late February to protest administration efforts that, he said, would weaken the 1970 Clean Air Act. Schaeffer told Whitman in a widely publicized letter that EPA had made significant progress in cracking down on polluting power plants in recent years but now "we seem about to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory."

As political wars raged on Capitol Hill over the Bush administration's environmental policies, EPA reform efforts-shaped by a decade-old National Academy of Public Administration report-are moving along all but unnoticed by the public. The NAPA report urged EPA to set broad environmental goals and focus its agenda on achieving them. EPA started setting environmental goals in 1992. "We were thinking about looking for outcomes, creating a report card," says Mike Ryan, the agency's deputy chief financial officer. That effort dovetailed with the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act, which requires federal agencies to craft long-range strategic plans to help them use their resources wisely.

LIMITED RESULTS

In 1997, EPA began to tie its budget to a series of strategic goals. Its 1999 spending plan was the first to ditch programmatic funding and begin linking money to environmental goals. For example, the budget set aside $92 million for reducing chemical air pollution by 12 percent by the end of that year. Tying goals to the budget ensured that EPA staffers would take them seriously, says David Ziegele, director of the Office of Planning, Analysis and Accountability. "They picked up on it quickly. We've hit 80 percent of our goals the last two years."

But there's a catch to that impressive success rate: EPA has met 51 of the 64 annual performance goals for which the agency has enough data to assess whether the goal has been achieved. But the agency doesn't have enough information on nine other goals to tell whether its actions have helped clean up the air, water or soil. "The more our goals reflect environmental conditions instead of just counting inspections conducted or permits issued, the harder it is to get information that's timely," Ziegele said. Translation: Mother Nature doesn't operate on a one-year budget cycle.

EPA's data gap is also a sign of distress. The agency relies on outsiders-mostly state, local and tribal governments-for an estimated 94 percent of its information about pollution and the quality of the nation's natural resources. One of its goals is to improve information sharing among environmental protection partners at various levels of government. EPA is in the midst of crafting several initiatives to improve the exchange of information with these partners. By the end of the year, EPA says 45 states will be part of a new central data exchange that will enable its users to share information about pollution, inspections and permits.

EPA has made impressive strides toward linking spending to broad environmental goals, but the agency continues to stumble over its grant programs. This is not a small matter in an agency that distributes nearly 76 percent of its money to outside sources-private contractors, states and other federal agencies. EPA relies heavily on outside contractors to clean up waste sites and on state agencies to process permits and enforce regulations.

The agency has had problems even with the smallest grant programs. A May 2001 report by EPA's inspector general found the agency was unable to justify more than $1 billion in noncompetitive grants given to nonprofit groups and state and local governments in fiscal 2000. An Associated Press analysis found that EPA's grants to nonprofits had grown from $168 million in 1993 to almost $350 million in 2001. EPA officials say the agency will use more competitive bidding this year. EPA is trying to increase control over state grants by imposing requirements, but progress has been slight.

The Office of Management and Budget seems unimpressed by EPA's management initiatives. OMB gave the agency three red lights and two yellows in the management scorecard published in the president's 2003 budget. OMB turned thumbs down on EPA in the following areas:

Human capital. The agency lacks an up-to-date workforce strategy that supports its mission goals and strategic plan, according to OMB. It also has "significant skill imbalances in critical occupations." For example, 60 percent of the scientists in EPA's Office of Research and Development will be eligible for retirement in 2005. In response, EPA says it will complete a workforce restructuring plan by early summer.
Competitive outsourcing. The agency has failed to meet its two-year goal of competing 15 percent of its commercial jobs. In response, it has established a work group to implement the president's competitive sourcing initiative. The goal is to meet the 15 percent, two-year goal and eventually hit 50 percent.
Financial management. The agency is unable to provide unqualified statements about the security of its information systems and about backlogs in its water pollution permit system. EPA officials say they are working to fix these problems.

EPA officials who've been involved in channeling the agency into a results-oriented culture say no one should expect any easy fixes.

"Part of the problem is measuring progress toward our goals," says planner Alex Wolfe of the EPA's Office of the Chief Financial Officer. "The environment may take years to yield a response.

"And then," he adds, "the structure of the agency poses its own problems."

STUCK IN STOVEPIPES

EPA is a sprawling agency with more than 17,000 employees, 10 regional offices, 17 labs and a budget of $8 billion in fiscal 2002. The agency is a series of "stovepipes" -program offices that carry out statutory responsibilities and regional offices that operate with a great deal of latitude in addressing local problems. The freedom of politically appointed regional administrators to set their own courses has drawn criticism.

The agency's decentralization reflects its roots. EPA really is a collection of programs and offices created to carry out environmental laws that Congress began passing in 1970. The agency's air program, for example, arose that year from the Clean Air Act, with permitting, monitoring and research being handled from headquarters and each regional office. EPA is spending $593 million on air programs this year. Similar stovepipes exist for water, pesticides, drinking water, hazardous wastes, toxic substances, food protection and scientific research and development. "Companies have long complained that this approach brought a constant parade of EPA inspectors, each representing a different medium, into their facilities," Donald Kettl, professor of public affairs and political science at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, wrote in "Environmental Governance: A Report on the Next Generation of Environmental Policy" (Brookings Institution, 2002).

"Moreover, such a fragmented approach reduced the effectiveness of environmental regulations," Kettl continued. "After all, the regulations focused on the company's operations, not the different media. Reformers have argued for an approach that is more place- than media-based: one set of environmental standards to cover an entire facility, one integrated set of permits to regulate the standards, and one inspector to oversee compliance. For an agency that has long been Washington-based and media-centered, such a geographical focus poses enormous challenges."

The nature of EPA's evolution also put it at the beck and call of two dozen or so congressional committees and subcommittees. The extent of congressional oversight leads to conflicting directions. Members of the House Science Committee, for example, submitted legislation last year to bolster scientific research at EPA, while Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee were pushing to have scientific research removed from the agency altogether and farmed out to independent research panels. The consequent fragmentation and intense political supervision complicate reform. "Progress and change can be frighteningly slow," says Barry DeGraff, associate director of the resources management division at EPA's Region 5 in Chicago. "It's a constant battle in terms of resources and political will on the part of Congress to see initiatives through." The agency's difficulty in standing up to political pressure disappoints representatives of both industry and environmental groups, who otherwise agree on very little. "When you look to an agency that's supposed to be a leader in this field, you don't want them to be so buffeted by outside parties," says David Clarke of the American Chemistry Council, an Arlington, Va.-based trade association.

DATA GAP

EPA's attempts to focus on achieving environmental goals have revealed dramatic weaknesses in measuring progress. The results of pollution cleanups may not show up for decades. And EPA lacks data with which it can measure its achievements. EPA has a wealth of information about air quality because of the extensive, long-standing network of pollution monitors-automatic air sampling devices that provide continuous readings on such pollutants as fine dust particles, carbon monoxide and ozone-operated by the agency and state, local or tribal governments. But EPA lacks adequate data about solid waste, pesticides and other types of environmental problems because it must rely on inconsistent reporting from private industry and states. For example, EPA has no coherent system for making sense of data on wastewater dischargers even though the operators of plants that discharge wastes file reports daily. The reports go to state agencies, whose data-collection systems often are not in sync with EPA's. The agency's inspector general noted last year that the inability to measure the progress of some programs leads EPA to fall back on process goals, such as counting the inspections it conducts or permits it issues instead of looking for true environmental results.

"The EPA data systems stink," says Shelley Metzenbaum, a former EPA official who's a visiting professor at the University of Maryland and directs the performance management project at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. "GAO has produced reams of reports on problems with [EPA's] data collection."

The agency is at the mercy of outside parties for the data. The states do more than 80 percent of the environmental enforcement and collect 95 percent of the information about air, water and soil quality, according to the Environmental Council of the States (ECOS), an association of state and territorial environmental commissioners. EPA is in the midst of a $25 million grant program to improve information sharing with the states. Robert Roberts, who for seven years served as executive director of ECOS, is pleased with EPA's direction. "We are moving toward a true partnership between the states and EPA," says Roberts, who was appointed in March to head EPA's Region 8 Office in Denver. A major development two years ago was an agreement between ECOS and EPA that allowed states to attempt innovative regulatory programs. Progress, he said, has been slow but steady.

Mark Day, EPA's deputy chief information officer for technology and director of its Office of Technology Operations, says the agency isn't just moving aggressively to integrate information with states. EPA also is launching a program to collect information on critical indicators that will be useful for state officials and the general public in assessing progress in environmental protection.

"This is a complex information environment," Day says. "We have many different types of partners-universities tribes, states, industries-and many different types of data. This is very different from the Social Security Administration, which has a very clear job and very settled questions about their partners. Ours is still evolving to a great extent."

ENVIRONMENT.GOV

GAO praised several EPA programs in a report to Congress last year about federal agencies' use of technology to communicate information about regulatory programs. Among them: EPA's efforts to expand information sharing with states and to make it easier to collect and distribute data from permit holders. The report also singled out EPA's online compliance assistance centers for the range of communication services-e-mails, fax-back information and telephone hot lines-they offer regulated industries. Meanwhile, Envirofacts (www.epa.gov/enviro), an Internet-based system that allows users to retrieve maps and other information about a wide range of environmental categories from several EPA databases, has won numerous awards. They include Government Executive's 1999 Government Technology Leadership Award and Government Computer News' 2000 Agency Excellence Award. On April 1, EPA shut the public out of the Envirofacts databases as part of a homeland security initiative. Direct access to the databases is now limited to EPA employees, the military, other federal agencies and EPA contractors and state agencies that have received special permission from the agency.

OMB, however, didn't assign a green light to EPA's e-government efforts in its 2003 budget proposal. Instead, the budget office cited problems with EPA's capital asset planning and cost control and performance targets for information technology. OMB did note EPA's plans to improve its regulatory database and to make that information more widely available to the public.

Day, who joined EPA a decade ago after working in interactive technology management for the Missouri Department of Environmental Quality, says EPA is more prepared to tackle IT challenges than OMB or other critics might think. "This is a pretty entrepreneurial place," Day says. "It's a young agency. It doesn't have 200 years of history. Also, the environmental mission attracts people with high levels of energy. We have a lot of scientists, a lot of people who do think outside the box. And if you have a vision, you can get a chance here to achieve it."

The National Academy of Public Administration suggested, in its 2000 report, "Environment.gov," that EPA needs to be even more entrepreneurial to meet its considerable challenges.

While struggling to reinvent itself, EPA must also prepare to replace some of its most skilled and valued employees. In just three years, 53 percent of computer specialists at the Office of Environmental Information and 60 percent of scientists and chemists at the Office of Research and Development will be eligible for retirement. Jane Moore, acting chief of EPA's Office of Administration and Resources Management, says the agency is just starting to properly assess its human resource needs. The agency installed a personnel management system last year to collect and assess information about employees' abilities. "We're really just getting a handle on the skills and competencies we have versus the skills and competencies we're going to need," Moore says.

