VA Governor to Gut Environmental Permit Boards?

(Editorial From the Lynchburg, VA News and Advance 12/22/2007)

It was Abraham Lincoln, in the Gettysburg Address, who best described American democracy as “government of the people, by the people and for the people.”
More than 140 years ago, in the midst of a bloody civil war fought in large part over the “right” of one man to own another, that phrase was more a dream, an aspiration than reality.
Today, in 2007, the dream, the ideal is more reality than not, but that doesn’t mean that citizens, the true masters of their government, don’t have to stand vigilant to protect that concept of government from interests that would destroy it by a thousand tiny cuts.
That’s what is going on behind the scenes in Virginia and in Richmond regarding three citizen environmental panels that foes of citizens actually calling the shots in their government want to eviscerate.
The State Water Control Board, the Air Pollution Control Board and the Waste Management Board are three citizen-run boards that set policy in their respective areas of expertise for the professional staff of the state Department of Environmental Quality to carry out. The boards are also the final appeal body for state permits in their respective portfolios.
In the 2007 session of the General Assembly, a member of Lincoln’s Republican Party, Del. Steven Landes of Weyers Cave, tried to kill the boards outright and consolidate all permit-granting authority in the office of the director of the DEQ, a gubernatorial appointee.
Adding insult to injury, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, D, self-proclaimed man of the people and an environment-friendly governor, provided powerful logistical support from his office to get the bill through the legislative hopper in the dead of night and away from public scrutiny.
That blatant attempt to stifle citizens input failed, thanks in no small part to the efforts of three Central Virginians: Del. Ben Cline, R-Amherst, Del. Kathy Byron, R-Campbell, and Shelton Miles of Campbell County, the chairman of the State Water Control Board.
But the foes of citizens actually running their own government refused to slink quietly back beneath the rocks from whence they came and are preparing to kill the boards by other means in the upcoming 2008 session of the Assembly.
Powerful business interests and governmental bodies in Northern Virginia and Tidewater are lining up behind a so-called compromise that would retain the boards in name only but would strip them of any permitting powers, placing all that again in the office of the DEQ’s chief bureaucrat. Under federal law, since the boards would no longer permitting powers, their membership could include representatives of the very industries they would have a hand in writing the regulations for.
Talk about the fox guarding the hen house.
And of course, the civic-minded opponents of the three boards never considered that possibility. Right.
You don’t have to be a tree-hugging environmentalist to be scared of and angry about this blatant attempt by powerful business and government types to bar the average citizen from actually having a voice in forming and carrying out environmental policy.
It should be incumbent upon those pushing such a drastic change in environmental policy to clearly state the reasons for their proposals. Show us where the current system is broken or is not working, sit down with everyone involved and attempt to devise solutions.
Curiously, the boards’ foes point to only one issue: the time, they claim, it takes for permits to be granted. Shelton Miles, of the water board, admits up front there have been a handful of permits over the years that have taken longer than they should have, but points out that often the delays were the cause of the applicant himself.
But is that reason enough to gut the authority of these three citizen-run boards to help set environmental policy in Virginia and oversee the use of some of our most precious natural resources?
Absolutely not.
The 2008 session of the General Assembly starts in just under a month, and now’s the time for proponents of citizen-run government in Virginia to make their voices heard before it’s too late.
Contact the members of Central Virginia’s delegation - Sen. Steve Newman and Dels. Cline, Byron, Lacey Putney, Watkins Abbitt and Shannon Valentine - to express your concerns.
And we’ll say it again because it bears repeating: You don’t have to be a tree-hugger to be alarmed at this power grab by government and business lobbyists. This issue cuts to the heart of what representative democracy is all about.