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Earth Night

Chairman DeLeo, Chairwoman Resor, and Members of the Committee:

My name is Megan Amundson, and I am the Policy Analyst for the Environmental League of Massachusetts. ELM has a long history of supporting adequate funding for environmental agencies, projects, and programs from the Cape to the Berkshires. Our annual Green Budget, supported this year by over 30 environmental organizations, helps to draw legislative attention to the need for environmental expenditures.

Our environmental programs provide a number of essential government services, including restoring and protecting drinking water supplies and preserving rivers and wetlands, enforcing laws against air and water pollution, protecting and maintaining access to natural areas for all Massachusetts residents, protecting public health and our quality of life, reducing the use of toxic chemicals, returning contaminated land to use, and preserving our working farms.

The environmental budget, however, has not kept up with the growing demand on environmental agencies. Since 1989, the total budget for the state of Massachusetts has increased by 37 percent when adjusted for inflation.

Today, though, when adjusted for inflation, the environmental budget has lost over 18 percent during that same period. The purchasing power of the environmental agencies has never been lower than it is today. This loss underlines the clear crisis in environmental spending. In the FY2005 budget, environmental funding was only 0.69 percent of the total budget. While Massachusetts was once a leader in environmental protection, as of 2000 Massachusetts ranked 44th out of 50 states in environmental spending per capita, and 48th as a proportion of the total budget. Since these statistics came out, the environmental budget in Massachusetts has seen an additional cut of almost 30 percent when adjusted for inflation.

Unfortunately, this trend of grossly underfunding environmental programs is not reversing: The FY2005 budget is still 2 percent lower than the FY2004 budget, and the governor's House 1 budget for FY2006 is not enough to keep up with inflation and most of the increase it provides is merely a shift in funds intended to pay the salaries of employees currently paid out of capital funds rather than an increase for starved programs.

This trend carries with it severe, long-term consequences for our public health and our environment. Our Green Budget clearly outlines the funding amounts we and over 30 environmental organizations across the commonwealth believe are necessary for these programs to sustain themselves. Without increased funding, we are inviting disaster; it may not arrive today and it may not arrive tomorrow, but it will arrive and at that time we will pay dearly for it.

According to the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, the environment has been the hardest hit by state government's recent "belt tightening." Unfortunately, "doing more with less" is a fallacy-with less we inevitably do less, regardless of how politically attractive it might be to pretend that we can receive the same core services while paying less for them. State government is not Walmart.

The Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has been cut 19 percent in the last three years, forcing the agency to limit technical assistance to municipalities, reduce water quality testing, reduce the level of scrutiny it provides to hazardous waste site cleanup, and increase the timeframe for processing permits. While it has been able to release emergency regulations, for example for perchlorate in drinking water, that is about all it has the capacity to do: most of its work is now purely reactive as opposed to proactive. Water quality monitoring is being done haphazardly and the program to actively search out hazardous waste sites in order to prevent continued and spreading contamination has been disbanded. Furthermore, hidden in the rosy enforcement statistics the administration provides is the fact that DEP performed 11 percent fewer inspections in 2004 than in 2000. In fact, since DEP is now finding a larger number of serious violations while conducting fewer inspections, the administration's enforcement data suggests there is actually a larger rate of noncompliance now than in previous years when DEP had more resources to oversee the regulated community.

The Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) has been cut 43 percent in the last four years when adjusted for inflation and has had to limit access to facilities and park programs and reduce its ability to deal with illegal dumping. There are fewer rangers in the parks and fewer seasonal employees staffing such areas as swimming pools and beaches. Many state parks across the commonwealth and many urban parks that were once part of the Metropolitan District Commission have a story of unsafe conditions and neglected maintenance: campsites are operating without any ranger on duty after 5pm; state parks do not have sufficient maps to ensure the safety of users; user clubs such as biking or off-road vehicle clubs are left to maintain the trails they use and their trail use is not monitored to make sure they are not endangering the safety of other users by using inappropriate trails.

The Natural Heritage and Endangered Species program has not been funded from the operating budget since FY2004 for its data collection about the location of endangered species habitat as well as biological field surveys, environmental impact reviews, and land protection. Despite the lack of funding from the general fund, 19,000 households determined that endangered species protection is a priority and donated to the program on their 2003 state tax forms. While these donations are crucial to the continuation of the program, they are not enough. To make matters worse, the administration has gone so far as to charge the program a 36 percent fee on all money donated to it to pay for "overhead costs" when the government no longer funds the program, while admitting it could at any time waive it. That 36¢ of every dollar donated should be taken from this program for "overhead costs" at a time when the program receives no money from the general fund is pure theft.

One of the few programs that has seen its budget reinstated is the Riverways program, and the money has been well spent. The Riverways program is a model program for, among other services it provides, protecting rivers and streams by leveraging volunteers to monitor them. Its Adopt-A-Stream program, which organizes communities, volunteers, and companies to develop river monitoring programs, boasts over 285 volunteers in 18 distinct watersheds in 2004. Its River Instream Flow Stewards program, which was created in 2003 and assists local groups in identifying, documenting, and restoring rivers and streams that suffer low water flows, already boasts over 50 volunteers in 2004. The small amount of funding Riverways requires to function fully is repaid many times over in the number of hours dedicated volunteers across the commonwealth give to protecting local waterways.

Without sufficient funding these programs cannot do what the legislature intended when you passed our environmental laws. For many environmental programs, staff and equipment make up much of their costs. For DEP, the cost of enforcing our environmental laws is the cost of the staff needed to do the inspections. Much has been made of DCR's limited snow plow equipment for the amount of roads and sidewalks under its jurisdiction, but snow equipment is not the only area in which DCR's budget falls short-DCR has been cut so badly that over half of the agency's staff does not even have access to a computer. Parks agencies began in the 19th century, but DCR needs to be able to function in the 21st.

Given the substantial hurdles environmental programs currently face to do their basic core responsibilities, we recommend the following:

We encourage the legislature to use the state's increasing revenues to improve environmental protection and not nickel and dime the environment as the governor's budget does. The Green Budget outlines, in detail, what programs ELM recommends you prioritize and what funding those programs require to get back on the right track.

We also recommend that you reinstate the Toxics Use Reduction Fund and the Clean Environment Fund. Many citizens and companies pay for services our environmental programs provide. If that money is not then funneled back into those programs, and therefore program staff cannot commit sufficient time to provide those core services, citizens are being unjustly denied the services and benefits for which they are paying. Dedicated funds have been a useful tool for allowing certain service-oriented programs to partially fund themselves, taking some burden off the general fund, and guaranteeing that services will always be provided, even when the state encounters fiscal crises.

Our environmental programs are on the brink-there have been clear indications in recent months in the form of safety and public health concerns that the funding our environmental programs have been provided the last several years has been far from adequate. We look forward to working with you to make sure environmental programs that protect public health and our environment receive the funding they need to fulfill their missions. Thank you for the opportunity to testify.