SECOND-LEVEL STRUGGLES

EPA has succeeded in complying with the first generation of environmental laws aimed at containing large sources of pollution and cleaning up the nation's worst problems. Responding to a series of environmental protection laws that Congress passed in the 1970s and early 1980s, EPA helped get lead out of the nation's gasoline. Blood levels of the brain-bursting poison were dramatically reduced in the general population. The agency's regulations and enforcement stopped sewer pipes from belching wastes that fouled such rivers as the Potomac, the Cuyahoga and the Charles. And it helped scrub smokestacks and made air breathable again in cities like Pittsburgh and Chattanooga, Tenn. "We've tackled all the easy problems," DeGraff says. "What's left are really, really tough problems. They're tough scientifically and they're tough politically."

The second generation of environmental laws added more stringent requirements. They affirm the public's right to detailed information about the chemicals industries are discharging into the environment. They require property owners to disclose to buyers and renters the presence of lead paint in properties and force cleanups of leaking underground petroleum tanks. This second round of laws vastly expanded the amount of regulation EPA and its state partners must promulgate and enforce.

The agency must now lead the effort to solve increasingly complicated environmental problems such as global warming, while figuring out how to protect people and natural resources from previously unregulated sources of pollution that rain washes into waterways. Those pollutants include fertilizers and chemicals from lawns and metals and petroleum products from highways and parking lots whose cumulative impacts can be devastating. The agency is trying to move away from regulating one permit at a time, instead overseeing the impact of a wide range of pollution sources on entire ecosystems. In other words, instead of focusing on how a sewage treatment plant will affect one creek, the agency is trying to focus on, say, the impact on the Chesapeake Bay.

"EPA's first challenge came from Congress, which passed a bunch of laws that essentially said to use the best technologies you can and bring everybody up to a certain average," says Ray Loehr, professor of environmental and water resources engineering at the University of Texas. "We got a lot of pollution cleaned up simply on the basis of using the best technologies. But now, the agency has got to evolve," adds Loehr, who was chairman of the EPA Science Advisory Board during the first Bush administration.

The agency gets a lot of attention for its efforts to offer industries a carrot to encourage reduced pollution instead of wielding a big stick. One big reason is the large number of regulated entities-41 million, ranging from massive coal-burning power plants to tiny dry cleaning shops. The other reason is the vast array of laws and statutory requirements EPA must enforce.

Mike Stahl, the director of EPA's Office of Compliance, says the agency has been eager to form partnerships with industries, but still needs to wield enforcement power. "Most facilities and companies want to do the right thing," Stahl says. "But some portion, frankly, don't want to take the time or expense to do right by the environment."

Environmentalists, industry representatives, OMB and members of Congress all watch closely when the agency releases its annual enforcement statistics each January. EPA steadily has increased the cash it collects from violators to pay for pollution controls and cleanups. Last year, the agency reached agreements that resulted in polluters spending a record $4.3 billion on new pollution controls and cleanups. The cash spent on such efforts has risen steadily over the last five years. None of EPA's budget comes from fines. The agency assesses penalties based on the estimated environmental harm-the cost, say, of destroyed wetlands on water quality and wildlife populations-and sends the money it collects to the treasury. EPA netted $95 million in criminal enforcement cases last year, down from $122 million the previous year. But the agency reported a significant increase in criminal prison sentences-256, compared with 146 in 2000.

Industry groups have worked hard, meanwhile, to emphasize the costs to themselves and to consumers of complying with environmental regulations. Regulatory costs have been in the spotlight since the Reagan administration. And the pressure to relieve regulatory burdens has only grown in recent years, especially with the growing emphasis on balancing the benefits of rules with their costs. EPA has not always fared well in such analyses.

In 1997, OMB estimated that the cost of complying with environmental regulations was $18 billion greater than the $144 billion in benefits produced by the rules. Presidential candidate George W. Bush made a campaign pledge to reduce regulatory burdens on business. Once in office, he installed a guru of cost-benefit analysis, John Graham, the former director of Harvard University's Center for Risk Analysis, as the administration's regulatory gatekeeper at OMB. Graham's goal is to make regulatory agencies such as EPA justify proposed regulations with cost-benefit analyses at the beginning of the rule-making process rather than justifying decisions with post hoc calculations. Conservation groups say Graham's new cost-benefit requirements will stifle EPA's ability to craft rules that will protect human health and the environment.

CARROTS, NOT STICKS

During the Clinton administration, EPA, as part of its move toward casting its accomplishments in terms of environmental impact instead of what its critics deride as "bean counting"-the tallying of penalties collected-EPA reorganized its enforcement operations, concentrating them in a large, new office. The philosophy behind the move was to enable the agency's managers to begin thinking about new ways of enforcing the law and developing incentives to get permit holders to comply. EPA now tries to emphasize the environmental benefits of enforcement. In the last three years, the agency has included estimates of pounds of pollution reduced as part of that effort. EPA estimates it has stopped the release of 11.7 billion pounds of pollution from smokestacks and sewer pipes since it began estimating environmental benefits of enforcement in 1999.

Aside from offering the agency's enforcement squad a public relations tool, the effort to count benefits has enabled Stahl, director of the Office of Compliance, and his employees to start seeing patterns of compliance and violations. "It makes it easier for employees to look for where they can have the greatest environmental impact," Stahl says. "It's enabling us to turn from mundane to big-picture cases." EPA is also trying to counter criticism of its regulatory crackdowns by publicizing how businesses save money by reducing pollution. An EPA survey of businesses using the Web-based compliance centers found that 65 percent of the firms saved money through such efforts.

Quantifying environmental impact on a national scale is one objective of the voluntary Strategic Goals Program, which began taking shape in the late 1980s to help the agency and industries come up with strategies for "cleaner, cheaper and smarter" environmental protection. In 1995, the metal-finishing industry and its suppliers became the first to sign up for the program.

At EPA's urging, a panel representing metal finishers, regulators and environmental organizations came up with a broad policy program for improving the way the companies use metals, water and energy to reduce hazardous emissions and exposures and to improve their bottom lines. The goals, which are supposed to be accomplished over a decade, would take the industry far beyond the existing mandatory permitting regulations. By 2001, 425 metal finishers had joined EPA and 21 states and 80 local government agencies in the program. The agency is trying to step outside traditional enforcement by allowing self-policing-permitting businesses to discover their own violations and reveal them to EPA in exchange for opportunities for reduced fines and flexible cleanup agreements. "The benefit of that kind of policy is it really stretches the influence of our program," Stahl says. "We'll never have enough inspectors, but we can get environmental benefits if companies buy into the program."

EPA has been losing inspectors for five years. Its inspection and compliance staff is down 200 positions, to about 2,700 this year. EPA's enforcement staff is a target for budget cutters who want to continue to shift the responsibility for enforcement to the states. Stahl says that while it's true that states do more than 90 percent of the nation's environmental enforcement work, EPA does the largest and most complicated cases. "In the last year or two, we've been able to sustain inspection levels, but that will be hard to maintain if we continue to see our resources go down," Stahl adds.

Environmental Protection Agency
Created: 1970

Mission: To protect human health and to safeguard the natural environment-air, water, and land-upon which life depends.

Top official: Christie Todd Whitman

]]>

Rule Breakers

Cyril T. Zaneski — Tue, 01 Jan 2002 00:00:00 -0500

John Graham and a squad of anti-rule Bush nominees are attempting to reinvigorate the war on regulations

oping to boost a flagging national economy, the new President moved quickly to ease the burdens of federal regulation on American businesses. Within eight months of taking office, he issued an executive order to make agencies balance the economic costs and benefits of any major rules they might propose.

His order began: "The American people deserve a regulatory system that works for them, not against them: a regulatory system that protects and improves their health, safety, environment and well-being and improves the performance of the economy without imposing unacceptable or unreasonable costs on society; regulatory policies that recognize that the private sector and private markets are the best engine for economic growth."

The President wasn't Ronald Reagan. Nor was it George Bush. It was Bill Clinton. He signed the order, Executive Order 12866, on Sept. 30, 1993. Yes, that's the same Bill Clinton who put 26,000 pages of new rules-derided by critics as "midnight regulations"-on the books in the last three months of his second term.

Clinton's executive order, which was similar to the two Reagan orders it replaced, was kept by the new Bush administration. "The question for us is whether we can take the principles outlined in the Clinton order . . . and make the agencies adhere to them," says John Graham, the Harvard professor confirmed in July as director of the Office of Management and Budget's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). The question raised by Graham, whom Bush is counting on to be the administration's regulatory gatekeeper, is a huge one for a Republican President whose campaign netted significant financial support from industries eager for relief from what they say is a crushing burden of federal regulations. Bush promised to rein in what he called "an avalanche" of Clinton-imposed health, environmental and land-use regulations.

After Bush's election, expectations for regulatory reforms and rollbacks soared among the free-market think tanks that had released reports emphasizing the need for regulatory relief. Robert W. Hahn, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research and director of the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, was among those who released a report advocating reform as the new administration was taking office. His research shows that more than half of the federal regulations enacted between 1981 and mid-1996 would not pass a cost-benefit analysis test. That is, the costs of implementing and complying with those rules would exceed their benefits to society. "If Congress continues to allow agencies to create regulations without adequate attention to the full economic consequences," Hahn wrote, "the standard of living that most citizens enjoy will slowly but surely erode."

Bush made changing the regulatory game a top priority. Less than two hours after taking office, he put a two-month hold on rules handed down in the final days of the Clinton administration so his own team could review them. Such reviews have been routine in new administrations since 1980, but Bush wanted to show he meant business. The new administration set aside stringent new standards for arsenic in drinking water, relaxed energy conservation requirements for central air conditioners and heat pumps, eased mining rules and announced its intention to repeal a rule that would prevent companies found to have violated environmental, labor or employment laws from getting federal contracts. Bush also backed away from a campaign pledge to reduce emissions of unregulated greenhouse gases from power plants and announced his intention to withdraw the United States from a controversial international agreement to limit pollution that causes global warming.

Emboldened by the new administration, the Republican-led Congress got into the act. In early March, GOP lawmakers put the 1995 Congressional Review Act into play for the first time. They killed a rule aimed at preventing repetitive stress workplace injuries. Businesses loathed the ergonomics rule, which they estimated would cost them $100 billion in workplace upgrades. But the revolution stalled. A wave of negative stories about the administration's environmental policies swept the nation's press before and after Earth Day in mid-April. Public opinion polls showed a negative reaction to the Bush administration's handling of environmental matters, especially the decision to pull back on plans for a tougher arsenic standard. Then came the biggest blow of all: the defection of Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont from the Republican Party. When Jeffords became an Independent, he tipped the balance of power to the Senate's Democrats. The switch guaranteed that unsympathetic Senate committee chiefs would oversee Bush's efforts to eliminate or alter regulations.

The Bush administration "came in with guns blazing saying they wanted to repeal regulations, but they learned some hard political lessons quickly," says Reese Rushing, a policy analyst for the watchdog group OMB Watch.

By summer, few of Clinton's midnight regulations had been rolled back. And congressional Republicans, fearing a potential voter backlash in 2002, grew wary of voicing opposition to environmental protections. The Republican-led House, for example, voted 218 to 189 in late July to block the Bush administration's efforts to loosen the Clinton administration's restrictions on arsenic in drinking water. The Environmental Protection Agency got the message: It announced in October plans to strengthen arsenic standards by imposing the Clinton standard.

