Future of Empire State Landscapes and Waters “All Fracked Up”

My blood runs cold, my memory has just been sold
My angel is a centerfold
Angel is a centerfold  ~~~ J Geils Band

[Update below]

Growing up in New York’s Hudson Valley, there was no doubt in my young mind that I was living in the center of the universe.

As I’ve aged and seen much of the country, that perspective has only grown.

But now I weep in despair over the future of the State I still love.

The things I most treasured about my home state of NY are rapidly vanishing – or already gone.

So lets take a step back and examine my youthful foundational myths and illusions, to explore how present developments are betraying them.

One’s home is always special, not only in absolute terms, but in relative terms too.

So, to start off with the relative perspective, I have to say that NY’s neighboring states were pathetic.

I still recall that Pennsylvania had pinkish red pavement and highways with potholes so huge they gave our crappy 62 Plymouth Valiant flat tires. The best the state could offer was musty Pocono cabins, with mosquito’s, mice, and red mud I had to wash off the tires, fenders and half way up the doors of the car.

Connecticut was a featureless suburb you had to drive through to get to cool places, like Boston and the coast of Maine.

And Jersey was a terrifying industrial nightmare. After running the gauntlet of oil refineries, chemical plants, and reeking landfills, you arrived among baby oil coated, tatooed hordes, packed like sardines onto filthy beaches wedged between a polluted ocean and stinky bathrooms and funky boardwalks. And that was the BEST Jersey had to offer.

But even the best of the Jersey shore  experience couldn’t come close to Bob Moses’ spectacular Jones Beach, which was where our family went when we wanted salt water.

But mostly, on weekend outings we went to sparkling freshwater, like Welch Lake in Harriman State Park or Bear Mountain. There you could swim, hike in the woods, and picnic with a modicum of privacy and tranquility, amidst the grandeur of nature, not assaulted by tar balls and pinball arcades.

New York had the majestic Adirondack Mountains, the mysterious Catskills, the grand Hudson River, and the lovely Finger Lakes region.

We had real red blooded indians, who would crack your head open and take your scalp (and your wife and daughter too). These indians were not like the pussies up in Massachusetts, who shared corn with the Pilgrims, or the docile farmers who smoked peace pipes with the likes of rich lazy landowners in Philly.

We had frontiersmen, like Natty Bumpo who would hunt, trap, and portage canoes between frozen Adirondack lakes to Canadien St. Lawrence waters to feed the fur trade.  These were real hard core manly men, not urban elites in Boston and Philadelphia, who invented stuff, read books, and sat around writing documents.

Our literary legends were the terrifying Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow; the adventurous brave explorer Natty Bumpo; and the laid back Rip Van Winkle.

Non local heroes like Tom Sawyer just couldn’t compete either – Tom rafted the narrow muddy waters of the Mississippi, surrounded by tame, flat farmlands, catching sluggish catfish.

But I navigated the 3 mile wide wild Hudson in a 12 foot wooden craft in the shadows on the steep, rocky Palisades and the forests and forts around Bear Mountain, trolling for the spectacular wild striped bass!  Get back Tom Sawyer!

Our Guilded Age capitalists were far superior to the feudal slave owning wicked southern plantation owners; the greedy California gold rushers and slimy Texas oil men; the midwestern railroad robber barrons who ripped off farmers; and the land raping western mining and timber monopolists.

Our capitalists were sophisticated public spirited intellectual industrialists and philanthropists! They created not only private wealth, but other equally important things – public assets – like parks, libraries, museums, and schools.

Our universities were founded in the egalitarian public spirit of the Morrill land Grant program, created by Congress, and dedicated to progress in science and technology.

Just compare egalitarian Cornell (motto:”I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study,”) with elite Yale (founded in the 1640’s by clergymen) or Princeton (chartered in 1746 by British King George  and led by reverends), both institutions founded in a religious tradition, dedicated to and long serving private interests.

Once called “the first American university” by educational historian Frederick Rudolph, Cornell University represents a distinctive mix of eminent scholarship and democratic ideals. Adding practical subjects to the classics and admitting qualified students regardless of nationality, race, social circumstance, gender, or religion was quite a departure when Cornell was founded in 1865.

