Environmental laws typically get the short shrift
By Rob Smith / ecoRI News staff
This reporting was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
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Legislation, written by lawmakers or interest groups, is
introduced by legislators into the General Assembly; either the House of
Representatives, the Senate, or oftentimes both. In each chamber, it will be
assigned to a designated committee, which in turn begins the bill vetting
process to arrange a hearing date, solicit public comment, and for those lucky
few pieces of legislation, a vote onto the House or Senate floor.
Most bills won’t get that far, statistically speaking; most
will be held in committee for further study without an up or down vote.
Legislation passed out of committee onto the floor of the House or Senate will
receive another vote by the full chamber. Once passed, it’s sent to the
opposite chamber, where the process is repeated until both versions of the bill
have passed. Then it’s up to the governor to sign or veto the legislation.
That’s the quick and clean version of how Rhode Island
creates state law. But just because a bill is passed doesn’t mean it’s
enforced.
School composting law languishes
Bill S0104 was a
2021 measure sponsored by Sen. Bridget Valverde, D-North Kingstown, that, among
other requirements, mandated that all educational institutions — public
schools, charters, et al — divert their food scrap to either a compost facility
or an anaerobic digester. Education institutions had until January 2023 to meet
the mandates.
S0104’s life cycle was typical. Many of the committee
hearings were on Zoom thanks to the pandemic, and the measure traveled pretty
unremarkably through the committee process and floor votes and was signed by
Gov. Dan McKee in July 2021.
But three years after the law passed, and nearly two years
after the mandate for school composting went into effect, the results are
unremarkable. Evan LaCross, a spokesperson for the Department of Environmental
Management said, “The statute as written was intended to encourage developers
to build new composting facilities, but those infrastructure investments have
not happened yet.”
LaCross noted the state received additional federal funding
from the Environmental Protection Agency to investigate composting issues, and
that DEM was assisting with the expansion of composting in districts, pointing
to efforts in Providence and Portsmouth schools.
“Momentum continues to grow in other R.I. communities, with
several private haulers collecting organics from entities such as food
processors, restaurants, and residents. DEM is hopeful that the update of the
solid waste management plan made possible with EPA funding will position the
organics diversion as a high priority action item for R.I. and advance
our Lead by Example sustainability
initiatives,” LaCross said.
The need for enforcement of the law is clear. Waste has a
profound impact on the environment. The Central Landfill in Johnston, owned and
operated by the Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation, a quasi-public
state agency, is expected to reach its lifetime capacity sometime in the next
15 years.
Schools are massive contributors to food waste in the
landfill, presenting a perfect opportunity for diversion efforts. On any given
school day, an estimated 27,777 pounds of food is wasted in state schools.
Around 4,000 pounds of that is still usable and could be donated to hungry
families.
By the end of an academic year, Rhode Island schools will
throw away some 5 million pounds of food, 775,000 of which could be used by
food pantries, instead of rotting in the landfill.
Food waste is also a big contributor to climate change. Food
rotting in landfills produces methane and other greenhouse gas emissions. The
exact impact on climate change is sketchy; the best estimates suggest around
half of all emissions from the global food supply system come from food waste,
and a 2023 paper published
in Nature found global food waste resulted in 9.3 billion tons of carbon
dioxide equivalent emissions over a 16-year period.
A law, but no money
While it may be relatively easy to pass laws, it’s much
harder to ensure there is money to fund their implementation. In 2002, the
General Assembly passed a bill restricting the use of pesticides on school
property, with the aim of protecting children from carcinogens found in Roundup
and other lawn-care products.
The law required DEM and the Department of Health to work
together to create an integrated pest management plan for municipalities and to
create a task force for public education and professional training about
pesticides, their health effects, and alternatives.
Despite being passed by the General Assembly more than 20
years ago, parts of the bill, Rep. Lauren Carson discovered, went unenforced
for years. Carson only realized the existence of the original law when, spurred
by action in other states, she wanted to introduce her own bill limiting the
use of pesticides on school grounds. The General Assembly’s legislative counsel
office, after some research, told Carson the law she wanted to pass already
existed.
Her new bill, which got a
committee hearing in February and went no further, updated the language of the
original law, and gave specific deadlines for action by DEM and DOH.
“Many parts of the [original] bills have never been
implemented,” Carson told the House Environment Committee at a Feb. 6 hearing.
“I’m here to tell you I’m disappointed this bill wasn’t properly implemented.”
In written testimony to the committee, both agencies pointed
to a lack of resources, both fiscal and personnel, as to why the original law
went dormant.
“Although RIDOH applauds the intent of the proposed
legislation,” wrote interim DOH director Utpala Bandy, “it would not be
possible for RIDOH to engage in the actions outlined in the bill without
adequate resources. [The bill] requires RIDOH to participate in the creation of
two task forces and author two different legislative reports, both of which
will require considerable staff time from RIDOH.”
