THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 26, 1997 TAG: 9701240020
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J4 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: 76 lines
Gov. George F. Allen set out this year to polish his environmental image, in preparation for a U.S. Senate race in 2000. Already, however, a number of things have gone wrong on the environmental front.
A brief review:
Jan. 9: An internal memo to the office of Governor Allen leaked. It outlined an attack campaign to discredit a damning December report that accused the Allen administration of coddling polluters while water quality declines. The memo, by Department of Environmental Quality official Michael McKenna, suggested leaking misleading stories to the press to impeach the report by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission. McKenna resigned the next day.
Jan. 14: Pilot staff writer Scott Harper revealed that the fine print in an environmental measure Governor Allen proposed in December calls for diverting hundreds of thousands of dollars from the sale of special $25 Chesapeake Bay license plates to finance the initiative.
In effect, Allen would do away with a special commission created in response to the administration's failure to spend any of the license-plate money generated since 1992. The money is supposed to be used for education, research and other activities aimed at preserving the Bay. Sen. Frederick M. Quayle, R-Chesapeake, said, ``To take this money and dump it into his fund . .
Jan. 16: Terry Lynn Rettig, 46, of Virginia Beach, the former sewage plant manager at Smithfield Foods Inc., was sentenced to 30 months in prison for polluting the Pagan River with hog wastes for years and lying about it on government reports. The Allen administration was implicated when Rettig presented a written statement to the court that said the state DEQ made the cheating possible.
``They did their best not to find any problems,'' Rettig wrote, ``by calling Smithfield before they made an inspection, by not looking for problems, by always asking to see the same data and by not looking at the data or records during the inspections.'' Rettig described state inspections as ``social calls.''
Jan. 19: A story occupying two thirds of a page in the Sunday New York Times carried the headline, ``Virginia seen as undercutting U.S. Environmental Rules.'' It quoted Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Carol M. Browner, ``I think that it is unfortunate that you have a lack of leadership in the state. There is a disregard for the requirements of federal laws, and I think there is a belief on the part of some in Virginia that ignoring the environment and public health standards is what the business community wants.''
Jan. 21: The U.S. Supreme Court rejected Virginia's challenge to a federal law that denies highway construction money to states that fail to adopt approved pollution control plans for power plants and factories. The Allen administration argued unsuccessfully that the federal Clean Air Act violates states' rights by forcing states to enforce a federal regulatory program.
Allen is a prisoner of a political philosophy that appears to hold that lax enforcement of environmental laws makes Virginia a more attractive state to business. But it's questionable that Virginia wants the kind of business that is attracted to a state because of lax environmental standards. Lax enforcement has the unfortunate effect of giving an edge to polluting businesses. Better to vigorously enforce environmental laws, so all businesses are treated the same.
Katherine Slaughter, a staff lawyer at the Southern Environmental Law Center in Charlottesville, is quoted in The New York Times article on Allen's battles with the EPA. ``The Allen administration has sought to turn this into an ideological battle over states' rights. If you look beyond the environmental question, they have done it with the motor-voter legislation for voting registration, with the rejection of the Goals 2000 program for the schools. So it is consistent with their ideology.''
It's a foolish consistency in this case, however. Clearly, federal environmental standards must be enforced, for dirty air blows across state lines and polluted water flows across state lines. One state's lax environmental enforcement affects other states.
Allen harms himself and Virginia by continually butting heads with the EPA. Allen is out of step not just with EPA but with the Virginia Constitution, Virginia laws, the U.S. Supreme Court, Congress and certainly environmentalists. He should quietly enforce federal environmental standards. That's part of his job.