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Bean Counting for a Better Minnesota There has been considerable public debate recently about a tougher enforcement role for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) in potecting water quality. Assertions have been made that the MPCA has been negligent in its efforts to "catch and punish" facilities that violate state and federal environmental laws. Advocacy of this old-style enforcement approach to environmental protection -- as opposed to focusing on environmental outcomes -- suggests that there is little wrong in current environmental policies that a nightstick and courtroom could not fix. Traditional environmental regulation relied primarily on punishment as a way of achieving environmental compliance. It considered increased enforcement activity as a positive sign of improved environmental quality. However, focusing on inspections, violations, and enforcement actions subjects law-abiding facilities -- those of businesses and municipalities, for example -- to lengthy procedures and costly adjustments, and hides whether particular regulations actually improve environmental quality. Minnesotans have good reason to be skeptical about whether a greater number of enforcement actions actually creates a better environment. Enforcement actions send a message: If you threaten human health or environmental quality, detection and punishment will follow. Enforcement is important because it can deter people from behaving in ways that cause serious harm to others -- something the polluter has no right to do and something which all Minnesotans have interest in preventing. However, making enforcement actions the centerpiece of environmental regulation is akin to counting the number of days your children attend class instead of considering their test scores or grades. The former measures process and procedure, whereas the latter measures actual performance. A punitive, enforcement approach forces 1,400 cities and companies in Minnesota to navigate an expanding maze of environmental rules and requirements. MPCA permits for wastewater treatment issued today contain 32 percent more requirements for major industrial facilities, and 10 percent more for major municipalities, than those issued just six or seven years ago. As the environmental regulatory labyrinth grows more complex, a "permitted" facility has greater difficulty achieving total compliance and, subsequently, its chances of committing a "violation" increase. Indeed, the number of reported violations increased from 1992 to 1998. However, "the vast majority of infractions," wrote Star-Tribune reporters in a recent series, "were reporting violations, such as failure to file pollution reports completely on time." If the state pollution watchdog slaps a fine on a wastewater treatment facility for violating a paperwork-reporting rule, is the water any cleaner? Are the risks to public health necessarily reduced? Applying greater enforcement pressure may catch and punish a few polluters, but it does so at the expense of many cities and companies who do not contribute to environmental harms. A better measurement than the violation rate is the compliance rate, which takes into account the number of violations and increases in the number of requirements. According to the MPCA, the compliance rate remained a steady 98 percent from 1992 to 1998. The MPCA appears to have rejected the natural tendency of government bureaus to produce high-profile outcomes, such as enforcement actions, in favor of less adversarial actions, such as compliance assistance -- helping cities and companies understand and comply with environmental regulations. Enforcement actions make for a good bureaucratic bean-counting exercise, but it's a poor proxy for actual environmental results. There is little reason to celebrate increased dollars spent on environmental compliance or fines collected. Instead, we should celebrate pollution abated or rivers cleaned up. -- David W. Riggs is Senior Fellow for Economic and Environmental Studies at Center of the American Experiment, a conservative think tank in Minneapolis. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted. |