PROBLEM-SOLVING

Rather than relying on a punitive mindset, turning those not in compliance into criminals, problem-solving seeks to involve as many affected actors as possible in developing a workable solution to environmental problems.

Working under the terse slogan, "PICK IMPORTANT PROBLEMS: FIX THEM," the Florida DEP summarizes its framework as "a commitment to getting better environmental results than regulation alone would achieve through partnerships with the public, other governmental agencies and industry. EPS is a method for identifying the causes of environmental problems, the options for solving them, the measurements which would indicate whether the effort succeeds, and the resources which can be brought to bear from all of the interested parties."

Over the past two years, several initiatives have benefited from the EPS approach, including the protection of drinking water in the South District of Florida: the EPS was used to allow wellhead owners to self-audit their protection mechanisms, to prevent spillage into drinking water supplies. After a year's worth of work, compliance with drinking water regulations jumped from 70 percent to 94.7 percent, providing "safer wells and a relatively simple, resource-efficient solution to a significant threat to human health and groundwater."

Artificial reefs are popular amongst conservationists, fishers, and divers because they create habitat for marine life. In most areas of the United States, artificial reef-building is undertaken by state conservation departments. Along the Gulf of Mexico, however, two states have taken steps to enable individuals and private groups to create their own reefs.

In 1987, Alabama created its first large permit area designated for people to create reefs by sinking certain approved objects. Prior to this, recreational fishers had been creating reefs mostly by using old junk, which caused problems down the line for commercial fishers. In response, the state made the activity legal in certain areas, and limited the acceptable reef-building objects. Since then, reef-building in the state has skyrocketed. Today, private groups or individuals do 95% of reef-building in Alabama. Based on the success of Alabama’s permit areas, Florida has since created three similar reef-building areas. In both states, reef-building businesses have even formed.

Though the reefs become public property once they are in the water, the builder benefits from his reef while he maintains exclusive knowledge of its location. Though "ownership" of the reef ends when the reef becomes public, even the ability to gain this temporary right to a reef has led to a huge increase in private reef-building.

The advantages of private reef-building extend to the greater marine environment as well. Public reefs—that is, those built by the state conservation department and whose location is made public—are over-fished to such an extent that the fish population is often unable to replenish itself. With private reefs, the owner has an interest in maintaining the fish population as well as in fishing the reef. The private temporary owner balances these goals and in turn helps maintain the marine environment.

Private reef-building is helping eliminate a common, long-term problem in Alabama and Florida.

Instituted in 1994, this legislation is designed to protect companies who discover violations during self-audits and allow immunity for certain disclosure of regulatory violations. Generally, voluntarily conducted self-evaluations are privileged, i.e., not admissible as evidence. The privilege does not apply to reporting which is required by applicable law, regulation, permit or order. The privilege is waived upon a voluntary disclosure associated with a request for immunity. The privilege can be lost or waived in a number of other ways, as well.

The immunity reaches only monetary penalties; the law does not take away the regulators' ability to issue orders, require actions, or otherwise limit their authority.

Immunity from fines and penalties is generally available, based upon a voluntary disclosure; criminal immunity is available only for negligent acts knowing or intentional criminal acts are not granted immunity.

Since 1990, and despite increasingly strict controls on its industry, Chicago has been classified as one of the worst ozone non-attainment areas in the country. In 1999, Illinois launched a Volatile Organic Compound (VOC) trading system for the Chicago Metropolitan area. It was developed when state regulators recognized the failure of traditional regulatory methods to control Chicago's pollution problems and turned, instead, to market-based methods that they believed would encourage more innovative, cost-effective solutions.

The decision to target VOC emissions for reduction came after a number of years of modeling, research, and collaboration between state and federal officials, environmentalists, and private stakeholders from Chicago. When it was concluded that VOC trading was the best method for achieving the area’s immediate goals, Chicago's largest VOC emitters were asked to join the collaboration team to help design the trading program. The EPA developed rules to guide the Emission Reduction Market System (ERMS), and in 1999 it became the first of its kind to be instituted in the nation.