Even the Red Coat Torries were better in NY – brave guys like Major Andre and Benedict Arnold, not those effete white whigged elites who hung with the Hessians in Trenton.

But perhaps most significant for our tale today is NY’s rich tradition in progressive government and land conservation.

NY is the home of the likes of Horace Greeley, a leader of a free press who used it to oppose slavery.

Many others created a rich progressive tradition of strong government, from Teddy Roosevelt, to Gifford Pinchot (who was the first Dean of the School of Forestry at Cornell before he later became the first Chief of the US Forest Service), to FDR, to Nelson Rockefeller. Old School!

In 1825, with the opening of the 363 mile long Erie Canal, NY created the model for government public works and transportation infrastructure investments to promote economic development.

In 1885, NY established the nation’s first and largest park in the continental US, Adirondack park., followed in 1904 by Catskill Park.

The intellectual roots of the Adirondack Park go back to the founding of modern ecological science, forestry and landscape planning, by George Perkins Marsh’s 1864 work “Man and Nature“.

Those scientific developments came in the wake of the Hudson River School of landscape art – again, NY was at the forefront of science, art, culture and economic development.

Government in NY always worked effectively and for the people.

Most importantly, a land conservation ethic was a noble tradition and key responsibility of government.

But where has the rich progressive government and land and water conservation tradition I was spoon fed as a boy gone?

Where is that groundbreaking conservation cum powerful environmental movement?

Why has NY rolled over for the gas industry?

Thousands of gas fracking well will industrialize some of NY’s premier and still largelyl rural landscapes and wild regions, including  large portions of the Catskills, Southern  Tier, and Finger Lakes.

Heres’ what those western landscapes look like without the gas industry:

Fracking will pollute NY’s most precious natural resources, its pristine waters and forests.

What the frack is wrong with NY?

[Update: 4/27/20 – As a native NY’er and Bernie supporter, I’m really disgusted by this – smells like the work of those carpetbaggers Hillary and Bill Clinton, with a little friendly support from Obama and the quiescence of Lame Corporate Joe Biden:

• New York Board of Elections Removes Bernie Sanders From Primary Ballot ~~~ end update]

Martin’s Management Mishmash Recalls Nixon’s “Madman Theory”

While you won’t read about this in the newspapers, nonetheless, on Friday, DEP Commissioner Bob Martin invoked a fundamental strategy of the media damage control playbook: put out the bad news late Friday to minimize coverage.

In a Nov. 5, 3:25 pm email, Martin announced his long awaited management “transformation” to the DEP Friday skeleton crew. DEP was cutback to a 35 hour workweek [by Whitman, see comment] and so not many staffers show up on Fridays. See below for complete Martin text.

How would industry analysts respond to a corporate “transformation” dictated by a pharmaceutical CEO – who had no drug industry experience and was installed in the wake of a hostile takeover?

How would the CEO’s plan be received if it: randomly installed a 25+ year veteran marketing director as head of research; moved the experienced research director to the accounting office; transferred the leader of engineering to the sales Division; and reassigned the head of sales to be in charge of manufacturing (all this, while completely eliminating the management positions of major Divisions and appointing a set of cronies as policy makers?).

What would analysts make of that???

Would such a drastic random move positively impact company operations and productivity??? Would it be perceived as an effort to laterally transfer and promote from within to reform the Company, or as sabotage?

I had to sleep on it for 2 nights before I could conjure up an apt metaphor to describe Martin’s actions.

I initially was reminded of a cruel older cousin of mine, who regularly tormented me as a kid. One day, he asked if I wanted to play cards. Of course I agreed. He then asked if I wanted to play “52 pickup”. I said sure, at which point he threw the deck of cards into the air and shouted: “there’s 52, now you pick them up”.

While Martin’s “reorganization” surely shares aspects of “52 pickup”, I rejected that metaphor as too personal and something not well known.

I then thought of using the St. Valentines Day massacre, but rejected it because nobody at DEP actually got killed (although people may die as a result).

I considered and rejected “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic” as ill fitting because the Captain (Martin) himself is sinking the ship, this ship isn’t sinking due to design flaw and accidental iceberg strike. I similarly rejected Soviet Gulags, as over the top, because while Martin surely is sending some DEP managers to a form of Siberia in the practice of political repression, he’s following Christie’s Orders not Stalin’s.

