Who shall guard the guardians?

Posted 3/13/12

It has been recently reported that Pennsylvania, one of five members of the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC), which are jointly responsible for the bulk of funding of the agency, has cut its …

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Who shall guard the guardians?

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It has been recently reported that Pennsylvania, one of five members of the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC), which are jointly responsible for the bulk of funding of the agency, has cut its payments to the commission by 40.7% this fiscal year.

Pennsylvania has made no secret of the fact that it is annoyed with the DRBC for its failure to finalize its natural gas drilling regulations and start issuing permits. But it is not the only culprit in choking off funding to the agency. New York been reducing its payments for a few years, and for its 2013 budget proposes to pay only about 40% of its agreed-upon share. And the federal government, also a member, is worst of all: it is now about $9 million in arrears, having failed to make a payment every year but one since 1998.

Sadly, this type of situation—in which governments sign compacts entailing some action or other, and subsequently decide not to do them—is nothing new. New York State, for instance, was originally supposed to contribute one-third of the funding for its community colleges; the percentage is now significantly lower. And the River Management Plan for the Upper Delaware Scenic and Recreational River indicates sources of funding for the Upper Delaware Council including $100,000 per year from both New York and Pennsylvania. Both signed on to the document and are members of the council—and both have conveniently ignored the funding passage (though the document says literally “funding shall be sought,” rather than “obtained,” which gives them a kind of out).

It’s hard to come up with a solution for this type of “who shall guard the guardians” situation, which is a pity, because the consequences can be quite serious—as they could be in this case. Lacking funding from its members, the DRBC, whose mission is to protect one of the nation’s great natural resources and the millions who rely on it, is being backed into a corner in which it could very easily become hostage to a small cadre of corporations—many of them not even American—interested only in their own bottom lines.

If the states won’t fund the DRBC, there is basically only one way left for it to survive: do whatever it has to do to increase the fees it collects from the entities it regulates. The DRBC’s proposed natural gas regulations, now on hold, include a fee schedule for natural gas permitting. The more drilling there is, the more income will be generated. By cutting payments, not only Pennsylvania (which has made no secret of the fact that it wants to facilitate gas drilling), but the federal government and New York are creating a situation in which the commission can only survive via payments made by the very group they are supposed to regulate.

Just exactly how good a job would you expect such a regulatory agency to do at protecting your health, safety and welfare?

It would probably be just about as good a job as the Minerals Management Service was doing up until 2010—you remember, the one that was in the news back then for the egregious job it did regulating (or rather, not regulating) drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. The one that knew for six weeks before the BP catastrophe occurred that there was a high risk of blowout, and did nothing. The one that exempted BP from filing a plan on how it would handle a blowout scenario such as the one that actually happened. The one about which people finally concluded, after the deaths of 11 people, billions of dollars in economic costs and an immeasurable degree of environmental and human harm, that it had been too much in bed with the industry it regulated. (Efforts have been made since then, incidentally, to separate the decision-making from the funding process at that agency.)

Prominent conservative thinker Grover Norquist once said that he wanted to starve government until it was small enough to drown in a bathtub—and probably that’s exactly what those who have been crowing about the DRBC’s funding woes have in mind. But for the residents of the Delaware River Basin, the DRBC’s fate may be even worse than drowning: to be put on the private payroll of the very industry whose actions it must control to preserve the watershed. There’s probably nothing to be done about Pennsylvania Governor Corbett, a “drill, baby, drill” advocate. But maybe New York and the federal government can be held to account. If you are leery of being at the mercy of a regulator that is a wholly owned subsidiary of the gas industry, you might want to send letters to Governor Cuomo and your federal representatives asking them to live up to their agreement and pay their DRBC dues.

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