DEM director Terry Gray echoed those thoughts in his written
comments on the bill. “These goals are laudable, but we believe that additional
staff and other resources are needed to implement.”
“I guess you can tell I’m a little frustrated here,” Carson
said to the committee in February. “DEM and DOH have sent the committee letters
saying they don’t have the resources to do this. I told them they should have
done this 23 years ago, and if they didn’t have the resources they should have
asked for them.”
“Those regulations have not been promulgated, as they would
be redundant,” LaCross said when ecoRI News asked about implementing the law.
“Integrated pest management doesn’t require promotion by regulation as it’s
currently a best practice that’s widely used.”
Doing more with less
The General Assembly has a bad habit of passing unfunded
mandates — laws instructing government entities to take action without
providing the money for those agencies to act.
The total cost of unfunded mandates given to different
government agencies by law is unknown. A spokesperson for the state Office of
Management and Budget (OMB) told ecoRI News the office doesn’t keep data on the
number, or financial cost, of mandates across state government.
Having to do more with less is a familiar problem for state
environmental officials, and the past 30 years of DEM history shows why. In
1991, the department had a budget of $51.3 million, with 630 full-time
employees. Three years later, in 1994, the budget was $69.2 million, with 510
full-time employees.
Adjusted for inflation, that’s the same amount DEM gets now,
$146.4 million in today’s dollars, meaning despite the department’s growing
actions facing climate change, it has received no drastic funding increase
since the mid-1990s.
In addition to receiving relatively static funding over the
years, the agency’s employee roster has dropped significantly. Today, the
department has 437 full-time positions, up by 36 compared to 2022, but still
far short of its multidecade high in 1994.
DEM’s coastal regulatory counterpart, the Coastal Resources
Management Council, has to make do with even less. Its budget typically
averages around $5 million a year, half of which comes from the state, with the
other half coming from the federal government as part of the funding
distributed by the Coastal Zone Management program, a division of the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
CRMC’s budget and employee levels have been stagnant for
almost as long as DEM’s. In 2001, the coastal agency’s budget share was $1.15
million from the state. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $1.9 million in
today’s dollars.
Today CRMC gets around $2.5 million a year from the state
for operations, a slight bump for an agency now tasked with permitting growing
offshore wind and coastal climate projects.
Sometimes Rhode Island even create funds, without the funds.
The Ocean State Climate Adaptation and Resilience (OSCAR)
Fund was a grant program passed by the General Assembly in 2021, but lawmakers
stripped the funding mechanism out of the final version of the bill.
The original proposal required a 5-cent fee to be charged
for every barrel of petroleum products imported into the state, a mechanism
that would have raised a few million or so annually. Without funding, the OSCAR
program, which sole purpose is to fund projects to improve climate resiliency,
is a defunct law.
It took another two years — and additional lobbying from
environmental groups — for lawmakers to find a way to give the program money.
They gave it a one-time allocation of $4 million, and it’s currently accepting
applications for project proposals. But without a dedicated stream of funding,
the law is dead without more legislative action.
Future funding looks grim
The Executive Climate Change Coordinating Council (EC4) is
an agency of sorts made up of different government departments and designated
to lead many climate projects. It has existed since 2014, but proposals to give
the agency a budget, instead of relying on the resources of its 12 member
agencies, failed until last year. And then, funding didn’t come from the
general fund, the big pool of money into which most tax revenue goes into and
from which lawmakers draw funds to finance government.
Instead, it came from a different source: a portion of the
proceeds the state receives from auctions from the Regional
Greenhouse Gas Initiative.
For the foreseeable future, it’s unlikely state officials
will give the agencies the money they need to fulfill all the laws. Outside of
the money available from the federal Inflation Reduction Act and the Green
Economy bonds, there is little appetite within the state for aggressive
spending on environmental projects and reforms.
The state’s financial situation is also more grim than it
has been in recent years. The federal money given out during the COVID-19
pandemic has to be allocated by the end of this calendar year, which means any
non-sustainable spending in the state’s $14.9 billion budget is going to have
to find a new source of revenue or face the chopping block.
In a Nov. 14 report, OMB chief Joseph Codega projected that
state revenues this fiscal year will show a surplus of about $77 million,
primarily due to higher revenue projections during the fall estimating
conference.
But, he cautioned, “The Budget Office advises a cautious
fiscal outlook for FY 2026. Previous deficit projects indicated a shortfall of
$392.8 million assuming continuation of current services. While the additional
surplus projected in FY 2025 provides some relief, continued fiscal discipline
will be crucial to balance the FY 2026 budget.”
OMB discouraged any “expansionary requests” from
consideration from state departments and agencies.
“OMB strongly discourages any unconstrained discretionary
requests, and agencies should focus their efforts on cost-reduction and
efficiency Improvements,” wrote budget officials in guidance to agencies.
