Murphy DEP Continues Christie DEP Water Supply Advisory Council’s Practice Of Meeting Behind Closed Doors

Once again, we see continuity, not reform. How long must we wait?

I just got another disappointing email from DEP staff which again shows continuity with bad practices begun by the Christie DEP. Here’s the story.

During the Christie administration – as well as prior administration’s – I was a regular attendee of meetings of the DEP’s Water Supply Advisory Council. These meetings are not well attended by the public or environmental groups – Rich Bizub of PPA was a regular, and various watershed groups would sporadically send a representative.

I would use those meetings in three ways: (and never paid a penny or received a Foundation grant to do so)

1) monitoring – to listen and learn what was going on;

2) advocacy – to ask tough science and regulatory policy questions during the public comment period and during technical presentations to the Council; and

3) writing and organizing – to bring the information and my assessment of what was going in DEP/WSAC on to the public via this blog and by sending various emails to reporters and environmental group leaders and citizens I was working with.

(BTW, I never saw a similar effort to inform the public by the environmental group representative of WSAC, a well paid professional with staff support and grants from major Foundations.)

My questions were rarely answered satisfactorily, but at least they usually were included in the minutes. WSAC members and DEP staffers generally perceived me as a pain in the ass.

As the controversy over the Christie DEP’s failure to update the Water Supply Master Plan intensified and critical press stories started being written, the DEP staff to the WSAC pressured the Council members to shut down the public participation opportunities to avoid continuing embarrassment of the DEP Commissioner and the Governor.

The WSAC did this by changing the process for the meetings to allow the WSAC to meet behind closed doors.

After the public comment session, the public was now asked to leave the room so the Council could deliberate, conduct business, and make their recommendations to the DEP Commissioner in private.

The meeting Agenda was revised to exclude the public and include a new item “Council Session”.

Perhaps Acting DEP Commissioner McCabe is unaware of this practice.

If so, either she has not done her homework or the DEP staff to the WSAC failed to brief her about the change in meeting practices made during the Christie/Martin DEP regime to exclude the public from the Councils’s deliberations.

Once again, we see continuity, not reform. How long must we wait?

PS – some may say that the new practice is appropriate and analogous to an “Executive Session”. But the WSAC has no formal administrative powers, all they do is make recommendations to the DEP Commissioner. The WSAC are not elected officials or government employees. They have no basis or justification for “Executive Session” confidential deliberation. 

Additionally, we need to understand the rationale for the change made by the Christie DEP. It was done in response to and to prevent critical media coverage.