Experts who have watched previous administrations struggle and fail to curb federal regulatory power were not surprised that the gunslinger approach wouldn't cut red tape. Even without a dramatic flip in the Senate, a President's power to reverse regulations runs out quickly, says Richard Belzer, a visiting professor of public policy at Washington University in St. Louis and a former OIRA staff economist. "The President has his maximum power the moment he is declared President-elect," Belzer says. "It's all downhill from there." The books of regulations have fattened, he says, through Richard Nixon's "quality of life" reviews, Gerald Ford's "inflation impact statements," Jimmy Carter's regulatory analysis and review group and the 1980 Paperwork Reduction Act, Ronald Reagan's centralized executive regulatory review and task force on regulatory review, George Bush's Council on Competitiveness, and Bill Clinton's cost-benefit executive order.

"There's been 30 years of trying to guide agencies, 20 years of centralized executive review, and no model has been successful really," Belzer says. "The agencies adjust because the threat of administration enforcement lacks credibility." Bush has "levers of influence" to curb regulations in his choices to head agencies, budget proposals and ability to sway public opinion, Belzer adds. But a President is constrained powerfully by Congress, the press and pollsters.

The congressional constraint is significant. Melissa Luttrell, legislative counsel for regulatory affairs for the consumer watchdog group Public Citizen, says, for example, that the outlook for defeating the regulatory rollback brightened considerably when Connecticut Democrat Joseph Lieberman took the gavel of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee from Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn. "He's shown his willingness to hold hearings when he thinks that environmental or public health protections are going to be weakened," she says. "That scrutiny is critical because the Bush administration has shown that they are willing to take heat and go to bat for their industry contributors. But they have also shown they can be responsive to the public when they've had bad press."

Indeed, even the President considered by most to be the master deregulator, Ronald Reagan, ran into the same trouble. "Even a Congress that was a lot more Republican in its makeup than the present one was afraid of people saying that they didn't care about the environment or they didn't care about safety," says Murray Weidenbaum, Reagan's top regulation buster as the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.

A President who is unable to launch a direct assault on federal regulatory agencies can do so indirectly. Bush is following the Ronald Reagan model: Appoint or nominate foes of federal regulations to lead agencies they oppose. And cap the agencies' budgets to sap their regulatory power. "Politically, they know now they're not going to roll back environmental regulations like those in the Clean Air Act, but we expect to see less enforcement," OMB Watch's Rushing says. "We expect them to be smarter about how they go about attacking regulations."

Consider the approach to enforcement that the EPA is taking. Administrator Christine Todd Whitman proposed eliminating 270 enforcement officers and passing their duties, along with $25 million in enforcement grants, to the states. "As a former governor, I can tell you the states have done a great deal," Whitman says. "And many of them are very successful in their approach to protecting the environment . . . States often know best who and when they need to target."

Environmentalists disagree sharply with Whitman. "Our research indicates that the EPA proposal is just a move toward weakening environmental protections," says John Coequyt, senior analyst for the nonprofit Environmental Working Group. "There are a number of states like Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania that have done very poor jobs of doing follow-up inspections of facilities that had violated water-pollution laws. And when they do follow up, they fail to levy appropriate penalties that remove the economic incentives for breaking the law." The EPA's own inspector general concurred with the environmental group's analysis, issuing an August report critical of state environmental enforcement.

The Bush administration tried to make the turnover of enforcement power to the states more complete by nominating the head of Ohio's environmental agency, Donald Schregardus, to lead EPA's enforcement program. During the seven and one-half years that Schregardus headed the Ohio agency-from 1991 to 1999-enforcement actions and the amounts of fines collected fell sharply. The agency's performance drew formal complaints from Ohio environmental groups, who particularly pointed to Schregardus' lack of effort in enforcing the compliance of large power plants with air pollution laws. Coequyt called the nomination "a slap in the face of EPA." Faced with mounting opposition from Democrats in the Senate, Schregardus withdrew his nomination. He later was named the Navy's deputy assistant secretary of the environment, a post that does not require Senate confirmation.

Schregardus' withdrawal from consideration for the EPA post was a rare victory for environmentalists who have consistently opposed the administration's nominations for environmental posts. "With just a handful of exemptions, Bush has managed to fill environmental slots with appointees who are hostile to . . .environmental protection activities or who are skeptical about their effectiveness," Coequyt says.

While trying to shed enforcement responsibilities, Whitman also is proposing to retool an EPA permit program loathed by operators of large power plants, which gave $19 million to Bush and other Republicans in last year's election. The program requires plant owners and operators of major polluting facilities to apply for new permits when they modify facilities and increase their emissions. The Clinton administration took major enforcement actions under the program. Whitman told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in July that she favors a more "comprehensive strategy" for reducing air pollution, setting limits on three key pollutants and giving industries and utilities flexibility in how they meet them.

The talk about increasing industry flexibility worries activist watchdogs like Public Citizen's Luttrell, who says regulatory agencies have been weakened in the recent past. "There's an assumption that we're starting with a pretty good system of inspection and regulation because we've just had eight years of a Democratic administration, but that is just not so," she says. EPA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Food Safety and Inspection Service all had problems keeping up with inspections during the Clinton administration, she says.

Heads of enforcement agencies come and go, and budgets for inspections expand and contract, but the great hope for meaningful long-term regulatory reform rests in whether Graham can implement Clinton's executive order. "There is a system for regulatory review in place," says Susan Dudley, senior research fellow and deputy director of regulatory studies at George Mason University's Mercatus Center.

"There's a requirement for good analysis that will require agencies putting forth a rule [to] look at the costs as well as the benefits. And there's no doubt we're going to see a stronger OMB analyzing the rules."

The importance of a stronger OMB in carrying out the cost-benefit tests called for in Clinton's executive order made Graham's confirmation one of the more intense political battles of the spring, even though the office that Graham would direct is tiny-it has only 45 full-time analysts-and all but unknown beyond the Washington Beltway. Graham's opponents, which included Public Citizen and the Natural Resources Defense Council, used strong language to denounce him for showing bias against environmental and public health regulations when he headed Harvard University's Center for Risk Analysis. The NRDC called Graham "a nightmare choice," and Public Citizen referred to him as "a disaster."

But Republicans say Graham calls 'em like he sees 'em. His backers say that the Harvard center that Graham headed gets corporate funding, but the studies it produces often go against the wishes of its corporate benefactors. "He is hands down one of the most qualified people ever nominated for this position," Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, said during Graham's confirmation hearing in May. After all the hype, the Senate finally confirmed Graham in July. He went to work with modest expectations. He says his goal is to change the way agencies approach rule-making by getting agencies to do cost-benefit analyses at the beginning of the process rather than justifying decisions with post hoc calculations. "By the time OMB gets involved in most cases, a lot of political commitment has been made," Graham says. "It's very difficult to have an impact when you come in so late. I think you have a better chance if you get in early."

Graham moved to implement that plan in late September. He issued a set of rulemaking guidelines that instruct agencies to put their in-house economists and scientists to work early to ensure "the quality, objectivity, utility and integrity of information" they use to craft new regulations.

Graham hopes those guidelines will force agencies to set regulatory priorities. "We need to identify the big ticket regulations with the greatest impact on the economy, public health and the environment," he says. OIRA plans to review agencies' published regulatory assessments to know what they're planning, identify regulations with the biggest economic impact, then work with agencies to use their own scientists, analysts and economists early on.

Graham's second initiative began in October when he announced plans to expand the visibility of OIRA and the rulemaking review using the federal Internet portal at www.FirstGov.gov. Rather than simply publishing a docket of proposed regulations, the site will expand over several years to include, among other things, statistical summaries and economic analyses of proposed rules, information about OIRA meetings with outside parties, and lists of correspondence from industries, public interest groups and others. The public access plan has two goals, Graham says. One is to avoid controversies like that which arose last winter over Vice President Dick Cheney's secret meetings with industry groups in crafting the administration's energy plan. The other, he says, "is to increase public understanding of OMB's regulatory review responsibilities, thereby allowing public scrutiny, criticism and praise of what we do."

The idea of an activist administrator at OIRA worries environmentalists and public health advocates. Lieberman, for example, asked whether Graham might intimidate EPA and other agencies into avoiding new rules. OMB Watch's Reese Rushing suggests that OIRA may end up with little to do because Bush appointees have such disdain for regulation that they may end up proposing few rules. But Graham says there's little chance of scaring off the agencies. "I've never known the agencies we're talking about," he says with a smile, "to be afraid of rule-making."

Cyril T. Zaneski is a correspondent at National Journal News Service. ]]>

Interior Department

Cyril T. Zaneski and Gia Fenoglio — Thu, 28 Jun 2001 00:00:00 -0400

Established: 1849
Address: 1849 C St. NW, Washington, DC 20240
Phone: 202-208-3100
2001 Budget:: $9.5 billion
Employment:: 69,233
Web Site: www.doi.gov
Functions: The Interior Department is the federal government's principal conservation agency, responsible for governing most nationally owned public lands and resources. The department administers land grants, oversees outdoor recreation, manages Indian affairs programs, operates national parks and historic sites, marks boundaries, and conducts research on geological resources. Gale Norton
Secretary
202-208-7351
After the 2000 election, Republican lawmakers from the West were still seething that President Clinton had set aside 3 million acres in their region as national monuments. They contended that the West's electoral support for George W. Bush was a loud-and-clear call for a strong advocate of private-property rights to head Interior. And Bush's appointment of Norton to manage Interior's 436 million acres-including national parks, wildlife refuges, and Indian lands-certainly made those Western conservatives very happy. She has advocated "market-oriented, property-rights-based, locally controlled solutions" to environmental problems. Norton, 47, came to Interior from the Denver law firm of Brownstein, Hyatt & Farber, where one of her clients was NL Industries, a Houston-based lead manufacturer being sued over cleanups at toxic-waste sites. She also served on the advisory board of Defenders of Property Rights, a Washington group that represents landowners in disputes with government agencies. Norton began her legal career working from 1979-83 for the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which was founded by another Coloradoan revered by property-rights advocates, James Watt. After a short stint as an assistant Agriculture secretary under Ronald Reagan, Norton joined Interior in 1985 as associate solicitor. She was elected Colorado's attorney general in 1991 and served two terms. She ran for the Senate in 1996, but lost in the GOP primary. Born in Kansas, Norton moved to a Denver suburb in 1959. She graduated from the University of Denver in 1975 and earned her law degree there in 1978. She and her husband, John Hughes, enjoy hiking.

J. Steven Griles
Deputy Secretary (designate)
202-208-6291
Griles, nominated as Interior's second in command, returns to the department after 11 years of working for petroleum and mining interests. At Interior from 1981-89, Griles was assistant secretary for lands and minerals, deputy secretary for land and water, and deputy director of the Office of Surface Mining. Griles, 53, says he's excited about working in an Administration committed to multiple use of public land. "I feel strongly that there are certain lands in this country where there should be oil and gas development," he says. "But that should only take place if we can also protect the land. I think we can do both." Griles spent six years as senior vice president of the United Co., a mining and gas firm in Bristol, Va., and five years as president of his own lobbying firm. A native of Virginia, Griles has a bachelor's degree from the University of Richmond. He is an enthusiastic hunter, fisherman, skier, hiker, and golfer. Griles said that he hikes a portion of Appalachian Trail every year. And last winter-just before Norton called and asked him to serve as her deputy-he took a vacation in the West and went snowmobiling. "If I didn't have to work," he says, "I'd be outside all the time."