The ERMS builds from recognition that within Chicago's metropolitan area, numerous entities emit VOCs, each with different options to reduce emissions along with various costs associated with those options. The trading program sets a cap on overall VOC emissions for the group of sources, based on a reduction of past emissions, and requires that each source contribute to staying within the cap. It is up to each individual source to determine how it meets necessary reductions. Those facilities facing high-cost control options may trade with other sources that face lower costs. The lower-cost facility receives compensation for its efforts from the higher cost facility. The costs of reducing emissions are thereby lowered.

The VOC trading system implemented in Chicago differs from strategies previously relied upon for reducing VOC emissions. It provides flexibility to sources of VOC emissions and requires little regulatory oversight. These factors allow for innovation in environmental solutions and are intended to produce environmental benefits at lower cost.

The partnership between Hopewell and its industries began with the 1977 opening of a regional wastewater treatment facility designed to effectively treat industrial as well as municipal wastewater. The wastewater facility was custom-designed by the City of Hopewell and industry leaders, and is funded by both the public and private sector. This initial success was institutionalized as the Hopewell Community and Industry Panel (HCIP), a forum of business, government, and community leaders who are involved in formulating solutions to the town’s problems. HCIP’s successes to date have included environmental awareness programs and the financing of a $10.7 million improvement to the wastewater facility, marking a 30-year operating agreement between the City of Hopewell and local industries.

The Chesapeake Wildlife Heritage (CWH) in Maryland is a private, non-profit organization comprised of sportsmen, bird watchers, and other fish and wildlife enthusiasts. The group is dedicated to creating, restoring, and protecting wildlife habitat in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed through direct action, education, and research in partnership with landowners in the watershed. CWH was formed in 1980 by a group of duck hunters who wanted to revive the area’s duck population, which had dwindled due to over-hunting and the development of houses, towns, and croplands where the ducks once thrived. The hunters began by pooling their resources to build ponds for the ducks. Their efforts proved successful at restoring the duck population, and eventually it became clear that similar methods might help other wildlife suffering in the area. In the mid-1980s, the group expanded to become the CWH, which works to protect all species in the Bay.

The CWH has three primary means for achieving their goals of protecting and restoring wildlife habitat on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay: agricultural land management, artificial nesting structures, and wetland creation and restoration. The agricultural efforts include managing cropland in the watershed and helping farmers to implement agricultural techniques that will improve water quality, protect wildlife habitat, and preserve wetlands. CWH also encourages farmers to plant various tree species on their land so that the organization can then install artificial nesting devices that help restore the forest species in the bay.

Some of CWH’s most impressive work has been their restoration of wetlands in the area. Not only do wetlands provide habitat for wildlife, they also help control agricultural runoff, a leading source of pollution in the nation’s waterways and a growing concern in the Chesapeake Bay. Wetland restoration in the bay is relatively simple and not very costly. Since the eastern shore is composed entirely of hydraulic soil, wetland plants thrive naturally there unless a drainage system has been installed. To convert cropland to wetland, CWH only has to reverse the effects of the drainage system. This process is not very costly because the price of farmland has been dropping as agricultural advances have decreased the need to plow new land.

So how much difference has the efforts of CWH really made? According to a Center for Private Conservation study on the group, quite a lot. Their agricultural efforts extend to over 150,000 acres around the bay. They have installed over 6,000 wood duck boxes in the Chesapeake watershed that get 50% usage by ducks, and produce over 25,000 baby wood ducks each year. CWH has also restored over 100 acres of wetlands. In 1994, the Smithsonian Institute began monitoring 13 of these wetlands to determine how effectively they were restored and how well their water quality had improved. Their research on these wetlands since then has supported the idea that properly constructed and maintained wetlands provide wildlife habitat while also helping to reverse the effects of nutrient runoff from agricultural sources.

