Like many other people from this area, I went to New Hampshire before the election to try to affect the results in a "swing state." I was working with the Sierra Club, trying to get the message out to voters about the stark contrast between the two candidates' positions and records on environmental concerns.
The long-term consequences of having an administration that refuses to understand environmental problems and pushes the country and the world in the wrong direction (on so many issues) are so devastating that it is hard not to just shriek in rage and despair. Screaming won't help anything though, and I'd rather be busy doing something that will have a positive effect than just fulminating. So while I expect to receive summons for action at the national level, and will respond, I'm going to put most of my energy into battles at the state and local level.
In Massachusetts, the Sierra Club supported many candidates for election or re-election to the state legislature. According to James McCaffrey, the Executive Director of the Massachusetts Chapter, the candidates the Club endorsed did very well. The candidates recruited by Governor Mitt Romney to run against incumbents did not prevail. McCaffrey is especially pleased that Senator Pam Resor, a great friend of the environment in Massachusetts, was re-elected.
The Massachusetts environment needs help from all of us, largely because Romney's administration has continued a pattern of underfunding environmental agencies and programs. According to Massachusetts Audubon, budgets for Massachusetts' environmental programs and agencies have declined by thirty two percent in the past five years, going from $245.1 million in Fiscal Year 2001 to $166.1 million this year.
The main operational account for the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has gone down by twenty five percent. DEP is the agency that regulates pesticides and hazardous wastes, landfills and trash-to-energy facilities, clean air and drinking water. It also enforces the Wetlands Act, and has been in the process of trying to find a cheaper way to do that job (leading to significant fear that it is taking itself out of the enforcement business).
In those same five years, the budget for state parks has decreased by thirty one percent. I was on the Board of Managers for those parks in Fiscal Year 2001, when their budget was $25,677,383; it was too low then. The parks budget in real dollars (adjusted for inflation) had been generally declining since the days of the Dukakis administration in the mid-1980s. The FY05 budget is $17,749,682.
The Romney administration has talked about "smart growth," but it has been lots of talk and very little action. While I'm personally inclined to agree with the Governor when he decries outrageous housing costs and says we must build more multi-family housing, I find his blindness to the need to purchase land or development rights to land baffling. It we are going to have both housing and open space, we must have money to assist landowners who are willing to keep land open, as well as money to buy open space - nothing else really works.
Environmental advocates worked very hard in the winter of 2001-2002 to get the legislature to pass a new Environmental Bond Bill to provide funds for major capital projects, especially land purchases. During the administrations of Governors Weld, Cellucci, and Swift, annual expenditures for land conservation were about $50 million. But last year, Governor Romney approved only $18 million. Citizens rose up to support land conservation, so in Fiscal Year 2005 the administration increased the amount – but only to $27 million. That's better than $18 million, but no where near $50 million. Given the dramatic increase in the price of land, we need far more than $50 million per year to avoid having most of our open space disappear under development of various kinds in the next decade or so. It would be easy to spend $50 million on deserving projects in our region alone.
At the same time that we push for adequate funding from the state, we also have to work hard to protect the land that is already in formal protection. Threats range from neglect, through misuse, to dealing with accidentally-introduced pests. Some management decision may be questionable. For example, there is a proposal to cut pine and hemlock trees in the Mount Holyoke Range State Park, at the Bachelor Street entrance in Granby. I don't know enough about this proposal yet to have a position; if you want to know more, there is going to be a meeting about it at the Notch Visitor's Center on Thursday, December 9, at 7 pm.