P. Lynn Scarlett
Assistant Secretary (designate) for Policy, Management, and Budget
202-208-4203
Scarlett, the president of the Los Angeles-based Reason Foundation, is one of the nation's leading proponents of "market-oriented" solutions to environmental problems. For more than a decade, she has been writing about and helping to develop initiatives aimed at encouraging private-property owners and corporations to work voluntarily with government agencies. "My heart is with collaboration and partnership and open dialogue-not with conflict," says Scarlett, 52. In her new role, she will be responsible for providing policy guidance and fiscal and administrative oversight of the department's divisions of personnel, budget, and policy. A native of western Pennsylvania, Scarlett enjoys birding, canoeing, and hiking. She is also an artist who enjoys pen-and-ink drawing. Scarlett earned bachelor's and master's degrees in political science at the University of California (Santa Barbara), where she also completed coursework and exams for a Ph.D. Scarlett has worked at the Reason Foundation since 1979. She served as special-project editor and vice president for research, and created and managed the foundation's think tank before she was named president in January. She is married and has a daughter.

Return to Main Story

]]>

Envrionmental Cleanup

Cyril T. Zaneski — Fri, 01 Jun 2001 00:00:00 -0400

Critics say the Environmental Protection Agency's scientific efforts are contaminated by mismanagement and red tape.

cientists at the Environmental Protection Agency work in the trenches of an increasingly complicated and controversial battle to protect natural resources and public health.

They've had some stunning victories. EPA scientists played a major role in getting the lead out of gasoline and paint, an action that led to a dramatic decline of that brain-damaging poison in the blood of inner city children. EPA researchers also helped clear killer air pollution in such industrial cities as Pittsburgh and Chattanooga. And their work backed regulations that led to dramatic cleanups of rivers and beaches that were once fouled by industrial wastes.

But things can go awry on the path from research to rules. Regulations get crafted that cost industries billions-or rules don't get written at all, dangerous chemicals get dumped and people get sick. For example, Congress and EPA are still trying to figure out how to get out of the MTBE mess. MTBE-methyl tertiary butyl ether-is a chemical added to gasoline as part of an EPA-mandated program for reducing air pollution. EPA launched the program in 1992, despite warnings by its own scientists that MTBE would contaminate water supplies while doing less than expected to clean the air. The scientists later were proved right: MTBE has contaminated waterways and ground water in 30 states, including more than 10,000 wells in California. So EPA has spent more than $2 million on additional scientific studies of the impact of MTBE-oxygenated fuels. All of these studies have been deficient, according to a review by the National Academy of Sciences. In the meantime, MTBE continues to be a problem.

In the aftermath of the MTBE debacle, one of EPA's own scientists went public with allegations of bureaucratic bungling of scientific research. Microbiologist David Lewis, a 30-year veteran researcher, charged in a 1996 commentary in the journal Nature that the agency was "hopelessly gridlocked" and its scientists "largely consumed by administrative red tape." Lewis wrote that EPA was especially weak in understanding the biological impact of the pollutants it was supposed to regulate. He followed with another Nature article in 1999, questioning the scientific basis for EPA regulations dealing with pesticides, PCBs and other chemicals. The agency responded by asking Lewis to be quiet and then to resign-a move that brought action from the Labor Department and scrutiny from EPA overseers on Capitol Hill.

In March 2000, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit struck down EPA's drinking water standard for chloroform, a probable carcinogen, ruling that the agency disregarded the best available scientific information and set an "arbitrary and capricious" standard. The EPA had assumed incorrectly, the court ruled, that there was no safe threshold level for chloroform, a byproduct of chlorines.

The ruling, Lewis' allegations, the MTBE mess and a series of critical assessments of EPA science by government watchdog organizations have fueled the agency's critics. Some, like Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., don't believe EPA's scientific research is reliable as a basis for regulation. "The EPA has lost credibility," Inhofe says. "We need to find a way to involve outside panels of scientists. . . in the regulatory process."

The alleged lack of coordination between EPA science and regulatory policy was in the spotlight in March when EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman made a highly controversial decision on arsenic, a known carcinogen. She halted a pending tightening of a 59-year-old standard for arsenic in drinking water, saying the proposal was not supported by scientific evidence. The Clinton administration had decided to reduce the acceptable level of arsenic by 80 percent, from 50 parts per billion to 10 parts per billion. Whitman said EPA would seek an independent review of both the science behind the standard and the costs to communities that must comply with the rule.

"Certainly, the standard should be less than 50 parts per billion," Whitman says. "But the scientific indicators are unclear as to whether the standard needs to go as low as 10 parts per billion."

Now, the talk on Capitol Hill is the need for "sound science" at EPA. Those buzz words are a favorite of conservative politicians like Inhofe, who accuse the agency of putting politics ahead of scientific research in setting rules. But the words also are used by environmentalists who fear that the Bush administration and conservatives in Congress will force EPA to put business' economic concerns ahead of science in rule-making.

Whitman has tried to steer a course between the two factions by emphasizing her interest in strengthening EPA research efforts and letting them point toward sound regulations. "We will use strong science," she told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee during her confirmation hearing in January. "Scientific analysis should drive policy. Neither policy nor politics should drive scientific results.

"Without a level of confidence on the part of the Congress and the people of this country that the department makes decisions based on the very best science available," Whitman added, "I don't believe we will have the moral authority, much less the legal authority, to really make a difference."

Lack of Coordination

Getting science and policy to work hand-in-hand at EPA won't be easy. The agency's research over more than three decades has been fragmented, inconsistent and plagued by weak management, according to an exhaustive study completed last year by a panel of experts brought together by the National Academy of Sciences' National Research Council.

The EPA's top science job, assistant administrator for the Office of Research and Development, is one of the agency's weakest and most transient administrative positions, the panel concluded. The research administrator position is usually one of the last filled by a new administration and those who take the job stay an average of just 18 months. Moreover, the research administrator has authority only over the research office, and not the extensive scientific work done by EPA's individual resource-protection programs and 10 regional offices. The research administrator often must battle for attention and authority with other assistant administrators, who usually are lawyers with limited scientific backgrounds.

The lack of a strong hand at the tiller of EPA's scientific endeavors is surprising, given that the agency is responsible for what is arguably the nation's most important scientific operation related to the environment. The Supreme Court emphasized EPA's importance in late February when it upheld the agency's right to act on behalf of human health and the environment under the Clean Air Act without consideration of cost. The Clean Air Act requires strong, coordinated scientific research. Every five years, EPA must review its air standards to make sure they reflect the latest and best scientific evidence.

But despite its responsibilities and visibility, the agency is responsible for just 8 percent of federal environmental research. EPA's estimated $570 million research budget represents about 7 percent of the agency's overall spending, and its 1,900 research staffers are about 10 percent of the overall EPA workforce. Because its budget is relatively small, the agency's research projects must be chosen carefully. Since 1996, the EPA has focused on reducing uncertainty in risk assessment and on cost-effective approaches for managing and reducing risks. But the agency's odd configuration of laboratories and the lack of a strong chief of science makes it difficult to set priorities and stick to them, several former scientists agree.

Bernard Goldstein, dean of the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Public Health and the assistant administrator for research at EPA from 1983 to 1985, says the agency's organization makes it difficult for scientists to be heard by administrators and for the research administrator to set priorities. The research office "at times has not been heeded by the program offices nor at times has it sufficiently been relevant to shorter-term and longer-term agency needs," he says. A lack of communication between the agency's administration and researchers has meant that big policy questions often have come to the fore without studies needed to reduce the uncertainties of EPA decision-makers, Goldstein says.

EPA began reorganizing its research program in 1995 to address that lack of communication and coordinate research programs, says William Farland, the acting research administrator at EPA. "The work in individual laboratories was strong," he says. "The problem was, it wasn't coordinated and, therefore, it wasn't comprehensive."

But David Lewis, the EPA scientist critical of the agency's research management, says reforms put in place by former Administrator Carol Browner became a "management fiasco" that alienated EPA scientists and resulted in policies and regulations that are not based on sound science. "Getting science from the field to the assistant administrator for the Office of Research and Development takes eight months as information passes through seven layers of management," Lewis wrote to Whitman in March. Quoting an EPA research director, whom he did not identify, he added: "By the time the information gets to Congress, it's filled with inaccuracies."

One Strong Scientist

The key to helping assure stronger research and science-based policy at EPA is strong scientific leadership, says James Reisa, director of the National Research Council's Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology, which oversaw the council's study of EPA science. Leadership is more important than ever, he says, because environmental problems have grown more complex. While the agency could focus on regulating what came out of sewer pipes and smokestacks in its early years, it must now find strategies to deal with the hole in the ozone layer, global warming and the cumulative impacts of tens of thousands of chemicals. "We've picked all the low-hanging fruit and now it gets difficult," Reisa says. "We're facing problems now that are less tractable. So the most important recommendation at this time is that you need strong leadership. You need one strong scientist at that agency who's responsible for science."

The lack of strong, consistent scientific leadership at EPA has led to research that is of uneven quality, the NRC study panel concluded. More importantly, the lack of a strong scientific voice at the agency has contributed to suspicions among the agency's critics that EPA's science has been manipulated by the agency's decision-makers to fit policy goals. "A perception exists that regulations based on unsound science have led to unneeded economic and social burdens and that unsound science has sometimes led to decisions that have exposed people and ecosystems to avoidable risks," the panel's report said. People inside and outside the agency suspect that EPA scientists and administrators skew their research results "consciously or unconsciously" to fit their policies, the report concluded.

The academy recommended the creation of a new position, deputy administrator for science, to be a strong hand in running all scientific enterprises and also be a strong player in helping set policies. The idea behind the super scientist-as-deputy administrator is to attract someone with an unassailable reputation as a researcher who would not only lead science in the agency, but be a strong, recognizable voice for EPA's science in the public eye. "The agency's senior administrators now are paid to manage, not do good science," says Robert Huggett, EPA's assistant administrator for research from 1994 to 1997. "You need to have someone who puts science first. And you need better coordination. I think the government would get more bang for the buck if money for research were better coordinated." To back up the new deputy administrator, the report recommended making the existing assistant administrator of the Office of Research and Development a six-year appointment with the title "chief scientist."

"It's important to have stability there," Reisa says. "With each new head of the Office of Research and Development comes changes in policy and management. It's incredibly disruptive."

The agency also needs to bolster its pool of scientific talent by creating endowed research chairs at EPA's national laboratories and continuing to emphasize graduate research fellowships and post-doctoral research programs, according to the NRC panel. "EPA needs research superstars, potential Nobel laureates," Reisa says. "These kinds of people set a tone for all the scientists at the agency and bring in top talent. When the nation's best and brightest grad students all want to work at EPA lab because so-and-so works there, you've arrived."

The NRC report was prepared by a superstar panel of scientists, who consulted with 200 scientists, engineers and policy-makers, reviewed more than 300 EPA documents and inspected 12 EPA laboratories and five of its 10 regional offices. When the report was released last June, it caused a stir. The Clinton administration quickly endorsed its recommendations. The Business Roundtable, an industry group, incorporated key portions of the report in its own plan for reforming EPA. So did a coalition of eight nonpartisan think tanks led by the Reason Public Policy Institute and the National Academy of Public Administration. The Reason report recommended that the Bush administration move quickly to elevate the science adviser's position "to start building on the credibility of EPA science, because that is ultimately the foundation for everything that the agency is going to be doing from there on."