Although it began as a small group of duck hunters with a very specialized interest, CWH has expanded a great deal since then and has managed to significantly improve the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay.

Maryland CWH link

MASSACHUSETTS – Clean Charles River 2005 Initiative

The Charles River cuts an impressive figure through the heart of Boston, separating the city proper from the college-laden city of Cambridge and running deep into the heart of Massachusetts. Despite being used for boat races, recreational boating, and transport, the river has been neglected by local communities for decades and has a "healthy reputation for being a very dirty river."

The first comprehensive urban river cleanup and restoration effort in the country is attempting to turn this around. The Clean Charles River 2005 Initiative includes EPA’s region I, the Massachusetts DEP, the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, the Charles River Watershed Association, the Watershed Institute, and local environmental activists and stakeholders, working together to meet the goal of restoring fishable and swimmable conditions in the lower Charles by 2005.

Focusing on bacteria from illegal discharges, the Initiative has enjoyed success from its innovative approaches to watershed management. Voluntary stormwater management plans have been adopted by eight of the affected communities, and the watershed groups are enjoying exemption from CSO requirements in exchange for monitoring of the pollution in the river. Utilizing a "place-based" focus and harnessing local knowledge has led to several successes already on the river, including doubling the number of days that meet the EPA’s "fishable and swimmable" criteria standards since the project’s inception in 1995.

Link:

Massachusetts Riverways Newsletter

http://www.state.ma.us/dfwele/river/Rivq197.htm

Massachusetts DEP

http://www.state.ma.us/dep/

MISSISSIPPI - Voluntary Stream Protection

Farmers in Mississippi have historically opposed any infringement on their property rights by environmental agencies. Sources in Mississippi said that "attempts to develop regulatory programs for the protection of scenic waterways have failed in the past because stakeholders were opposed to new regulations." Given the distrust of government and protection by mandate, the only solution to protect the rivers was a voluntary partnership program.

Signed by Gov. Fordice on March 16 of this year, House Bill 1422 created a voluntary partnership program between the Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks (DWFP) and interested parties. Any Mississippi organization or individual can nominate a river for the Scenic Streams Stewardship Program. Once a river's been nominated for the program, the DWFP will work with community members, industry leaders, and other concerned parties on developing a voluntary plan for the waterway. The plan will rely on mutual management of designated streams by farmers and riparian landowners, but the bill shies away from cleanup (concentrating on pollution prevention and best-management practices, while continuing the current economic uses of the river). Support for the program has been muted, but the voluntary nature of the program has brought important interests on board (such as the Mississippi Farm Bureau).

Link:

Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks:

http://www.mdwfp.com/

Mississippi Farm Bureau Home Page

http://www.msfb.com/

NORTH CAROLINA - Upper Little Tennessee River Watershed

North Carolina has been a leader in managing water quality and related problems throughout the state. In the early 1990s, the Wisconsin Division of Water Quality (part of the Wisconsin Department of Environment and Natural Resources) initiated a comprehensive, formal process for developing water-quality management plans that use river basins as the basic management unit. This process emphasizes local decision-making, inter-agency and inter-governmental coordination, collaboration between various interests in the watershed, and science-based planning and decision-making. The idea behind the approach is that by involving locally affected individuals and decentralizing the decision-making process, watershed management plans will be uniquely suited to their areas and thus more successful than other, more "top-down" programs. Although the individual watershed management plans are largely state-funded, they are often initiated by local non-profit groups that maintain significant roles in the watershed’s management.

One of North Carolina’s most comprehensive watershed management plans is in the Upper Little Tennessee River Watershed. The Upper Little Tennessee River is highly valued for its scenic qualities, recreational opportunities, and biodiversity, but it is threatened by pollution from excess sediment and storm-water runoff. Efforts to protect the river began in 1993, when a group of local citizens and agency representatives came together to explore river protection and restoration efforts, and eventually formed the Little Tennessee Watershed Association (LTWA).