I also rejected the well fitting phrases “monkeywrenching” and “body on the wheels” because these were terms used by radicals I support. But I do agree that Governor Christie, Commissioner Martin, and their industy backers perversely share Savio’s views, e.g. that “the operation of DEP has become so odious”  that they are trying “to make it stop” so that they can pursue unregulated freedom to profit at the public’s expense:

“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious ”makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.

So I settled on the “Nixon Madman Theory“.

The Madman theory was part of Nixon’s foreign policy. His administration attempted to make the leaders of other countries think Nixon was mad, and that his behavior was irrational and volatile. This included putting nuclear bombers in flight on highest alert. Fearing an unpredictable American response, leaders of hostile Communist Bloc nations would avoid provoking him. Nixon famously explained his theory to White House Chief of Staff HR Haldeman:

“I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry — and he has his hand on the nuclear button’ — and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”^[1]The administration employed the “Madman strategy” (as it was later dubbed by Haldeman) to force the North Vietnamese government to negotiate a peace to end the Vietnam War.^[3] Along the same lines, American diplomats (Henry Kissinger in particular) portrayed the 1970 incursion into Cambodia as a symptom of Nixon’s supposed instability.^[4]

On October 1969, the Nixon administration indicated to the Soviet Union that “the madman was loose” when the United States military was ordered to full global war readiness alert (unbeknownst to the majority of the American population), and bombers armed with thermonuclear weapons flew patterns near the Soviet border for three consecutive days.^[2]The madman strategy can be related to Niccola² Machiavelli, who, in his Discourses on Livy (book 3, chapter 2) discusses how it is at times “a very wise thing to simulate madness”. The logic behind the strategy is commonly attributed to Thomas Schelling, whose books The Strategy of Conflict and Arms and Influence discuss “the rationality of irrationality” and how useful “the threat that leaves something to chance” can be.

Below, is a link to Martin’s Reorganization email –  I know many of the people affected by it, so will refrain from analysis to avoid targeting individuals.

However, aside from the lack of any logic and madman nature of the move (e.g. to reward yes men and intimidate critics), I must mention that it is more evidence of:

• disarray,
• lack of knowledge and of experience in environmental management
• incompetence and dishonesty
• a retaliatory disposition that tolerates no dissent,
• pursuit of privatization, deregulation, regulatory rollback, disinvestment, and dismantling
• an over-arching objective to dismantle and destroy DEP under a false pretext and reliant upon fact free, ethically challenged, and flawed methodologies, designed to benefit special interests. 

Here it is: DEP Transformation Update.doc – sorry to have to post full text, I can’t get a link to work:

From: Bob Martin
To: Martin, Bob
Date: 11/5/2010 3:25:53 PM
Subject:Transformation Update

All Staff:

This past spring I told you about my transformation agenda for the Department. During the summer you participated in transformation sessions, and we released the Vision and Priorities documents to make sure that everyone-inside and outside the Department-knows where we are focusing our efforts and resources. In October we began ongoing customer service training, aiming to operate more effectively by being more responsive to all of our stakeholders and constituents. Throughout, we have asked for and continue to ask for your input.

The next component of transformation is maximizing the effectiveness of our management team.

Deputy Commissioner Kropp, the Assistant Commissioners and I have been working together to identify the best posts for our managers, and today we are announcing some moves to enhance and strengthen our operations. More details are below. We anticipate additional future moves as part of the ongoing process of transformation, and continue to solicit interest in lateral mobility from all staff and managers (details on our intranet at http://dep-inet2.dep.state.nj.us/lateralmobility/).

As I have said, the Governor and I have already received positive feedback from individual stakeholders and members of the general public, recognizing improved efficiency in their interactions with the Department. Yet, we have much more to do, and this repositioning of managers is a significant step toward achieving greater efficiencies with existing resources.

As we continue efforts to enhance our ability to protect the environment and serve all the residents of New Jersey, as well as to transform the DEP into a model agency for the state and the nation, I thank you for your continued involvement and commitment to transformation.

