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Sunday, April 26, 2009

Environment - "IDEM slow to resolve enviro permit issues"

Gitte Laasby, environmental reporter for the Gary Post-Tribune, has a lengthy story today on IDEM's permit review process and its results. Some points:

When IDEM Commissioner Thomas Easterly was appointed in 2005, a pile of backlogged permits were collecting dust on agency desks: Nearly 300 air permits and 276 water permits.

The permits had either not been issued or not been renewed and updated. Among them were some for Northwest Indiana's steel mills, which expired in the early 1990s. The federal Clean Water Act requires permits to be updated to meet stricter standards every five years. * * *

One strategy to get the permits done was Gov. Mitch Daniels implementing a performance management system. It ties performance to compensation so employees who perform satisfactorily get rewarded and those who don't won't get raises or will ultimately be fired.

Under the system, a permit writer will be told to process a certain number of permits in a year based on complexity. Whether the person meets his or her requirements affects the amount of raise they get.

"We have exceeds (expectations), meets and do-not-meets," Easterly explained. "So if you do not meet, you can go on a work improvement plan. So you have a period of time to bring that thing that you were deficient in back up to at least a 'meets' level. If you don't get there, then we start down a progressive defuncts path and you might leave the agency."

Many IDEM staff reacted negatively to the system, saying it forces section chiefs to find people who don't meet expectations even if those people have done what was asked of them. That's because the system determines 10 percent of employees must exceed while 10 percent fail. Part of the incentive to perform disappeared after the state eliminated raises for 2009.

Nevertheless, the strategy seemed to work. In 2005, IDEM spent the equivalent of more than 500,000 days total on issuing air permits. By the end of 2008, the number was down to about 70,000. In the water department, permit days were cut from 300,000 to 30,000. Customer service had improved for businesses seeking permits.

The backlog went from 297 air permits in 2005 to five today, and 276 water permits in 2005 to six currently.

Yet critics said the fact that some permits are still backlogged shows IDEM has not finished the job, leaving some legacy problems unaddressed.

Tom Anderson, executive director of Save the Dunes Council, said while all minor wastewater permits have now been issued, major permits remain. IDEM still has six major permits left to issue, five for steel mills in Northwest Indiana: ArcelorMittal Burns Harbor Indiana Harbor East and West, U.S. Steel Midwest and U.S. Steel Gary Works. IDEM conducted a hearing on the U.S. Steel Gary Works permit Dec. 11, 2007, but the permit has still not been issued.

"If you look at the major permits, we do not see a lot of change ... compared to what we saw years ago," he said. "In the last five years, there's been some work, but the (U.S. Steel) permit is still not issued."

Anderson said one reason is that IDEM has still not addressed an underlying problem that has persisted for well more than a decade: Laws passed by the General Assembly need to be fleshed out in rules that IDEM can apply when issuing permits.

For instance, IDEM needs to know under what circumstances a company can increase its discharges to Lake Michigan to be able to issue certain water permits. The lack of this "anti-degradation rule" was at the heart of contention over BP's wastewater permit in the summer of 2007, according to an independent report.

Anderson said administrators told environmentalists in 2002 that the lack of this rule was among the top explanations why permits had not been issued on time.

"We're seven years later, and one of the highlights was, this administration was going to tackle this anti-degradation rule," he said. "In the last five years, we haven't made much progress except to identify it as a problem ... They aren't resolved. We just have a longer list of issues."

IDEM spokeswoman Amy Hartsock said work groups failed to resolve the issue between 1997 and 2004. She said IDEM has been meeting with industry representatives and environmentalists since March 2008 to formulate a rule, but she couldn't say when it might be finished.

"We must follow the steps in the rulemaking process, and the rule's completion could take at least seven to 10 more months," she said in an e-mail.

Although everyone appears to agree that IDEM made progress by catching up on permits, not everyone agrees it's always a good idea to issue permits within the designated time frame. Critics say some permits are rushed at the expense of compliance with federal law.

"I can see the fact that more permits get issued, but simply issuing a permit that's not any more restrictive than it's been in the past is not any better," said Valparaiso attorney Kim Ferraro, who is executive director of the Legal Environmental Aid Foundation of Indiana. "Many of them go backwards."

As an example, she cited the U.S. Steel Gary Works wastewater permit that IDEM presented to the public in the fall of 2007. She said IDEM did not impose a new mercury limit, but gave the company five years to comply. She said IDEM also allowed U.S. Steel to increase its discharges of several pollutants. The Clean Water Act requires that permits get gradually stricter with the goal of "virtually eliminating" pollution.

Extending the same pollutant limits rather than ratcheting them down over time is like issuing the same permit, she said.

Easterly, in a presentation in his early days as IDEM commissioner, said permits should be "without unnecessary requirements."

Ann Alexander, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said IDEM also runs the risk of legal challenges to its permits by rushing them through without enough attention to detail -- for instance in the case of BP's 6,400-page air permit including appendices for the Whiting expansion. While BP and IDEM?spent several months working out the details of the permit, the public had seven weeks to review it.

"I think that the BP permit they issued is pretty good evidence that haste makes waste. Government efficiency is a good thing, but it shouldn't be at the expense of compliance with the law," she said. "We repeatedly have found issues with the permits they're issuing. You're ultimately losing time if people feel it's inappropriate and that they need to challenge it. Ultimately, the way to make sure these permits are issued expeditiously is to make sure they're issued appropriately the first time."

From a side-bar:
Coming Monday:

Changes in enforcement at IDEM have led critics to ask whether IDEM is still fulfilling its purpose of protecting human health and the environment.

Today's and tomorrow's Post-Tribune stories will constitute an in-depth look at how IDEM has changed over the past four years.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on April 26, 2009 08:38 AM
Posted to Environment