Russell Harding's bid to eliminate the state's environmental law enforcement capability is seen as telegraphing his intent to coddle industry.
In recent years, investigations by the DNR's fourteen environmental conservation officers have resulted in polluters paying hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties, cleanup costs, and upgrading facilities to reduce emissions. One investigator is credited with earning forty-seven times his pay in penalties and settlements during his six years on the job. Moreover, successful investigations have included the state's largest industries, including the auto makers, as well as many smaller operations.
The investigators are truly dreaded by industry: never before, according to environmental sources, have polluters been under such stringent scrutiny.
MUCC's executive director Tom Washington reports that Attorney General Frank Kelley has collected more from polluters (in penalties, cleanups and equipment upgrades) than the chief law enforcement officers of all the other forty-nine states. He, too, credits the environmental COs.
Harding, in structuring Governor Engler's order to dissect the DNR and thereby creating a new Department of Environmental Quality, which he will head, conveniently left the environmental COs back in the emasculated DNR, to become, if Harmes so desires, conventional conservation officers.
Harding, apparently serious, says he will contract with the State Police and local police for environmental investigations.
Washington calls that "a joke." State police, and other enforcement agencies, he points out are not trained (or educated) to handle environmental investigations, and generally, "just couldn't care less."
As of the end of July, DNR law chief Herb Burns reports the environmental section was slated to temporarily transfer to the DEQ. The officers would then transfer back to the DNR when a funding source is found to support them.
Their present funding comes from penalties and settlements paid by polluters.
Harding, meanwhile, is said to be aiming for a Washington post if pollution-friendly Republicans win the White House in 1996.
RWOL
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