Bob Martin
Commissioner

# # #

Natural and Historic Resources

Lou Valente was recently appointed as Chief Project Advisor to the Commissioner to develop a strategic plan for the long-term fiscal sustainability of DEP’s natural and historic resource programs. As part of this process, Lou will be visiting field locations to see first-hand our operations and to seek input on revenue generating opportunities for specific areas.

Lynn Fleming will serve as Assistant Director of the State Forestry Service. Lynn helped lead the State Park Service during several difficult budget cycles, and she brings with her a wealth of knowledge and expertise in land management operations and forest stewardship. Under Assistant Director Fleming, the Office of Natural Lands Management will be reassigned to the State Forestry Program to better align stewardship planning initiatives within the Division of Parks and Forestry.

John Trontis also recently joined DEP, as Assistant Director of the State Park Service. As former director of Hunterdon County Parks, John has a strong background in parks management, volunteerism and an exemplary commitment to natural and historic resources.

Land Use Management

Mark Pedersen will move from Site Remediation to lead the Division of Land Use Regulation. Mark brings to this position over 25 years of diverse experience within DEP. Most recently, Mark served as a Bureau Chief in Site Remediation, and has been a leading change agent in process improvements and transformation in that program.

Tom Micai will serve as Director of the newly consolidated Division of Policy and Planning within Land Use Management. Tom will oversee an expanded focus on transformation through regulatory review and development informed by science and planning.

Rob Piel will move into the Division of Policy and Planning as an Assistant Director. In addition to regulatory policy initiatives, Rob also will oversee a newly consolidated Coastal Zone Management Program that combines federal and state planning initiatives.

Elizabeth Semple’s leadership role within the Division of Policy and Planning will be expanded to include both broad State Planning efforts and oversight of a consolidated Water Quality Management Planning group.

Ruth Ehinger, who has served as the State’s Coastal Manager as well as in various capacities throughout her 30-year career at DEP will move into the newly created Office of Ecological Restoration within Fish and Wildlife.

Water Resource Management

Michele Putnam will be moving from Director of the Division of Water Supply to become Director of the Division of Water Quality, overseeing all water pollution issues including NJPDES and municipal finance. Gene Chebra will manage municipal finance within the Division of Water Quality.

With Michele’s departure, Fred Sickels will lead the Division of Water Supply, which includes among other programs safe drinking water, water allocation and well permitting. Karen Fell will manage Water Supply Operations, with responsibility for all aspects of safe drinking water aside from permitting.

Jill Lipoti, who has served as the Director of the Environmental Safety and Health, is moving to Water Resource Management to head up the Water Monitoring and Standards program. Jill brings strong scientific background and expertise, and will provide a new look to program tasks. Leslie McGeorge will remain in the Division of Water Supply with responsibility for operations within Water Monitoring and Standards.

Al Korndoerfer, Stan Cach, Jeff Reading and Richard Dalton will be responsible for high level special projects to support Water Resource Management’s research priorities and ongoing transformation.

Climate and Environmental Management

With Jill Lipoti’s departure, Paul Baldauf will lead the Division of Environmental Safety and Health. Paul’s experience with homeland security issues and broad understanding of environmental regulations provides him with the necessary background and experience to provide oversight of the programs with DESH as the Department’s transformation proceeds.

Site Remediation

Two divisions are being established within Site Remediation: the Division of Responsible Party Case Management will be directed by Ken Kloo, and the Division of Publicly Funded Site Remediation will be directed by Tony Farro. Ken and Tony have demonstrated records as change agents within SRP, and will be able to implement the transformation goals within each of these newly established divisions and their respective programs.

Compliance & Enforcement

John Castner will head DEP’s County Environmental, Solid Waste and Pesticide Enforcement Programs. Included in this structure are the Bureau of Local Environmental Management under the management of Trish Conti; the Bureau of Solid Waste C&E managed by Debbie Pinto; the Bureau of Pesticide Compliance managed by John Orrok; and Minor Air Sources supervised by Tom Morris. John Castner also will be developing a pilot program that reviews incoming incidents and citizen complaints to examine how we are currently handling these notifications and identify where improvements can be made to ensure more timely responses.

Marcedius Jameson will head the newly combined Water and Land Use Enforcement programs. Marcedius will move to consolidate the two programs into one that takes a broader, watershed approach to dealing with impaired waters throughout the State. Rai Belonzi will take over the Central Bureau of Water C&E.