While Whitman and the Bush administration have been silent so far on possible plans for muscling up science at EPA, members of Congress are preparing legislation that could restructure the management of research and bolster the political power of scientists in the agency. Rep. Vernon Ehlers, R-Mich., himself a Ph.D. physicist and chairman of the House subcommittee overseeing EPA, used the academy's report as the basis for legislation to give science a more prominent role in the agency.

"I've been bothered for several years that EPA decisions were not always based in good science," Ehlers said. "I think this bill will help remedy that." He said his bill stands a good chance of passage because of widespread interest on Capitol Hill in strengthening the credibility of EPA's scientific research. And Ehlers' reputation as a moderate who is not an enemy of environmental regulations enhances the mainstream appeal of his effort. Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, is working on a companion bill in the Senate.

How far EPA reform efforts go on Capitol Hill will depend on the involvement of environmentalists and the Bush administration. So far, neither has expressed a great deal of interest. Environmentalists have been busy sizing up an administration they fear will not be supportive of their concerns and opposing administration proposals to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other public lands to oil exploration and other resource-extraction industries. Pat Kenworthy, vice president for policy research at the National Environmental Trust, a conservation group, says she's wary of efforts to restructure EPA. "Sometimes, some of what passes as reorganization or streamlining is really an attempt at deregulating," Kenworthy says.

Clinton-Era Reforms

EPA itself tried to reform its research programs under Huggett, the agency's former assistant administrator for research during the Clinton administration. While many of the appointees in that job have lacked solid scientific credentials, the academy report says, Huggett brought a national reputation as an expert in marine chemistry and toxicology earned in 20 years at the College of William and Mary. Huggett was chairman of environmental science at the college's marine school.

Huggett arrived at EPA in 1994 after having served on its science advisory panel. He was familiar with the stack of reports critical of the agency's scientific programs and was determined to make changes recommended in those assessments. "I didn't all of a sudden wake up in the morning and say this is what I'm going to do," says Huggett, who is now vice president for research and graduate studies at Michigan State University. I was able to do what I did because I was working from what others had recommended."

Huggett installed a program that based research priorities on environmental risks. The agency set out to identify and characterize hazards based on potential exposure and directed research toward the most pressing needs. "There was never any question about whether EPA administrators were using scientific data to make policy," Huggett says. "The question was always whether they would get the data they needed. We needed to make sure you could always get the best science at the right time."

Huggett also is credited with improving the agency's process for guaranteeing that research is peer-reviewed, a process that requires outside experts to review results of its research for accuracy. Prior to his arrival, friends of EPA researchers often reviewed agency research, the academy report found.

Another of Huggett's reforms was an annual $100 million competitive grants program, similar to those at the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. He also launched a $3 million graduate fellowship program, garnering some criticism in the process. "When you're taking away money that used to go to people inside the agency and giving it to people outside, it's not going to be popular," Huggett says.

Reisa says Huggett should be acknowledged for bucking a system that had been entrenched for a quarter century. "The guy had incredible courage and Administrator Carol Browner backed him to the hilt," Reisa says.

The change in grant awards also meant a change in how the agency promoted its research managers. Previously, managers were promoted based on the number of people who worked for them and the amount of money they controlled, Reisa says. "Researchers were turned into money managers and grants administrators. A lot of fiefdoms were built up." And there was no competitive procedure, he adds. "Research scientists lose their edge when they're spending all their time giving out money."

Farland, EPA's current acting assistant administrator for research, acknowledged that such changes caused a lot of pain internally-particularly those that opened to outside laboratories the competition for agency grants. "Cooperative agreements among labs were a way of life," Farland says. "The move toward making scientists compete for funding was a traumatic experience."

Research 'Chaos'

Lewis, a scientist in the EPA's Athens, Ga., laboratory, says the experience was more than traumatic; it effectively made it impossible to get scientific results directly to policy-makers in Washington. Prior to Browner's tenure at EPA, all policy decisions had to be signed by the assistant administrator for research to assure at least some high-level scientific review. The reforms begun by Huggett created layers of bureaucracy for managing the laboratories that EPA scientists say made planning research "chaotic," "impossible" and "frustrating," Lewis says, quoting researchers he declined to identify. Researchers, he says, are afraid of losing their jobs in a witch hunt. The fix for EPA science should have been "simple and not costly: a long-term plan to steadily increase the number and quality of the agency's scientists while giving them more resources and better mechanisms to do research and collaborate with outside scientists," Lewis told Whitman in his March letter.

"The scientists, such as myself, were simply unplugged by Huggett's reforms," Lewis says. "Now, they're passing regulations that are not based on sound science."

Lewis' criticisms of the agency and its policy decisions landed him in trouble with the Clinton administration. After he published commentaries critical of the agency in Nature and in the Athens Banner-Herald in 1996, the agency's Office of General Counsel determined he had violated the Hatch Act. The agency said Lewis had violated the law regulating political activity by federal employees by listing his EPA affiliation in the Athens newspaper ahead of his connection to the University of Georgia, where he was an adjunct senior research scientist. By listing the EPA first, Lewis was told, he had attempted to embarrass the agency. He says his promotions were stopped because he had spoken out.

Lewis took his complaints to the Labor Department and to Congress. In October 1996, three members of the Georgia congressional delegation-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Rep. Charles Norwood and Rep. John Linder-wrote a letter to Browner supporting Lewis. And in January 1997, the Labor Department determined Lewis' criticisms were protected by provisions of federal environmental laws and that the agency's general counsel had applied the ethics rules in a retaliatory manner.

EPA agreed in 1997 to pay Lewis $115,000 in legal fees and damages. The Labor Department determined further in October 1998 that EPA had blocked Lewis' promotion. The agency agreed to pay $25,000 in legal fees but also required that Lewis agree to resign by May 28, 2003.

Asked about the Lewis case or about the agency's handling of dissent by its scientists, Farland, the acting assistant administrator for research, said he would not comment on any individual case. However, he says the agency expects its scientists to work out differences on issues within the agency. "Of course, there will always be differences of scientific opinion," Farland says. "I think the question of whether scientists who work within the federal government can be simply independent, to do what they want to do, is a different issue."

Lewis finds it difficult to believe that agency officials still deny they did anything wrong. "What they don't realize or accept is that every one of those environmental statutes that give EPA its authority also give EPA employees the right to disagree with the agency's policies in public," he says. Lewis criticized EPA again in an October 1999 article in Nature that raised questions about the safety of federal rules allowing the application of human sewage sludge on farm fields. The questions raised by his paper are among those being considered by a National Academy of Sciences panel looking at the issue of sludge as fertilizer. The academy also found lacking the agency's decision to allow MTBE.

EPA decisions such as these opened the door for conservative critics like Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr., R-Wis., the former chairman of the House Science Committee, who held two hearings on EPA whistle-blowers who had questioned the agency's scientific work.

However, the current chairman of the House Science Committee, Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, R-N.Y., says extreme criticism of research at EPA is unwarranted. "There isn't anything inherently wrong with science at the agency," Boehlert says. "This is a town where everybody likes to say that they favor science-based decision-making, but when the research is done and they don't like it, they [turn to] another approach."

Many critics of the agency have suggested that scientific work be conducted outside the agency in a kind of bureau of environmental statistics, similar to independent offices that gather information on the economy or labor. With a firewall between policy-makers and the scientists gathering information about the environment, these critics argue in a recent report from the Reason Public Policy Institute that the environmental research will have greater credibility. Farland says it is important that environmental research stays within EPA. "I don't think there is a place in the federal government where the research that we do can be done any better," he says.

Cyril T. Zaneski is a correspondent at National Journal News Service. ]]>

Senate Democrats slam Bush nominee to oversee federal regulations

Cyril T. Zaneski — Fri, 18 May 2001 00:00:00 -0400

Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., charged Graham has "trivialized environmental regulations" in the past by saying that smog might be good for human health because it blocks the sun's ultraviolet rays--and by questioning the need to regulate some toxins.

Durbin also suggested that Graham has compromised his integrity by soliciting donations from polluting industries and tobacco interests for the institute he founded--the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis.

For 15 years Graham has been teaching students at Harvard how to analyze the costs and benefits of government efforts to reduce environmental and public health risks. As an academic, he acknowledged, he has been "speaking provocative ideas"--a practice that he promised will end if he is confirmed as administrator of OIRA, the part of OMB that reviews all new federal rules.

He promised that he would be "enforcing the laws as Congress wrote them."

Governmental Affairs Chairman Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., and other Republicans praised Graham as the expert in his field of risk analysis--and cited a long list of endorsements of his nomination by academics in the field of environmental science and public health.

Thompson questioned how anyone in Congress could object to Graham's use of corporate funding to run his center, given politicians' need for campaign contributions. "I don't think we ought to get too high up on our high horses with regard to that," Thompson said.

But Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., said opposition to Graham from environmental and consumer groups was based on the Bush administration's early assault on environmental rules, not Graham's credentials.

"If the Bush administration had not taken action early on that raised questions about the administration's attitudes toward a whole range of protective regulations ...there would be a lot less anxiety about your nomination," Lieberman told Graham.

]]>

Natural wonder

Cyril T. Zaneski — Sun, 01 Apr 2001 00:00:00 -0500

And with help from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and American taxpayers, they achieved a stunning success.

The Corps' mid-century drainage project, an engineering marvel, managed to dry up half the Everglades for farming and suburban development. But the project inadvertently left the remaining wetlands in lousy shape. They can no longer support the tropical flora and fauna that made South Florida a biological jewel. By some estimates, 95 percent or more of the populations of brightly plumed wading birds that once made homes in the Everglades and 68 types of plants and animals in the region are now listed among the nation's endangered and threatened species. A few, like the Cape Sable seaside sparrow and the Florida panther, are teetering on the brink of extinction. But what grabbed the attention of the farmers and developers who form the backbone of the region's economy is this: The Everglades wetlands are no longer capable of soaking up superabundant summer rains for later delivery to a booming human population and thirsty crops of vegetables and sugar cane.

So Floridians turned again to their old federal partners and found them willing to help with a different mission. Working side-by-side and splitting costs along the way, federal and state officials crafted plans for the world's largest ecological rescue mission, which will also serve as an urban and agricultural water project. The Everglades restoration is expected to cost $7.8 billion over 36 years and then about $180 million a year to maintain. Under a landmark deal approved overwhelmingly last year by Congress and the Florida Legislature, the partners will divide project costs equally forever.

Politicians, ecologists and engineers all around the world are keeping an eye on what happens in South Florida. It is, first, the world's most ambitious ecosystem restoration, an attempt to deal in a holistic way with environmental problems of an entire landscape of 18,000 square miles.
Second, the project is a test of how federal, state, tribal and local governments can work together and with multiple competing interests in the private sector. There are more than two dozen government entities involved in the Everglades project. They are following a broad restoration plan agreed upon by a coalition of competing South Florida interests-tourism promoters, environmentalists, limestone mining companies, business leaders, the sugar industry, farmers and urban utilities.

