Bill WolfeDEP Commissioner Lisa P. Jackson briefs Governor Corzine.A Joint Joint Senate and Assembly Committee will conduct a hearing on April 15th concerning much needed reforms to NJ’s toxic site cleanup program. The hearing is in response to a series of fiasco’s at toxic sites across the state, from the Meadowlands Encap landfill debacle to the South Jersey Kiddie Kollege tragedy, where 60 toddlers were poisoned at an industrial building that had been converted to a day care center.
DEP Commissioner Jackson testified before the Senate Environment Committee on October 23, 2006 to present the Corzine Administration’s reform agenda (for links to Jackson’s testimony and other key information, see: http://www.peer.org/news/news_id.php?row_id=909
I urge folks to contact their legislators and will be writing on this issue in depth http://www.njleg.state.nj.us/BillsForAgendaView.asp
In the meantime, I thought I’d share with the public a leaked memo, from DEP Assistant Commissioner Kropp – that lays out the current Corzine reform agenda. Interesting to compare that to Jackson’s October testimony.
From: Irene.Kropp@dep.state.nj.us
Subject: Site Remediation Program Reforms
Date: April 8, 2008 6:47:20 AM EDT
To: [deleted]
As you all know, at the request of Senator Smith the Site Remediation Program managers held a series of stakeholder meetings last year to discuss Site Remediation Program Reforms. Eleven white papers were drafted as a result of this process and distributed to the stakeholders for comments. Final versions of the white papers will be posted to the web this Friday.
An additional result of that process is the development of legislative reforms that will be presented at a Joint Senate and Assembly hearing on April 15th. Commissioner Jackson and I will be providing testimony at that hearing. Consistent with recommendations provided during the stakeholder sessions and our internal roundtable discussions, the legislative reforms we present will address the following:
1. Establishing a licensing program for all environmental consultants who perform remedial investigations and actions in New Jersey in order to hold them more accountable,
2. Providing the DEP with new remedy selection authority,
3. Improving the long term effectiveness of our remedial actions by adopting a permit program for long term monitoring of institutional and engineering controls,
4. Ensuring our limited resources are dedicated to the most important cases,
5. Establishing a new remediation guarantee fund to protect against remedy failure,
6. Adopting new business processes that ensure timely remedial decisions, and
7. Strengthening our enforcement authority.
I envision there to be much public debate about these and additional reforms that may be offered up by other stakeholders. As such, I do not anticipate new legislation being passed much sooner than September. I will be discussion future reforms at an upcoming series of staff meeting in the public hearing room in the near future and I will continue to keep you posted on the progress we make. Thank you, Irene
Irene Kropp
Assistant Commissioner
Site Remediation and Waste Management
NJ Dept. of Environmental Protection
609-292-1250
Bill Wolfe[Update: 4/24/08 – The chronology reveals a minor victory. The Taskforce held its first meeting on April 9. I filed an OPRA request for Taskforce documents on April 14.
On the legal due date, April 22, DEP posted selective Task Force related documents on the DEP website. see:http://nj.gov/dep/permittf/ However, DEP remains firmly in control of the information and spoon feeds the public what DEP feels they need to know. This is totally unacceptable and a far cry from open, transparent and participatory public deliberations. Even the Whitman Administration held industry dominated Task Force meetings in public and allowed for public comment.]
New Jersey to Consult Industry on Eco-Rewrites in Secret
“Efficiency” Task Force Members Not Barred from Self-Dealing with DEP
Trenton — An industry-dominated task force to recommend an overhaul of state anti-pollution permits and policies will work in secret, according to an e-mail from the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) Commissioner Lisa Jackson to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). Commissioner Jackson also rebuffed PEER recommendations that materials submitted to the task force are made a public record and that task force members be barred from lobbying DEP for their clients.
Commissioner Jackson created the Permit Efficiency Review Task Force in mid-March to identify administrative, regulatory and statutory changes needed to make DEP programs “timely and efficient.”
The task force will have full access to DEP staff and materials and will report back in mid-July.
On March 25, 2008, New Jersey PEER Director Bill Wolfe wrote Jackson asking that task force sessions be open to the public, materials submitted to the task force be made publicly available and that task force members “be precluded from having any contracts, pending regulatory approvals, or financial relationships with the Department” during the 120-day life of the task force.
Bill WolfeIn a return e-mail on the evening of April 2, 2008, Commissioner Jackson denied all of PEER’s requests:
· Public input “can only occur once the Task Force has completed its analysis and compiled the group’s thoughts and recommendations. At that time, I will determine how to most effectively seek and obtain input from the public”; and
· “I do not consider it necessary or reasonable to restrict members of the Task Force or their respective employers from having other business before the Department.”
“We all know the state is in tough economic straits but candor and openness do not cost a dime and may save us bundles down the road,” Wolfe stated. “How can the public intelligently review the task force findings if the material upon which those findings are based is a state secret?”