Ed Choromanski will head up the newly combined Air and Hazardous Materials Enforcement program, which will keep all three air regional offices and add the Bureau of Hazardous Waste C&E that now includes the UST C&E program. The Bureau of Hazardous Waste C&E will also add hazardous waste manifesting, biennial reporting and medical waste registration programs under Michael Hastry. Chris Odgers will manage the Air Central Region bureau. Ed will look to streamline the inspection processes at industrial and commercial sites with an emphasis on identifying and addressing the greatest hazards.

To create greater efficiencies, multiple licensing programs will be combined within C&E. Among these are Pesticide Operations; Solid & Hazardous Waste Transporter Licensing; and Exams & Licensing, which includes Water/Wastewater Treatment Plant Operators, Well Drillers and UST Certifications and Landscape Irrigation Contractors. The newly combined
licensing programs will be led by Jim Hamilton with the assistance of Charles Maack.

Knute Jensen will head C&E’s Office of Innovation and will take a leading role in transformation projects throughout C&E.
# # #

Why is Environmental Review Just Beginning on a Project Already Under Construction?

 

[Updates below]

I just got home  from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) scoping hearing on one of the multiple segments on the controversial Tennessee Gas Co. pipeline project (TGP) (see today’s Star Ledger set up story.) (Tennessee is part of the El Paso – as in Texas – pipeline Group).

The hearing was held up in Ringwood.  About 65 residents turned out to oppose the project, including the NJ Highlands Coalition and Sierra Club.

Scoping is required by NEPA regulations. It is supposed to be “an early and open proess for determining the scope of issues to be addressed and for identifying the significant issues related to a proposed action.”

The TGP project would have a series of  major negative impacts. It is just one piece of a massive regional gas pipeline infrastructure expansion project. It would transport 1 billion cubic feet per day of Marcellus shale gas, through Pennsylvania into the NY metro region.

Marcellus shale “fracking” is controversial: NY State and the Delaware River Basin Commission have imposed  moratoria on well drilling. The US EPA is conducting a national study of the impacts of drilling and legislation is pending in Congress to strictly regulate fracking (see:

• MARCELLUS GAS PIPELINE’S CHEAP PATH THROUGH JERSEY PARKLANDS  – Paltry $45,000 for 24-Year Lease on $2 Billion Pipeline Up for Quick Approval and for additional info, also see this and this)

Given these significant scientific, regulatory, and legislative efforts, it is premature for FERC to consider this pipeline proposal. Reviews should wait until the scientific data are in and a new regulatory framework is established. Resolution of those pending actions will have large impacts on the availability and quantity of gas supply and the environmental safeguards on fracking Marcellus gas.

Additionally, 1 billion cubic feet of new gas supply would have significant energy price and demand impacts, which could undermine cost effective energy conservation and development of alternative renewable energy technologies. FERC must consider broader energy policy and economics, and assure that this project does not harm sound energy infrastructure capacity and overall regional energy policy, particularly global warming, efficiency, and renewable energy policy. NJ’s Energy Master Plan and Global Warming Response Act emission reductions must be considered by FERC.

From a land use perspective, the proposed “Northeast Upgrade” portion of the overall project is 37 miles of 30 inch diameter pipeline that would cut through and destroy at least 638 acres of extremely environmentally senstivite forested and unique public parklands, including the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, the Appalachian Trail, the NJ Highlands, and numerous State Parks, streams, wetlands, water supply watershed lands, critical wildlife habitat, water supply reservoirs, and historic sites. FERC must not allow Tennessse to segment the larger project, and must conduct a full blown EIS and rigorously evaluate cumulative and secondary impacts of the overall project.

To try to get a quick handle on the TGP project, I did a little research on the FERC review process.

Even for someone with experience in environmental regulation, it is very difficult to understand how the various pieces of this puzzle fit together, see the big picture and get a handle on exactly what the Tennessee Gas pipeline project is. There are a number of different plans and routes out there.

The Tennessee project has been segmented, and broken into at least 5 diffferent “loops”, which are difficult to understand as they are described. For example, Here is a recent NEPA scoping on the related “300 Line” project.

