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Little Done 6 Years Into The Murphy Administration

Christie Regulatory Rollbacks Remain

Bend Over, Earth Day Is Coming

The NJ environmental community just released the most false praise of and groveling before Governor Murphy and his flaccid DEP in NJ history. Read it and weep:

Dear Governor Murphy,

Over the past seven years of your administration, New Jersey has made remarkable progress in becoming a national leader on environmental and climate action.

Never before has a Governor who has done so little on the environment received so much praise.

Never before – including the Whitman and Christie DEP’s – has DEP done so little on the regulatory front and so much on the press office public relations front.

There is an easy to understand and accurate barometer to measure that failure right on DEP’s own website.

Just look at the DEP Rule Re-adoption Without Change page.

Regulations expire every 5 – 7 years. The expiration is intended to provide an opportunity of continuous improvement, as science and conditions change and lessons are learned about flaws in the regulations. But DEP may readopt without changes to maintain the status quo.

The Murphy DEP has readopted 51 regulations without change, including 8 years of Christie DEP rollbacks.

The pro-business and strongly ideologically anti-regulatory Christie DEP rolled back protections in freshwater wetlands rules, and forestry and public access to the coast and rivers and landfill closure and flooding and Highlands protection and sewer plants and clean water and stormwater management and private site cleanup and coastal zone management  and a broad waiver post Sandy and toxic cleanup program and septic systems a broad waiver of regulations and Green Acres and OPRA public records  and drinking water and phosphorus (water quality) and water pollution and rocket fuel in drinking water (and other unregulated chemicals).

Get that? By re-adopting all these regulations without change, the Murphy DEP has approved of all these Christie DEP rollbacks.

In addition, the Christie budgets slashed DEP funding and staffing, Christie Executive Orders rolled back DEP’s discretionary power and abolished programs and institutions, the Christie DEP failed to act on numerous fronts, e.g. land use, air and water quality, chemical safety (TCPA an RTK), etc and even blocked the Drinking Water Quality Institute from meeting for several years.

Christie DEP settled billion dollar Natural Resource Damage (NRD) lawsuits for pennies on the dollar.

The Murphy DEP has maintained that pro-corporate practice (e.g. see BASF and American Cyanamid deals) and done nothing to strengthen the NRD program to improve DEP’s legal leverage and avoid having to settle for peanuts.

Six YEARS into the Murphy Administration, and NONE of this dismantling and rollbacks have been restored and strengthened by the Murphy administration. One Murphy Executive Order on regulatory policy may even make Christie’s policy even worse.

Revealing a similar pattern, the Murphy DEP adopted just 13 new regulations. Most of them were either required by federal EPA, were minor rules, or were weak efforts that are full of loopholes.

Some were even supported by the chemical industry. The DEP even openly admits this in a response to the Chemistry Council:

In recent years, the Department has streamlined the risk assessment process for air permits by providing the regulated community with a simple-to-use Risk Screening Worksheet (Worksheet) (http://www.nj.gov/dep/aqpp/risk.html). The use of this Worksheet eliminates the need to perform refined air quality modeling for a significant number of permittees. If the facility has the potential to emit one or multiple HAPs, the Worksheet can assess risk at the same time for multiple HAPs. Similarly, when a permittee runs an air quality model for the refined risk assessment for one pollutant, the permittee can use the same run for multiple pollutants.

Notice that DEP did not mandate cumulative risk assessments for multiple hazardous pollutants, or require consideration of undue burdens and health vulnerabilities of at risk environmental justice communities, or establish stricter modeling and air monitoring, particularly in urban areas where schools and people live in close proximity to toxic polluters.

They did just the OPPOSITE and made them weaker.

Yet the current Director of Sierra Club, NJ Chapter recently testified to the Senate Environment Committee and claimed, paraphrase, “as a former DEP employee, I can assure the Committee that DEP has strict hazardous air pollution requirements”!!! 

The Murphy DEP’s highly touted signal accomplishments on the regulatory front – e.g. rejoining RGGI, CO2 emissions rules for a handful or power plants, environmental justice, “forever chemical”, and inland flooding rules – are full of loopholes and will have little or no impact on current greenhouse gas emissions and levels of pollution in EJ communities (see above HAP regulation).

The flood rules were obsolete before they were even proposed, because they relied on the outdated 100 year flood and rainfall events.

The “forever chemicals” rule just exposed DEP’s failure to regulate hundreds of currently unregulated chemical and mandate state of the art treatment for drinking water to remove these chemicals.

Finally, the Christie DEP was led by a former corporate consultant from Accenture, Bob Martin. Martin did his corporate consulting in Europe with European players.

The Murphy DEP is even worse, led by Shawn LaTourette, a former corporate lawyer who represented some of NJ’s worst corporate polluters. He has gross conflicts of interest right here in NJ.

Yet while Bob Martin was criticized as too pro-business, there has not been a peep of criticism of Shawn LaTourette, just the opposite. Gov. Murphy even had the balls to call LaTourette an “Erin Brokovich” public interest lawyer, a disgusting lie that went unchallenged by the press or environmental groups.

Not surprisingly, DEP’s failure to act and maintain continuity with the Christie DEP has led to an explosion of warehouse developments, further loss of the few remaining acres of forests and farms, stagnation on the water quality front as global warming drives even worse outbreaks of harmful algae blooms, and greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption and vehicle miles traveled are all increasing. Bears are being slaughtered. Loggers continue to manage NJ forests. The solar industry is declining and off shore wind is off track. The Energy Master Plan is in shambles. Electrification of buildings is stalled. I could go on but won’t.

[Update: A long time Trenton observer sent me this note:

Murphy is  worse then Christie – DEP budget is lower and has significantly less staff -bigger backlog of park repair – Turnpike widenings  Murphy further weakened storm water rules was even criticized by Trump fema – more roll backs or weaken of clean up rules – more privatization- sprawl is back – ~~~ end update]

 In conclusion, it is obvious why this lame letter was released right now.

We are two weeks from Earth Day.

The DEP will make an Earth Day announcement, enviro’s will praise it and declare victory. They’ll take the press clips to their Foundation donors as evidence of success.

The press will  write glowing headlines and stories.

And nothing will change.

[End Note: The NJ Spotlight story URL gives the game away. The letter was organized by corporate friendly anti-regulatory Coalition for the Delaware River Watershed. More on exactly who they are coming soon. A teaser: (note: this post is old and the primary subject mater is no longer accurate):

I just learned that NJ League of Conservation Voters, NJ Audubon, and NJ Conservation Foundation (they are pathetic cheerleaders, along with their $100 million Wm. Penn Foundation created faux grassroots fundraising focused front group The Coalition for the Delaware Watershed) are doing a public event with the DRBC.