EPAWATCH Enforcement plan focuses on industrial compliance A new system for measuring enforcement launched in April will track industrial compliance with environmental laws, while still allowing EPA to identify violations. Past measures of enforcement success have only gauged the output of state and federal enforcement agencies without providing a meaningful measure of environmental results, said Mike Stahl, deputy assistant administrator for enforcement and compliance. For instance, EPA boasted in March that it had assessed a nearrecord $185 million in fines and referred 677 criminal and civil cases to the Justice Department in 1998; however, these numbers do not reveal how much pollution was reduced, or how many facilities complied with the law. "It's utterly ridiculous to measure performance of a program by the number of enforcements, because they measure failures," said Malcolm Sparrow, professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. What is needed, he said, is to calculate environmental outcomes. Sparrow was part of the team of state, industry, and environmental representatives that developed new performance measures for directiy comparing the effectiveness of different enforcement initiatives and for targeting problem areas. The new measures include industrial compliance rates, a comparison of the environmental and human health improvements resulting from assistance and enforcement efforts, average time for violators to come into compliance, and percentage of chronic violators by industry sector, region, and state. The new system will "ensure we're effective in getting the maximum amount of compliance and indicate areas that need attention," Stahl added. Environmentalists say the measures are a good first step toward correcting widespread and chronic non-
compliance with environmental laws. What little information there is on noncompliance indicates that EPA has a big problem with scofflaws, said Ed Hopkins of the Sierra Club. Significant noncompliance with the Clean Air Act averages 28.5% for 639 facilities in five industry sectors, according to EPA date on the Sector Facility Indexing Project Web page. Significant noncompliance describes a violation that poses "a more severe level of environmental threat" or "a violation with emissions or substantial procedural violations." "The new performance measures are one step towards confirming the noncompliance problem and enforcing it," said John Coequyt, analyst with the Environmental Working Group. He said the new measures are evidence that EPA is changing its commitment to enforcement, but the agency must follow through with "real actions" against polluters. Coequyt's group plans to release a report in May criticizing EPA's enforcement efforts.
age Agencies (AMSA) and the Water Environment Federation (WEF). In The Cost of Clean, a report released at the end of March, AMSA and WEF offer a glimpse of what it might take to bring the nation's wide array of systems and facilities designed to collect, transport, treat, and discharge household and industrial wastewater and stormwater up to par with new water quality standards, as well as enhance aging facilities. Local governments will have to spend $132 billion to maintain current facilities and another $200 bil-
Communities will need to pump more than $330 billion over the next 20 years into the nation's aging wastewater treatment
Shortfalls projected for wastewater infrastructure Communities will need to pump more than $330 billion over the next 20 years into the nation's aging wastewater treatment infrastructure to meet increasingly stringent water quality regulations, according to new estimates from wastewater and water quality professionals. But EPA is doing little to help close this chronic funding gap. Federal funding is tight right now, said Richard Kuhlman, chief of EPA's State Revolving Fund (SRF) Branch. The agency proposed only $800 million for fiscal year 2000's clean water SRF program, a $550 million cut from last year's appropriations. This low-interest loan program is the primary federal financing vehicle for clean water infrastructure needs. If federal funding continues at the current rate, 90% of the bill will fall on local governments, claim the Association of Metropolitan Sewer-
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infrastructure to meet increasingly stringent regulations. Ken Kirk AMSA lion to deal with stricter stormwater regulations, said Ken Kirk, AMSA's executive director. They cannot afford to do both, he said. But Linda Eichmiller, deputy director of the Association of State and Interstate Water Pollution Control Administrators, said the federal government should not be required to pitch in money for infrastructure replacement and operating and maintenance costs. The rules of the game under the Clean Water Act were that user fees should be high enough so that local communities would be able to foot the bill for these costs, Eichmiller said.