The FERC reviews process; the NEPA environmental impact review process; and federal and state environmental permitting are extremely complex and not transparent to the average citizen, making it difficult to participate effectively. Each government agency has its own silo, with no one looking out for the overall public interest. This makes it easy for Tennessee to game the system.

After a little effort, I found out that some NJ segments of the Tennessee pipeline project in NJ are already under construction. In their most recent weekly status report, Tennessee Gas reported to FERC:

“Pipeline Construction Loop 325, Sussex and Passaic Counties, New Jersey – Construction of 15.98 miles of a new 30-inch diameter pipeline adjacent to existing right-of-way.  Clearing operations began at the right-of-way off of Highland Lake Road; (Highland Lakes). The clearing crew worked east of the horizontal directional drill entry from MP 6.57 to MP 7.25. Sensitive species exclusion fencing was installed as needed prior to Tennessee Gas Pipeline Company 300 Line Project (“Project”), Docket No. CP09-444-000 Weekly Status Report Week of October 17, 2010 through October 23, 2010

This most recent Tennessee progress Report to FERC on the” Pipeline Construction Loop 325″ appears to overlap or conflict with the FERC Environmental Assessment summary document distributed at the hearing tonight. That FERC document descibes the proposed “Northeast Upgrade Project” as including:

Loop 325 – Installation of 7.7 miles of 30-inch diameter pipeline loop in Passaic and Bergen Counties” (@page 3)

Before tonight’s hearing, I decided to take a ride up and observe the forest destruction in the Sussex and Passaic stretch described in the FERC Status Report. Here’s what I saw:

[Update #3 – Don’t say we didn’t warn you. Where the hell was DEP during permitting? Where is DEP enforcement now? See: Residents of West Milford’s Lake Lookover continue to deal with runoff problem

[Update #2 – 11/4/10 – I testified at the second hearing in Milford Pa. last night. About 60 residents attended. Six or seven property owners raised objections – one well informed resident spoke of the need to consider cumulative impacts and opposed Marcellus fracking. The Town of Milford raised concerns with truck impacts on rural roads and safety of the existing 55 year old pipeline. No environmental groups participated.

Elpaso corporate flacks tried to justify the project as balancing a little forest destruction with the benefits of cleaner burning gas.

I took them up on that and suggested that maybe that “balance” would be acceptable if FERC an EPA teamed up to mandate that all the coal fired power plants in the pipeline corridor be required to convert from coal to gas. I asked FERC to conduct a full blown EIS and make a regional coal plant inventory and fuel conversion part of the impact assessment. Who knows, based on that info, mabe FERC or EPA would pull the trigger?. Dream on!]

[Update 1 – 11/3/10 – FERC Federal Register Notice – hearing tonight in Milford, Pa. at Delaware Valley HS]

Even the Wall Street Journal Gets It

Governor Christie’s cancellation of the ARC Hudson River rail tunnel project is just one more indicator of accelerating decline (see today’s AP national story: Infrastructure projects in N.J., other U.S. states put on hold amid struggling economy, spending slowdown 

(and no, I am not surprised that Christie got caught lying about his political rationale for killing the project).

Christie’s ideologically driven thinking reminded me of a bizarre Wall Street Journal story I read this summer. A must read WS Journal story reported:

Roads to Ruin: Towns Rip Up the Pavement

Asphalt Is Replaced By Cheaper Gravel; ‘Back to Stone Age’

[…]

Paved roads, historical emblems of American achievement, are being torn up across rural America and replaced with gravel or other rough surfaces as counties struggle with tight budgets and dwindling state and federal revenue. State money for local roads was cut in many places amid budget shortfalls.

This is the natural result of  an unchallenged 30 year campaign of right wing conservative attacks on government and taxes.

This period of right wing organizing was accompanied by a virtual withdrawal and abdication by those that support government programs and progressive values. Right wingers have filled that vacuum and hijacked populist and progressive agenda.

Recent develpments are consistent with and more evidence for the collapse of empire theory.

History shows that military over-reach and huge expenditures on the military industrial complex lead to a downward spiral: huge budget deficits, cuts in domestic social programs, lack of private investment in production and a shift to financial speculation, faltering economy, the rise of an oligarchical class as the midddle class is destroyed by rising economic inequality, and ultimately collapse of democracy and the imperial project.