Tipping Canoe

"The Everglades project is like a canoe," observes Terrence "Rock" Salt, a retired Army Corps colonel who now serves as executive director of the South Florida Ecosystem Restoration Task Force, the intergovernmental group coordinating the project. "You get one guy standing up, and everybody goes over."

South Florida's canoe always seems on the verge of a spill. Interest groups and government agencies have sued each other, battled in ugly election campaigns and regularly exchanged harsh words in public about the Everglades campaign over the years. The current cleanup effort got shoved forward by a lawsuit. In 1988, a brash-acting U.S. attorney named Dexter Lehtinen filed suit against the state of Florida for allowing polluted water to flow into the Everglades from farmland. The legal war cost federal and state taxpayers $7 million in legal fees and spawned another 39 related lawsuits before the state cried "uncle" and agreed to launch a cleanup in 1991.

But that was hardly the end of the battle. "It's hard to go a week in South Florida without somebody throwing a grenade," says one federal official involved in the Everglades restoration. The Miccosukee Indians, whose reservation is inside Everglades National Park, have fought the National Park Service in federal court and in Congress over the tribe's plans to expand its housing. The Miccosukees, environmentalists, the Army Corps and the state are embroiled in a complicated triple lawsuit in federal court over management of water in the habitat of the Cape Sable seaside sparrow.

The loudest and nastiest fight took place in 1996, when environmentalists and the sugar industry waged a $38 million battle over a referendum on a proposed penny-a-pound tax on Florida sugar to help fund the Everglades cleanup. Sugar won the bitter fight-the most expensive in the state's history. It was impossible in the summer and fall of 1996 for anyone in Florida to watch a half hour of television without seeing three or four advertisements on the sugar tax campaign. "There's an awful lot of scar tissue around this issue," says Bob Dawson, a former top official in the Corps who now works as a Washington lobbyist on the Everglades project for South Florida agricultural interests, the sugar industry and urban utilities. "It's very difficult to get people to trust each other."

Yet somehow, the Everglades project stayed afloat. The warring parties managed to agree on enough to persuade Congress that the restoration would not dissolve into a series of lawsuits. "You've got to give credit to all those people who put down their machetes and reached across the table to shake hands with their enemies," says J. Allison DeFoor, former environmental policy adviser to Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. "By the time we got to Washington last year, we had everybody from Big Sugar to the enviros holding hands and singing 'Kumbaya'-sometimes through gritted teeth." In South Florida, the actual day-to-day work of planning the restoration has been smoother than many expected because the two lead agencies, the Corps of Engineers and the South Florida Water Management District, have been working together for a half century. The district is a massive engineering agency with more than 1,700 employees who manage water supplies and operate a flood control system built by the Corps for 16 counties from Orlando in central Florida to Key West. Though the Corps has worked closely with the district in the past, the Everglades project marks the first time that the agency has opened up its planning to the public. Traditionally, the Corps designed major projects behind closed doors and held token public hearings after the work had been completed. The Everglades project, by contrast, was drawn up in full public view on the Internet. Between 1996 and 1999, the Corps posted proposed plans on a Web site devoted to the restoration, accepted comments from the public and cooperating groups of scientists and engineers, and then revised its plan based on the comments.

"What you're seeing in South Florida is a true bottom-up effort," Salt says. "Government-in this case, the Corps-is really taking its cues from a process driven by the public."

Water, Water Everywhere

The public is going to have to stay involved. Though the restoration has been authorized, it will unfold over nearly four decades in a series of 68 engineering projects. The ultimate goal is to restore about 2.4 million acres of wetlands, but it also aims to provide water for farms and the human population. The Corps and the water district each will have about 150 employees working on the restoration. They'll keep 15 to 20 projects going at a time, while a special interagency oversight group tries to make sure that the work of individual project teams conforms to the overall restoration goals, says Stuart Applebaum, the chief of ecosystem restoration for the Corps' Jacksonville District.

"This is like going to the moon in the 1960s," Applebaum says. "While this project is not as complex as the space program in its heyday, the restoration technically presents just as big a challenge. Nobody has ever done anything like this before."

If the idea of spending $7.8 billion on the restoration sounds stunning, consider this: The project authorized last fall is only part of a still larger ecological restoration and pollution cleanup that stretches beyond the Everglades itself. In all, the effort to restore South Florida's environment is expected to cost $14.8 billion, with the federal government's share reaching $6.5 billion and the rest coming from state and local sources. Along with the Everglades endeavor, the South Florida restoration includes many other projects. The biggest are a state plan to cleanse water flowing into the Everglades from farmland, which will probably cost more than $1 billion, and the $414 million restoration of the Kissimmee River, which snakes along 40 miles between Orlando and Lake Okeechobee. The Kissimmee restoration is actually an undoing of a Corps project that turned the river into a straight ditch between 1962 and 1971, causing severe water pollution problems and destroying about 35,000 acres of wetlands.

The goals of the Everglades restoration flow from the work of business leaders, tourism promoters, environmentalists and farmers on the 49-member Governor's Commission for a Sustainable South Florida. Appointed by the late Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles, the commission members worked from 1995 to 1999 to reach consensus on 14 major reports outlining restoration goals.

This consensus did not come easily. An environmentalist referred to one of the sugar industry representatives as a "corporate felon," recalls Richard Pettigrew, a former state senator and House speaker who chaired the commission. "At first, many of these longtime foes were afraid to break up into committees to identify issues we should deal with," Pettigrew says. "Nobody wanted to give up anything. The utility rep from Palm Beach County, for example, didn't want to talk about any solution that didn't guarantee him free, unlimited access to water."

Pettigrew allowed feuding commission members to pick their committees. He also made sure each meeting included a social gathering in the evening where members could bond over drinks. "Eventually, we began to understand the real problems that people had, rather than just the rhetoric," Pettigrew says. "And we stayed out of that sugar tax fight, even though some people were killing each other over it."

The commission managed by the fall of 1996 to complete a report outlining restoration goals. These goals made their way into the federal Water Resources Development Act of 1996 and set the stage for the restoration. The report, like all those adopted by the commission between 1994 and 1999, was passed by a unanimous vote.

The key to the commission's success and to calming the combatants concerned about access to water was this: A restoration of the Everglades would be more than an environmental project, it would also increase the water supply for everyone.

Water is the major issue in South Florida, even though it is one of the wettest places in the country. The region gets about 60 inches of rain a year. Most of the water, however, falls during summer thunderstorms and quickly drains into coastal estuaries through a network of more than 1,000 miles of canals built by the Corps and the state over the last 100 years. The restoration project's major goal is to stop that rapid loss of water by capturing most of it in hundreds of deep wells and a network of new reservoirs that will be built on farmland and abandoned limestone mining pits at the edge of the Everglades. The Corps calls the concept "enlarging the pie."

"We fashioned a win-win situation," Pettigrew says. The sugar industry reluctantly agreed to sell at least 50,000 acres of farmland to the government for reservoirs in return for the assurance that farmers would have water in the long term. Without such a deal, the farmers feared, the growing urban areas and their growing power at the ballot box eventually would start beating agriculture in political battles and suck dry existing water supplies. Environmentalists, meanwhile, agreed to share water because the ultimate loser in a future water war would be the Everglades. The bottom line, Pettigrew says: "We never wavered in our central goal: To make sure the Everglades was restored-and restored to the highest possible level."

Restudy, then Restore

The restoration plan is largely fashioned after a state plan drawn up in the early 1980s under former Democratic Florida governor and now U.S. Sen. Bob Graham. The old state "Save Our Everglades" program got a new head of steam in 1993 when Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt took an interest in getting the Clinton administration involved. By June of that year, the federal task force-with officials from about a half dozen agencies involved-was holding its first meeting.

For what was to become a momentous undertaking, the restoration effort was at first known humbly as "the restudy." The name reflected the fact that the project was actually a rethinking of the Central and Southern Florida Project, a massive drainage project that the Corps designed in 1947 and began building after Congress authorized its construction in 1948. The project expanded and improved a network of drainage ditches begun by the state early in the century and added many more. The Corps laced South Florida with about 1,000 miles of canals and cut the heart of the Everglades with levees that turned the grassy riverbed into three major reservoirs and a 700,000-acre agricultural area.

The Army Corps' work is an engineering marvel that achieved its goals of opening up vast tracts of land for farming and development. But the project did severe damage to the environment. The number of wading birds dropped dramatically. Everglades National Park, dedicated in 1947 to preserve the region's biological wealth of plants and animals, was degraded as drainage projects beyond the park's boundaries dried up its marshes to the peril of its flora and fauna. Florida Bay suffered devastating algal blooms that smothered its marine life.

And the region's human population-which has boomed from 500,000 when the Corps designed the system to more than 6 million today-began to suffer, too. Residents have endured frequent water shortages and intrusions of salty seawater into depleted freshwater aquifers, the sole source of the region's drinking water. Devastating wildfires have burned longer and hotter in the dried-out edges of the Everglades, polluting the air over cities and suburbs near the coast.

Fashioning the restoration as a restudy enabled the Corps to tap into a fat federal purse for general construction. If it had begun as a restoration study, it would have been forced to draw from the Corps' threadbare "general investigations" account. Salt, who headed the Corps' Jacksonville District from 1991 to 1994, and his successor, the now-retired Col. Terry Rice, "pushed the envelope" to get restoration efforts going, Rice says. It was Salt who oversaw the start of the Kissimmee project and came up with a broad plan for extending the restoration effort into the larger Everglades. Rice, who served from 1994 to 1997, challenged the Governor's Commission for a Sustainable South Florida to ask for a full restoration. "Give me a plan and we will implement it," he recalls telling them. The commission members, accustomed to working with the slow-moving Corps bureaucracy of old, found that hard to believe.

Rice understood why commission members were skeptical at first. They were accustomed to being told what couldn't be done, and so was the Corps. "A lot of times, I think we let lawyers run our agencies, and that's a mistake," says Rice, now a professor at Florida International University and a consultant to the Miccosukee Tribe. "I would tell my lawyer: This is what I want to do. Tell me if it's illegal or not.' "

The commission accepted Rice's challenge. They gave him a set of goals, which were then written into the 1996 Water Resources Development Act to guide restoration planning. The bill expanded the South Florida Ecosystem Restoration Task Force to include state, local and tribal representatives and authorized it to coordinate the project.

Conflicting Voices

Created in 1993 by an executive order, the task force originally included only representatives of five federal agencies. State and local governments initially were excluded because the 1972 Federal Advisory Committee Act prohibited such cooperation. That barrier was lifted in 1995, when Congress eliminated some of the law's restrictions as part of the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act. The 14-member task force now coordinates the efforts of 13 federal and seven Florida agencies, two Indian tribes, 16 counties and dozens of cities and towns.

In practice, however, the task force has little control over the agencies whose efforts it is supposed to coordinate. The agencies receive their authority-and their funding-from the legislative bodies that oversee them, Salt notes. So the task force must try to build consensus while leaving untouched the individual responsibilities of its members. "While it was framed as a partnership, each side has its own way of doing business," Salt says. "The state never contemplated giving up any sovereign rights in this process. . . . They're not doing it the way the feds do it, but that's a good thing, not a bad thing."

But state officials have grumbled openly about federal oversight of the project. One sore point is that the General Accounting Office has repeatedly criticized the task force for failing to operate more like a federal agency and to develop strategic plans for buying land. Task force proponents say such criticism would only make sense if the organization had control over its member agencies' budgets.

