West Easton Council and residents in attendance at Monday’s council meeting got a preview on what we can expect, as we try to renew our Multiple Separate Storm Sewer System (MS4) permit in 2018. The DEP’s newest mandate to procure that MS4 permit will be an unfunded pain in the (wallet) for West Easton taxpayers, along with other communities seeking permit renewals.
I find myself torn between believing the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) is needed to protect our environment, while at the same time, I think it has become a government entity that has lost the teeth needed in preventing major polluters from destroying the environment. The same can be said for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Underfunded and understaffed, both the EPA and Pennsylvania’s DEP are seen by Trump as little more than an unimportant hindrance to businesses. State DEP’s take directions from the Environmental Protection Agency, now run by Trump appointee, Scott Pruitt.
Pruitt was the attorney general of the oil and gas-intensive state of Oklahoma. Pruitt spent much of his energy as attorney general fighting the very agency he is now leading. On his Linked In page, Pruitt boasted of being “a leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda.”
President Trump’s fiscal 2018 budget proposal would cut the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Science and Technology nearly in half, while paring by 40 percent funding for EPA employees who oversee and put in place environmental regulations, according to a White House document that was shared with The New York Times.
And while the agency’s administrator, Scott Pruitt, has vowed to prioritize the agency’s cleanup of hazardous waste sites, the president would cut funding for the program, known as Superfund, by about 25 percent. And spending for a program to restore former industrial sites contaminated by pollution, another stated priority of the administrator, would shrink by about 36 percent.
Those cuts are part of an overall EPA budget reduction of about 30 percent, as outlined originally in March, when the White House unveiled the top-line budget requests for the fiscal year that begins in October. The agency’s budget would drop to $5.7 billion — its lowest level in 40 years, adjusted for inflation — from its current $8.2 billion.
Even before this proposed budget reduction was released, the EPA still expected Pennsylvania’s DEP to meet the EPA’s past expectations.
Take, for example, these exchanges between the EPA and our own DEP regarding drinking water, shortly after Trump was elected.
The EPA sent a letter to our DEP chastising them for not meeting their program requirements in a “complete and timely manner.”
The DEP replied with its own letter to the EPA. Though they gave the obligatory promises of improving, they made note that staffing and funding had declined since 2009.
Trump’s proposed budget will only make the situation worse for the DEP and, unlike his usual flip-flopping on issues, he has stood fast on industry being more important than the environment. He’d drill through a baby seal’s skull if he thought oil, gas, or coal would be found underneath it.
How does the DEP problem relate to West Easton, you ask?
The DEP still has to show the EPA that they are making progress in pollution reduction. Not only in drinking water, but in air, earth, and rivers.
Since Trump has eased restrictions on major polluters in the coal industry and Bush II took pains to take care of his Oil & Gas Industry, the focus on reducing pollution has and continues to turn on communities.
Coal companies can now dump their waste into streams without monitoring pollution levels, thanks to Trump. The Oil & Gas Industry has been able frack and pump toxic chemicals into the ground thanks to Bush II, but it is apparently communities that will be obligated to reduce pollution. The DEP is determining the amount of pollution being produced by stormwater, in an unproven “science” that measures runoff contamination from that stormwater, into rivers and watersheds.
West Easton is now expected to reduce sediment and pollution runoff from our storm water system by 10 percent to meet MS4 requirements in order to get a 2018-2023 renewal permit.
Can the DEP truly determine that a reduction of 10 percent was accomplished, even if we do what the DEP says they want done?
No.
The DEP just believes that the expensive solutions they “offer” to us (do it their way and they will be satisfied) will result in a 10 percent decrease. Since the DEP can provide no evidence in evaluating the total amount of pollution being generated by each community along stormwater’s path to a river, they have assigned blame equally in the form of a demand to all communities, to do what they say will result in a 10 percent reduction from each community.
West Easton is downstream from communities above us. We are the last community before stormwater reaches the Lehigh River. Those communities above send their water runoff to us and we have to deal not only with our own stormwater, but their runoff, as well.
It will be expensive and we aren’t given many options by the DEP, on how to get it accomplished to the satisfaction of the DEP. We can expect little to no help in the form of grants. Every community is under the gun to make improvements and what little grant money may be available will have every community fighting over those crumbs.
The DEP’s answer to communities like ours, who receive the crap sent to us from communities above, is to tell us to work with those other communities to get it accomplished. Shared cost makes it less expensive, they say. Representatives in one community have a hard enough time coming to an agreement among themselves on a project, let alone multiple communities agreeing on a shared project.
All I see are taxpayer dollars being thrown into a bottomless pit, based on calculations that are justifiably called, “voodoo” math, with no true evaluation of West Easton’s efforts to reduce pollution and our money spent in those efforts being scientifically provable.
I will have that part of the story Monday, including the projects that the DEP will accept to meet their 10 percent reduction demand.
Disclaimer: On January 4, 2016, the owner of WestEastonPA.com began serving on the West Easton Council following an election. Postings and all content found on this website are the opinions of Matthew A. Dees and may not necessarily represent the opinion of the governing body for The Borough of West Easton.