And the most recent Republican assault was all predicted by author Naomi Kline in her superb book “The Shock Doctrine” (which I applied to Christie policy in this post).

Scary to think that we are living through the Twilght of American culture and collapse of the US empire as the world simultaneously faces the ultimate limits to growth caused by: peak oil and gobal climate change.

Have a good weekend!

Who Owns Your Tap and Toilet Water? Will You have Clean and Plentiful Water Tomorrow?

The Clean Water Council will hold it annual public hearing on Tuesday October 12. This year’s hearing is sure to provoke controversy.

Expanded privatization of NJ’s drinking water systems, wastewater treatment (sewers), and stormwater management infrastructure is now on the table.

Do you think that more corporate profits and control over your public water and sewer systems is the way to go? Governor Christie and DEP Commisisoner Bob Martin sure seem to.

In addition to a white paper on “infrastructure asset management” – surprise, surprise! -prominent on the Council’s issues agenda to be considered is:

What role might privatization or public-private contracts perform to improve water infrastructure asset management?

As Gomer Pile, USMC,  used to say: SHAZAAAM!

Current DEP Commissioner Bob Martin made a career out of privatizing public water supply systems.

Given Governor Christie’s ideological support for privatization – including Christie’s Privatization Task Force created under Exectutive Order # 17 – word has it that Martin’s privatization experience was his main “qualification” for the DEP job.

Governor Christie also issued Executive Order #15 which sought to eliminate certain public authorities.

In a September 15 post, we warned that, among other things, in response to Christie’s Executive Order 15, Commissioner Martin had submitted recommendations to the Governor to consolidate the North Jersey District Water Supply Commission with the NJ Water Supply Authority, as well as consolidate the Clean Water Council and Water Supply Advisory Council.

Shockingly, Martin’s consolidation recommendations were not supported by any facts or analysis.

Commissioner Martin’s consolidation recommendations are sure to prove controversial. Setting up a showdown, the Council’s White Paper recommendations to Commissioner Martin directly contradict Martin’s own consolidation recommendations to the Governor:

Importantly, a “one size fits all” approach to infrastructure management and accounting is inappropriate due to the wide variety of ownership types and sizes of systems. Asset management techniques must be suited to each infrastructure type, management structure, whether the system is a bulk or retail service, system size, infrastructure age, etc. While there are emerging general approaches5 that have broad applicability, the specifics of asset management will vary among and even within systems.

As water and sewer line breaks, boil water emergencies, and drought warnings become almost a daily occurence, the Council’s hearing comes at a critical juncture.

NJ’s safe drinking and clean water infrastructure deficits are approaching crisis conditions. Back in 2005, I testified to the Council about infrastructure deficits:

Need for Public Investment – Financing environmental infrastructure deficits

The first priority of the Clean Water Council should be a strong recommendation to the next Administration to get the environmental infrastructure deficit issue on the political and policy radar screens. The Council should focus on the fact that environmental nfrastructure deficits are a serious and long ignored problem that threaten NJ’s economic future, quality of life, public health, and ecological integrity. The Council needs to emphasize that water resource and environmental infrastructure expenditures are investments. The Council should recommend the absolute need to establish creative new funding sources to finance this critical deficit.

More recently, on September 19, we wrote about NJ $7.9 billion drinking water infrastructure deficit.

But that drinking water infrastructure deficit is dwarfed by overall clean water and stormwater management needs, which exceed $ 20 billion.

Importantly, those costs do not include necessary investments in new treatment technologies to respond to emergent chemical threats (see recent DEP petition for rulemaking) or to adapt to global warming (see “Adapt or Die“).

Those “hard infrastructure” cost assessments also don’t include the most cost effective and environmentally sustainable approach: preservation of “Natural capital” and green infrastructure. 

Clearly, Governor Christie’s head in the sand “anti-tax” and privatization approach will not solve these huge structural problems. Nor will Martin’s poorly thought out consolidation.

A massive environmental infrastructure investment package is required to protect NJ’s ecological, public health, and economic/jobs future.

We urge you to register to testify and turn out for the Council’s October 12 hearing . We will keep you posted on the outcome.