"There is a perception that the task force is a governing body, a shadow government," says Ernie Barnett, Florida's director of Ecosystem Planning and Coordination and the chairman of the task force's intergovernmental working group. "Somehow, the people in Washington got the idea that the task force has some oversight over Florida's land-acquisition process." The task force also has been unable to settle disputes among federal agencies. "Too often, federal agencies have conflicting voices and visions," Barnett says. "When you have a state-federal partnership, you have to speak with one state voice and reflect a single vision. It's easy for us, because the governor settles disputes. But when there are federal disputes, that's when the wheels come off."

The effort to save the Cape Sable seaside sparrow is such an example. The National Park Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service have been involved in a dispute with the Army Corps for years over water management practices that federal biologists say have pushed the sparrow to the brink of extinction. Three lawsuits have been filed in the matter, which is now before a federal judge in Miami. "The sparrow will make it only because God is helping," Barnett says. "The weather has cooperated. The agencies have not."

The task force works best when there are well-defined state and federal roles, Barnett says. It has done best in carrying out state and federal mandates. For example, Barnett says, it did well in setting priorities for spending $275 million set aside by Congress in 1996 for restoration efforts.

At times, the working relationships formed by members of the task force enable them to cut through red tape. For example, the task force enabled the Environmental Protection Agency and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to strike a compromise on regulations that will save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in upcoming tests of the use of deep wells for storing water for the restoration project, Salt says. "Normally, the task of working through state and federal regulatory frameworks is too daunting," Salt says. "But because we had this task force, we were able to work together and come up with a way to help." Despite all of its complications, the restoration project has probably put Florida in a better position than most states for tackling monster issues, says Dawson, a former top administrator in the Army Corps who lobbies in Washington on behalf of South Florida utilities and agriculture. "The key is that they've developed a balancing act and it's going to be a real safety net for South Florida," Dawson says. "The mechanism they've developed for sharing water is the kind of mechanism that might have helped people in California with their power crisis. But they just rolled the dice there on [a possible] power shortage and the environment is going to get hurt."

Dawson says the South Florida model of building consensus will be copied elsewhere. "I think it's going to be a harbinger of things to come in other parts of the country. The emphasis is on ecosystem restoration that is tied to vital interests of all the players," he says. "If people don't learn to cooperate, it's not going to work."

The $7.8 billion restoration effort aims to let water flow again in the heart of the Everglades. Left: The broad river bed before drainage projects began in the late 1800s. Center: The existing network of canals that helped turn half of the old river into farmland and suburbs. Right: The restoration envisioned by project planners.

Cyril T. Zaneski is a correspondent at National Journal News Service. ]]>

The perils of preservation

Cyril T. Zaneski — Sun, 01 Apr 2001 00:00:00 -0500

"Yes, there are key transferrable lessons, but the biggest mistake you can make is to take this as boilerplate," says Terrence "Rock" Salt, executive director of the South Florida Ecosystem Restoration Task Force, the coordinating agency for federal, state, tribal and local governments working on the $7.8 billion Everglades project.

The project most often compared to the Everglades restoration is the proposed $10 billion plan being assembled by federal and state agencies to restore waterways at the junction of the San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers in California. Likewise, the Chesapeake Bay project coordinates the efforts of several states with the federal government. The Louisiana Wetlands Initiative, focused on preserving the marshes around the Gulf of Mexico, centers on the work of the Army Corps of Engineers.

Lesson 1 for the managers of these projects is to bring representatives of all interest groups to the table in an effort to agree on a set of facts and common goals. The key to Everglades advocates' ability to leverage cash from Congress and the Florida legislature was the broad outline drawn up by the Governor's Commission for a Sustainable South Florida. The 49-member commission was set up and appointed in 1994 by the late Gov. Lawton Chiles in an effort to reach consensus among the region's many-and often competing-economic, environmental and political interests.

"It's important that the commission be appointed by someone with clear authority like a governor or mayor, and that the members are told that they are not to come back without a plan," says Richard Pettigrew, a former state lawmaker and lawyer who chaired the commission. "The commission needs strong and high-quality people, not a bunch of naysayers," Pettigrew says. "And it needs time."

The full Florida commission met for two days a month between 1995 and 1999. With regular committee meetings combined with gatherings of subcommittees, the commission work took hundreds of hours a year. But the panel's 14 major reports form the basis for work done by the federal and state agency teams who assembled the restoration plan. The commission's votes on every major report were unanimous.

While getting interest groups to agree on a project's goals can be complicated, it is also hard to get agencies moving in the same direction. Some of the most vexing problems in South Florida flow from disagreements among government agencies. The Everglades restoration effort includes 13 federal agencies, seven Florida agencies and commissions, two Indian tribes, 16 counties and dozens of cities and towns.

Salt, who has been involved since 1993 in organizing the Everglades efforts, offers three pieces of advice for getting agencies to start working together.

o Respect cultural differences between the state and federal governments and among different agencies. "The vast majority of public servants are trained in a system that teaches boundaries and they take that very seriously," Salt says. "It's particularly difficult for regulators. They are accustomed to being combative in an effort to save natural resources." o Get all the agencies to agree to a single set of facts. This is not as simple as it sounds. In South Florida, agencies have tended to view reality through a prism of their mandates and missions.

o Be prepared to pay your share. States that serve as local sponsors for Army Corps projects typically pick up about 30 percent of the tab. To show their enthusiasm for the restoration, Floridians agree to pay half the project's cost, a deal that did not go unnoticed on Capitol Hill. "The 50-50 cost share is a huge advange in South Florida," Salt says. "It's the trump card."

]]>

In search of a super-scientist

Cyril T. Zaneski — Mon, 05 Mar 2001 00:00:00 -0500

Chief Scientist, Environmental Protection Agency (Proposed)

If there's one thing that Republicans, Democrats, industry groups, and environmentalists agree on, it's the premise that environmental protection strategies and rules should be based on sound scientific research.

On this point, EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman sought to reassure members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee during her confirmation hearing on Jan. 17: "Without a level of confidence on the part of the Congress and the people of this country that the department makes decisions based on the very best science available, I don't believe we will have the moral authority, much less the legal authority, to really make a difference."

Behind those comforting words lurks an unsettling reality: The EPA does not have a distinguished scientist directing the research behind rules that protect public health and can cost industries billions of dollars. There is, as a result, strong bipartisan support for the creation of a powerful position at EPA that would take the lead on scientific matters in ways that could dramatically change how key environmental decisions are made in Washington.

Rep. Vernon J. Ehlers, R-Mich., the chairman of the House Science subcommittee overseeing the EPA, has introduced a bill setting up a super-scientist job to oversee the agency's research and to ensure a strong objective voice in policy debates. "I've been bothered for several years that EPA decisions were not always based on good science," said Ehlers, who is a research scientist with a Ph.D. "I think this bill will help remedy that." Ehlers' bill is based on recommendations from a National Academy of Sciences report that was heralded by environmentalists and by such business groups as the Business Roundtable. Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, is working on a companion bill in the Senate. Whitman, however, has yet to weigh in on the idea.

The legislation, which sponsors hope to advance quickly, would create the position of deputy EPA administrator for science. The plan is to install a distinguished scientist to direct the work of the agency's 12 laboratories and some 2,000 scientists, ensuring that sound scientific research underpins all agency decisions.

The EPA's current top science job -- assistant administrator for the Office of Research and Development -- is one of the agency's weakest and most transient administrative positions, according to the June report by the National Academy of Sciences' National Research Council. The administrator has no authority over scientific work done by EPA program officials or by the agency's regional offices; to be heard, he often must joust with lawyers who run the agency, the report found.

The idea behind creating a deputy administrator slot is to attract someone with an unassailable reputation as a researcher. This person would not only lead science in the agency but would also be a strong, recognizable voice for EPA's science in the public eye. "The agency's senior administrators now are paid to manage, not to do good science," says Robert Huggett, a former EPA assistant administrator for research. "You need to have someone who puts science first." Return to main story

]]>

Whitman tackles EPA enforcement with a smile

Cyril T. Zaneski — Mon, 12 Feb 2001 00:00:00 -0500

There is no doubt that Whitman, who as governor of New Jersey led a $1 billion effort to preserve open space, would have been a happy camper if she had been asked to run the Interior Department and to oversee national parks, wildlife refuges, and preserves. But the Bush Administration tapped former Colorado Attorney General Gale Norton as Interior Secretary in deference to Western landowners, whose property-rights cause she has championed.

At the Environmental Protection Agency, Whitman, 54, will need a tetanus shot, not a fly rod, before wading into polluted streams as the nation's environmental top cop. And some critics question whether she is up to the task.

"The EPA administrator needs to be the chief pollution fighter in the country, vigorously standing up for environmental justice and full enforcement of environmental programs that safeguard our health and the natural world," said Jeff Tittel, director of the Sierra Club's New Jersey chapter. "Governor Whitman's record in New Jersey causes us to have

serious concerns about the commitment she will bring to the job." What troubles conservationists is that under Whitman's leadership, the New Jersey resource agency's enforcement staffing declined 30 percent and the pollution fines it collected dropped 80 percent. By contrast, outgoing EPA Administrator Carol Browner touted her agency's enforcement efforts, citing a record 6,027 enforcement actions last year and fines or other payments of $2.6 billion--the third-highest total in the agency's 30-year history, according to one of Browner's last press releases.

Whitman derides such enforcement statistics as "bean counting" and evidence of an outmoded "command-and-control" approach to environmental protection. She has strong backing on that point from President Bush, conservative lawmakers, and state environmental regulators. "That has long been EPA's problem: They tend to see enforcement as a goal in and of itself," said Robert Roberts, executive director of the Environmental Council of the States, an organization representing state regulatory officers. "But enforcement statistics don't tell you anything about the quality of the environment."

Whitman says the quality of New Jersey's environment improved during her seven-year tenure as governor, which began in 1994. She emphasizes the amount of land purchased and preserved; the reduction in the number of days in which water pollution forced beaches to close; the streamlined cleanup programs that encouraged redevelopment of abandoned inner-city industrial sites; and the overall measured improvement in air quality. Most environmental improvements occurred, she says, because her state moved beyond forcing regulatory mandates on industries. "We are instead working to forge strong partnerships among citizens, government, and business, built on trust, cooperation, and shared mutual goals," she told the Senate committee.

She is hoping to bring a similar approach to the EPA. Her goals include providing "flexibility" to states and local governments that want to solve their own environmental problems; setting up "market-based incentives" that will make it profitable for companies to reduce pollution voluntarily; and emphasizing both "strong science" and cost-benefit analyses in crafting policies and regulations.

But it is easier to scrub a hazardous-waste dump clean than to reform the EPA. With 18,000 employees and an annual budget of about $7 billion, the agency is not only massive, but its branches answer to many masters. At least two dozen congressional committees and subcommittees oversee its moves, and dozens of conservation organizations and industry groups scrutinize the agency's every action. "It's really not just one agency, it's a collection of agencies," said William Dickinson, an environmental consultant who worked with Reason Public Policy Institute and other groups on a recent report on reforming EPA. "And any administrator will tell you, it's a bear to run."