The LTWA is a non-profit organization designed to work with public agencies, conservation interests, community groups, and public and private landowners to develop and implement conservation and restoration strategies for the river. It has been at the core of most partnerships in the watershed. LTWA works with its partners to address riparian habitat and water quality protection and restoration issues through restoration projects, research and monitoring, coordination, land conservation, and education and outreach activities.

LTWA partners have had a number of successes in the watershed, though they have yet to achieve measurable changes in the overall environmental quality of the river. They have installed over three miles of riparian fencing and full-tree revetments, as well as five miles of other riparian restoration work. The group’s efforts have increased awareness of water quality problems in the area, as well as encouraged citizens, landowners, and others to take this watershed approach to managing these problems. The group has provided a forum for communication between various interests in the watershed and improved interagency coordination. LTWA’s success to date, and its continued emphasis on community involvement, are promising signs that the Upper Little Tennessee River Watershed will experience significant improvements in the years to come, thanks largely to the efforts of its concerned private citizens.

ULTRW link

OREGON - Water Trust

Since 1993, the Oregon Water Trust (OWT) has been working to repair fish habitat and maintain water quality in five of Oregon’s river basins through the use of market incentives. The nonprofit organization was founded by a small group of individuals representing conservationist, agriculture, real estate, and legal interests, all of whom wanted to improve in-stream flows in Oregon’s waterways. For many months of the year, the water in Oregon’s streams and rivers is over-appropriated—that is, there are more rights to the water in the stream than there is water. This causes low water flows and can ultimately lead to de-watered streams, both of which endanger fish populations. OWT specializes in reallocating water to in-stream use by acquiring previously allocated water rights and transferring them to in-stream use. OWT acquires water rights with early priority dates, and uses existing laws and water markets to put water back into Oregon’s rivers and streams.

OWT was founded after Oregon’s legislature passed the Instream Water Rights Act in 1987, which for the first time recognized that leaving water in the stream was a beneficial use of water. The law was passed in response to the increasing problem of low stream flows and declining fish populations throughout the state. The act provides three ways in which to create an in-stream water right. The OWT specializes in the way that allows any private party to create a right by purchasing, leasing, or accepting the donation of existing water rights and converting them to in-stream rights.

Each of the trust’s deals is unique to its circumstances; most of them are temporary. For example, a landowner might lease his water right to the trust for two years because he will not need as much water during that period. OWT then converts this to an in-stream right and thus helps to increase flow in the waterway. The landowner also benefits because he does not risk losing his right to the water while he is not putting it to beneficial use. In another scenario, a landowner might want to help the fish population but still need his water for irrigation. In this case, the OWT would lease the right from the landowner for a period of time but compensate him for his or her loss of irrigation in some way. Some deals are permanent, as when a landowner plans to convert his or her land to some use not requiring water withdrawals, and he or she benefits from selling the right to the trust rather than simply relinquishing it to the state.

OWT currently targets its efforts to acquire in-stream water rights in five priority basins in the state. It chooses the basins based on various criteria, including the likelihood that in-stream water rights will help to repair the fish habitat, the legal condition of water rights in the basin, and community interest in the project. A majority of their funding comes from private sources and the remainder from public sources such as Deschutes County and the U.S. Forest Service.

OWT has been successful in number of ways. It has negotiated over 50 deals in the past six years, as well as protected flows in over 450 miles of river. Additionally, it has managed to convince many people to view water rights in a different way, as a commodity like any other that can be used on or off land as needed. It is devoted to solving water use and flow problems through emission trading systems rather than regulations, and has managed to show many in the area that this is an effective method of approaching these problems. OWT has succeeded in finding community-based solutions to Oregon’s water-related problems. Individuals or agencies in Washington, Texas, Nevada, and Montana are all in various phases of developing similar trust

Oregon Water Trust link