The conflict of interest concern is based, in part, on DEP staff being told that their jobs may depend on what the task force recommends. An April 2, 2008 DEP memo recounting Jackson’s budget briefings states:
“Managers were instructed that they should consider the staff they have now as the most they will have, and they should look at ways to cut back on non‑essential services and prioritize their work. The Commissioner mentioned the Permit Task Force (subject of another postmaster message) as one way that she will get ideas for how to handle things more efficiently.”
“Commissioner Jackson is giving these task force appointees from industry a position of undue influence and then refusing to acknowledge that foxes may use the opportunity to sample the henhouse,” Wolfe added. “Under these circumstances, for a DEP professional to say ‘no’ to a regulatory favor requested by a task force member would require a profile in courage.”
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Read the e-mail from DEP Commissioner Jackson
http://www.peer.org/docs/nj/08_7_4_jackson_e-mail_re_task_force.pdf
See the order creating the Permit Efficiency Review Task Force
http://www.peer.org/news/news_id.php?row_id=1013
View memo telling DEP employees that their jobs may depend on Task Force recommendations
http://www.peer.org/docs/nj/08_7_4_dep_budget_cuts_memo.pdf
Look at DEP habitual refusal to embrace transparency in dealing with industry
http://www.peer.org/news/news_id.php?row_id=885
New Jersey PEER is a state chapter of a national alliance of state and federal agency resource professionals working to ensure environmental ethics and government accountability
“Worse than Whitman” Jeff Tittel, Sierra Club.
Bill WolfeAvoiding landmines – Governor Corzine confers with DEP Commissioner Jackson prior to his remarks to NJEF conference.
Yesterday, at the 22nd Annual NJ Environmental Federation Conference held at Rutgers Law School in Newark, DEP Commissioner Jackson and Governor Corzine spoke to defend the Administration’s environmental policy. The most recent controversies include a plan to close State Parks and the creation by DEP of an industry dominated “Fast Track” Task Force to allow lobbyists to re-write DEP pollution and development permit standards and procedures. (see: “DISPATCHES: Efficiency v. ecology” http://www.packetonline.com/articles/2008/03/28/cranbury_press/opinions/doc47ed055c2e041780196362.txt
Bill WolfeJeff Tittel, Executive Director, Sierra Club NJ Chapter, moderates NJEF Conference panel.Jeff Tittel of the Sierra Club set the context with this harsh assessment: “What we are witnessing (by the Corzine Administration) is worse than during the Whitman Administration.” Tittel discussed the implications of what he described as a well coordinated lobbying effort to rollback hard won protections, and to impose a moratorium on DEP’s ability to adopt necessary new protections.
I want to touch upon two key concessions by DEP Commissioner Jackson.
First, Jackson announced that she would expand the membership of the Permit Efficiency Task Force. That Task Force was formed by her own Administrative Order, issued just days ago. The 19 member Task Force is dominated by industry and development lobbyists. The Task Force has no – zero – representatives of environmental groups, environmental justice advocates, urban community groups, or global warming or sustainable development experts.(see: NEW JERSEY ASKS BUSINESS TO REWRITE ENVIRONMENTAL STANDARDS — Developers See Slow Economy as Lever to Weaken Anti-Pollution Permit Rules http://www.peer.org/news/news_id.php?row_id=1013
Bill WolfeDEP Commissioner Lisa P. Jackson defends the Administration’s policies at talk to NJEF Conference. Jackson pledged to expand the Task Force to include members of 2 environmental groups – and perhaps an environmental justice representative. But she also added 2 lobbyist from the NJ Business and Industry Association and the League of Municipalities that would negate the token environmental presence.
Bill WolfeRoy Jones, of Camden, head of South Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance spoke at conference on eminent domain abuse, gentrification, environmental justice, and schools on toxics sites.
Will Roy be chosen or serve as a Task Force member? It remains to be seen whether the environmental community will embrace these token appointments and engage this fatally flawed Task Force. Their alternative is to mount a campaign along the lines of the “Fast track” coalition that defeated the McGreevey plan by vigorously generating public opposition. What is clear is that the task Force will bogusly attempt to justify rollbacks in protections under the guise of reducing red tape, streamlining the bureaucracy, and stimulating the economy.
Second, Jackson conceded that her recent revocation of her own 2007 Order to protect stream buffers from development was prompted by a legal challenge by developers. Previously, the DEP press office tried to spin that rollback as motivated by purely technical issues. Jackson’s admission that the revocation of her Order was done in response to legal challenge exposes that alleged prior justification as a lie. (see: NEW JERSEY CUTS DEEPLY INTO PROTECTED STREAM BUFFERS — Commissioner Revokes Her Year-Old Order, Leaving Buffers at Mercy of Politics http://www.peer.org/news/news_id.php?row_id=986
Bill WolfePhil Thompson, MIT Professor, speaks about cities, environmental justice, and huge economic development opportunities for urban small scale “distributed energy” systems. I will write about the fascinating speakers at the conference in a future post – especially the presentation on the environmental justice implications of energy and global warming policy by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Phil Thompson, who emphasized the economic development opportunities of “distributed energy” systems in cities.
Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence
Martin Luther King, Jr.
“…There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
Delivered 4 April 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm
*Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be here tonight, and how very delighted I am to see you expressing your concern about the issues that will be discussed tonight by turning out in such large numbers. I also want to say that I consider it a great honor to share this program with Dr. Bennett, Dr. Commager, and Rabbi Heschel, some of the distinguished leaders and personalities of our nation. And of course it’s always good to come back to Riverside Church. Over the last eight years, I have had the privilege of preaching here almost every year in that period, and it is always a rich and rewarding experience to come to this great church and this great pulpit. I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statements of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart, and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.
The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.
And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation’s history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.
Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: “Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King?” “Why are you joining the voices of dissent?” “Peace and civil rights don’t mix,” they say. “Aren’t you hurting the cause of your people,” they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.
Read more…
[Note: Inspector General Cooper’s Encap Report was a whitewash, so I repost this October 24, 2007 column – maybe the Attorney General or Legislative Committees can be convinced to examine these issues and develop much needed reforms. Who knows maybe the recently formed DEP “Permit Efficiency Task Force” might want to roll up their sleeves and engage serious flaws in DEP practices. http://blog.nj.com/njv_bill_wolfe/2008/03/dep_fast_track_is_back_environ.html
Heads are spinning as the political fallout and finger pointing continue in the collapse of the Encap luxury condo and resort golf course project. The multi-billion dollar project was slated to be built on top of highly toxic landfills in the Meadowlands. Under the influence of politically connected lobbyists, State officials approved over $300 million in taxpayer subsidies to the failed project. It looks like the taxpayers are left holding a rather large bag and millions of taxpayer dollars have vanished.
Worse, we now learn that the DEP Commissioner allowed lobbyists for the developer to virtually write DEP permits that violated regulatory standards designed to protect public health and the environment. The landfills remain even bigger environmental hazards due to the millions of cubic yards of toxic fill material imported to the site.
Superb journalism at the Bergen Record and captured the root cause of the debacle:
“Political appointees running the state’s environmental watchdog agency routinely overruled top staffers and approved stripped-down safeguards for the EnCap Golf project in the Meadowlands, a Record investigation shows.
State documents reveal that the staff scientists and leading specialists inside the Department of Environmental Protection were often surprised and frustrated to learn that their bosses had already green-lighted the developer’s proposals, sometimes in separate meetings with the developer’s attorneys.
Those high-level approvals often flew against longtime policies and standards that DEP staffers had spent their careers upholding. The staffers, who all declined to be named because they feared workplace reprisals, said interference from politically connected developers is a fact of life in their jobs.”
This key aspect of the story – the corruption caused by political access and undue influence over career DEP environmental professionals – is being lost as the focus is diverted to the extraordinary self-serving spin and finger-pointing by responsible state officials.
Former DEP Commissioner Bradley M. Campbell has blamed his bosses in the McGreevey and Codey Administrations.
Current DEP chief Lisa Jackson responded by saying that the career professionals should be free from political interference. She invited staffers should come forward if there is a problem like the EnCap situation.
“I come from the staff myself, I came from the technical side,” Jackson said. “I understand how frustrating it can be to work under political appointees who come in and often set new policies.”
While we agree with DEP Commissioner Jackson, we challenge her to back up that rhetoric with real reforms..
The problem of political influence at DEP is systemic and warrants a systemic remedy. However, what goes on inside DEP on a daily basis has been largely ignored in the corruption, ethics, and pay-to-play reform debates. Furthermore, New Jersey’s whistleblower protection laws are weak and riddled with loopholes. In a national ranking, New Jersey’s law scored only 55 out of 100 points. (see PEER analysis of New Jersey’s whistleblower law http://www.peer.org/docs/wbp/nj.pdf)
To begin this reform process, last April, PEER filed an Open Public Records request seeking public records of meetings between DEP officials and lobbyists and representative of regulated industries. http://www.peer.org/news/news_id.php?row_id=852
That OPRA request was denied by DEP. DEP claimed that disclosure of these records would jeopardize the privacy of the lobbyists involved.
In response to the OPRA denial, PEER filed a petition for rulemaking to force DEP disclosure of meetings with industry lobbyist. The petition was based on Election Law Enforcement Commission lobbying regulations, which require lobbyists to disclosure all communications with state agencies that seek to “influence government processes”. Transparency in government improves decisions and promotes accountability – as the saying goes “Sunshine is the best disinfectant.”
That petition was also denied by DEP Commissioner Jackson, on the same day it was published for public comment.http://www.peer.org/news/news_id.php?row_id=885
As this story explodes into a full-scale debacle and the public learns just how dirty the Encap deal was, we again urge DEP Commissioner Jackson and Governor Corzine to reconsider the transparency, accountability, and whistleblower protection reforms we have proposed.
There is no place for pay to play political influence at DEP.
The governor and Commissioner Jackson must act to bolster the credibility and restore public confidence in DEP.