Browner came to the EPA eight years ago with a reform agenda that she put aside when conservative Republicans began cutting the agency's budget and programs after they took control of the House in 1995. As she left office, Browner was being denounced by congressional Republicans for championing regulations, such as new air pollution rules, that they said could not be backed by scientific research and would saddle industries with high compliance costs. Almost forgotten in the loud fights over the EPA's regulatory efforts were a host of voluntary compliance programs that Browner nurtured and championed.

Whitman's confirmation hearing provided a reminder of just how volatile environmental enforcement issues will be. When Sen. James M. Inhofe, R-Okla., asked Whitman to provide immediate relief to regulated businesses by practicing what he called "compassionate compliance," he drew a swift rebuke from Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. "Compassionate compliance for polluters is a great idea," Boxer said. "But we don't want it to end with taxpayers' tears."

]]>

Tackling the Transition

Cyril T. Zaneski — Mon, 01 Jan 2001 00:00:00 -0500

Overhauling the mechanics of the transfer of power.

his was supposed to be the smoothest Presidential transition ever. For the first time, everybody was ready to go long before Election Day. Congress had agreed last fall to chip in extra cash to help pave the new administration's path into office. Groups of independent scholars had used new federal funding to prepare orientation programs for new appointees. Both the Bush and Gore campaigns had begun making plans to govern and the General Services Administration had outdone itself getting transition headquarters equipped for the first fully wired power transfer of the Information Age.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the transition. And as of early December, the government's transition headquarters at 1800 G Street, N.W., still was vacant, pending the conclusion of Vice President Al Gore's court contests of the Florida presidential vote and declaration of a clear winner of that state's decisive electoral votes. With Texas Gov. George W. Bush setting up his own transition office elsewhere using private donations, the 90,000 square feet of work space GSA had leased in downtown Washington stood unused. It wasn't until Dec. 13, when Gore finally conceded the election, that the Bush team received the keys to the transition offices. That left them with only a little more than a month to use the space. GSA's transition center shuts down after the inauguration.

GSA prides itself on being ready for anything between Election Day and the inauguration. The agency sets up, supplies and operates the transition headquarters for the new administration's 540 or so employees, dozens of political appointees and thousands of job applicants. And GSA makes switching administrations look easy. Consider, for example, the Transition Team Welcome Center. Just two blocks from the White House, the center is housed in the rented G Street building that GSA has turned into an inner sanctum for the incoming administration. With carpeting salvaged from other federal jobs and furnishings scavenged from federal agencies, the room is humble, sensible and utterly unremarkable-like a waiting room at a suburban dental office.

"This room shows what we're all about," says June Huber, director of presidential transition support for GSA, the agency in charge of making sure that the President-elect and his people can glide seamlessly into offices and focus on getting ready to govern. "It's a comfortable, attractive space that doesn't look temporary. It doesn't look like something we've put together piecemeal."

The President-elect can only hope that he can say the same about his new administration. For all of its importance to the President and the nation, a new administration often is cobbled together in a mad, 11-week dash through thousands of resumes. The trick is to make the team appear carefully planned and its members well chosen. That's never easy, and it's especially difficult this year, when the incoming transition team must make up for time lost in the battle that followed November's stranger-than-strange presidential election. "A transition is a damn hard thing to do well in the best of circumstances, but nobody's ever had to deal with anything like this before," says Paul Light, director of governmental studies at the Brookings Institution and senior adviser to the Presidential Appointee Initiative. PAI is a Brookings project funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts to improve the appointments process.

"With each passing day without a designated transition, you're losing valuable time to achieve policy goals in the critical honeymoon period of a new administration," says Virginia Thomas, senior fellow in governmental studies at the Heritage Foundation. "You have to start fast, before the forces of this town start bearing down."

New technologies were supposed to make the job easier this year. This, after all, is the first transition to benefit from the World Wide Web and e-mail. The first in which just about everybody comes to town with laptop in hand. "There were two or three laptops in the Clinton team in 1992 that connected Washington to Little Rock," Huber says. "You could count them on one hand. This time, they're standard equipment." GSA has set up an intranet that will allow appointees and transition team members to tap into vital news as well as tips on moving to and living in Washington. Everything about the transition, from designing offices to preparing contracts and even depositing paychecks has been computerized. "The difference between this transition and others, technologically, is like night and day," says Peggy Earnhardt, the GSA transition team's human resources manager.

The new Bush administration also will be the first to benefit from the 2000 Presidential Transition Act. The law amends the 1963 Presidential Transition Act. Congress voted last year to provide extra money, training and a mandate to get the planning for presidential transitions moving before Election Day. Passed with bipartisan support and signed by President Clinton in October, the beefed-up Presidential Transition Act provided $4.3 million for GSA-about $700,000 more than in the two previous transitions-to help set up the offices for the transition team and take care of other administrative matters. The money must be spent within 30 days after the inauguration. It also provided $1 million to pay for orientation programs and an information directory about the federal government for the top 50 appointees.

"One of our major goals in the 2000 act was to change the mind-set of the campaigns and the public about when and how to plan for a presidential transition," says Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee and a co-sponsor of the bill along with the committee's ranking Democrat, Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut. "The act says the right thing to do is to begin planning before the election is held."

And the law did get both campaigns and GSA talking well before Election Day. But Light and other experts praise the law as a tool whose impact will be felt down the line. "It has the potential for being a very useful first step," Light says. "Every major reform begins with a first step and I think the Transition Act of 2000 is really going to be seen as a wedge for opening up a larger reform opportunity."

The act was the brainchild of Dwight Ink, president emeritus of the Institute of Public Administration and a veteran of every transition since Dwight D. Eisenhower became President. Elected to the National Academy of Public Administration in 1969, Ink is a former acting administrator of GSA and assistant director for executive management at the Office of Management and Budget. Ink knew well the problems that appointees encounter and wanted to help them cope. "The pressures from all sides and the intrusive scrutiny that characterize Washington come as a shock for which they are not prepared. And they find they are expected to develop new programs and legislative proposals that have to be advanced through a maze of laws, processes and practices with which they are unfamiliar," Ink says. "Yet time is of the essence in the first days and weeks of an administration when the opportunities are greatest."

Working independently four years ago, Ink began developing the concept for a transition bill that would emphasize a series of informal orientations and workshops. The original House version of the transition bill was sponsored by Rep. Steve Horn, R-Calif., a member of the House Government Reform Committee. The Senate version added more provisions. But Ink believes that the workshops will prove the most valuable gifts to appointees: They need to learn quickly about the roles of the White House staff and their relationships with government departments and how to deal with Congress. "Early mistakes in handling relations with Congress, particularly those that create distrust, will delay consideration of administration legislative initiatives and generate an unnecessary level of opposition, leading to hostile hearings and crippling amendments," Ink says. "I believe these missteps could be reduced, and the initial batting average of a new President's legislative proposals could be improved, if top political appointees were to spend time during the transition talking informally with people from both parties who occupied similar positions in prior administrations and who, as part of an orientation program, would share their experience in working with Congress.

"Past mistakes in working with Congress can be as illuminating as successes," Ink adds. "The perspectives of scholars who have studied the respective roles of the presidency and Congress could also be of help." The key, Ink says, is that the orientations not be stuffy lectures. The sessions should be informal and focus on issues that stimulate discussion rather than serve as a fixed agenda, he says.

A number of nonprofit organizations have worked over the last few months with GSA, the White House Office of Presidential Personnel and the Office of Personnel Management to prepare orientation programs. They include the Council for Excellence in Government, the American Enterprise Institute, the National Academy of Public Administration, the Brookings Institution, the Heritage Foundation and the Center for the Study of the Presidency. The President-elect's staff ultimately will choose the content of the orientations, and GSA has until fiscal 2001 to spend the $1 million that Congress allocated for the workshops and for working with the National Archives and Records Administration to develop the transition directory-a compendium of information about the federal government. The Center for the Study of the Presidency, for one, is preparing seminars on leadership and values led by "some of the top executives in the land," says Gilbert Robinson, the center's chief operating officer. And the center has published and will present a 300-page book, Report to the President-Elect 2000: Triumph and Tragedies of the Modern Presidency to the President-elect and his top appointees. The book includes 76 case studies by journalists and scholars on presidential successes and failures since the FDR era.

The Heritage Foundation has prepared performance management orientations that deal with agency budgets and goals. "We like to think this is nonpartisan to some extent," says Heritage's Thomas. "Focusing on results is something that should appeal to both parties. It should appeal to anybody who doesn't just want to keep doing things the old-fashioned way." The transition act also launched a study that might lead to the overhaul and streamlining of financial reporting requirements dictated by the 1976 Ethics in Government Act. Officials from both parties say the requirements are perhaps the biggest headache of any transition. C. Boyden Gray, counsel to President George Bush, says that the financial disclosure form is "impossible to fill out accurately and fairly and honestly" because its definitions don't match those of the Internal Revenue Code. But the study won't be finished until April-too late to help the new administration. "This generation is going to have to grin and bear it," Light says.

While the new transition law's immediate impact remains to be seen, the new administration can count on Huber and her GSA team. A 26-year GSA veteran, Huber has worked on every transition since Ronald Reagan was first elected, and she finds them exhilarating. "So many people we work with in a transition have never worked in the federal government before," Huber says. "They come here and they've got preconceived notions about [what] federal career employees are all about, and we're their introduction. We are the ones that they will be working with on a day-to-day basis. We're going to have to create a good first impression not only on behalf of the GSA but on behalf of the whole federal government."

Huber heads a core staff of 30 who planned the offices for the new administration. The space includes the entire second and eighth floors at the G Street building, a mailroom and a supply center. Huber's staff makes sure that the computers and telephones work, pens and pencils are available, trash is picked up, the vending machines are stocked and paychecks arrive on time. Essentially, GSA set up a new company with a staff of 540. "This is what GSA is all about," Reath says. "This is the kind of thing we do every day." But the agency's employees consider the transition duty special. "How often do you get to make an impression on somebody who might just become the next Secretary of a government agency?" asks David Riggs, deputy director of GSA's transition team.

Technology makes providing the service easier and cheaper. M.A. "Skip" Gerdes Jr., the transition team's telecommunications group leader, says the telephone system that used to take 10 employees to install and maintain now takes just two. "What we used to do with an old bunch of telephones and hard wires, we can now do with a keystroke," he says.

Payroll and benefits, which used to keep transition team human resources manager Earnhardt working late to make sense of multiple copies of every form, now is a point-and-click affair. The biggest help, Earnhardt says, is having computers available for job applications: The biggest paperwork nightmare in any transition is handling thousands of resumes. But all the technology in the world can't guarantee the administration is going to get off to a running start. "Ultimately, it all comes down to who's going to be appointed to what post in the Cabinet," Light says. "The key decisions aren't made by computers. They're made by the President-elect."

]]>

Federal labs encouraged to share information

Cyril T. Zaneski — Fri, 22 Sep 2000 00:00:00 -0400

The National Laboratories Partnership Improvement Act (S.1756) would set up a three-year, $30 million pilot program under which the Secretary of Energy would establish "technology clusters" of private sector partners around 10 national laboratories.

Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., sponsored the amendment in the nature of a substitute that would require private sector partners to provide at least 50 percent of the costs of each project.

The committee passed the measure by unanimous consent en bloc with 36 other bills.

]]>