Christie DEP Commissioner Bob Martin Misleads Legislature On Pipelines – With a Little Help From His Friends

How much longer will the environmental community & media neglect this issue?

DEP Commissioner Bob Martin testified to the Assembly Budget Committee on Tuesday regarding the DEP’s FY’17 budget (see testimony and OLS analysis and DEP response to OLS.)

I want to focus on just one of Martin’s responses to a series of questions from Assemblyman Singleton about interstate pipelines and DEP’s environmental review process, particularly with respect to DEP powers versus FERC powers specifically including reconciling conflicts between FERC need determination and DEP’s environmental review.

Martin provided highly misleading responses, basically saying that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) preempted DEP environmental reviews. Martin responded:

They (FERC) are the overall controlling entity on it at the end of the day. They could over-ride anything we could even do from the State of New Jersey. […]

We can not fight that .. If we did reject a pipeline it would end up in court very quickly.

That is factually false, as NY State DEC and Connecticut demonstrated in rejecting FERC regulated pipelines.

Martin also lied by omission by failing to note DEP’s powers under the Clean Water Act.

But Martin could not have gotten away with those falsehoods without a little help from his friends.

Friends in the environmental community that have failed to conduct a public campaign to educate the public and pressure DEP to deny Clean Water Act Section 401 Water Quality Certificates for FERC regulated pipelines, like NY State DEC and Connecticut did to kill pipelines. The Rethink Energy NJ/PennEast campaign has been misdirected.

Had there been a high profile campaign, Martin could never have gotten away with those lies.

Friends in the media who have totally failed to cover this issue in NJ or the recent NY DEC denial.

Had there been press coverage and accountability, no way Martin gets away with those lies.

Friends in the Legislature who have known about but failed to challenge the Christie administration on this specific DEP Clean Water Act authority, which is NOT preempted by FERC or the Natural Gas Act.

How much longer will the environmental community and the media neglect this issue?

(h/t to Jeff Tittel for the heads up on this hearing)