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State governments
Q: You were having to delegate a lot of authority to the States. How did you handle that?
MR. COSTLE: Consider the gorilla-in-the-closet phenomenon. You want the gorilla to reside in the closet, and you want the players in the room to know he's in there. EPA was the gorilla; it had a strong role to play in providing fledgling state agencies and programs with a backbone that they could rely on while taking some potentially very unpopular actions on their own turf. And, of course, you have to look at the issue state-by-state, because that infrastructure was still evolving. It was well worth letting individual States have some running room. The federal law gave it to them for developing clean air implementation plans, and the administration of the water NPDES (National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System) permit program was a joint federal-state responsibility.
I believe that state delegation actually worked out pretty well. EPA could not put a cop on every corner, so the Agency had no choice but to beef up State programs, giving them tools, badgering them when necessary, but working with them, because they were going to get most of the on-the-ground work done. You'd have to ask others how we were perceived. But I do know, having been a State administrator, that I was generally sympathetic to their concerns. I think the Regional Administrators, a number of whom came from state and local backgrounds, shared that.
There was always the tension between headquarters and regions over who's really in charge. That tension is, I think, one of the calculated ambiguities about EPA's functioning. If you go one way or the other, you give up something either way. If you give the regions too much autonomy, you may have chaotic variations among regions in terms of implementing the Clean Air Act or the Clean Water Act. On the other hand, if you retain all authority in headquarters, you aren't going to get practical implementation and feedback. Central retention causes people in windowless Washington offices to try to solve problems by remote control, and that is not a healthy situation. So you disperse and delegate, and hope for healthy cooperation and interaction.
As I have said, it was a time of improvisation and accommodation. As you work out specific problems, you learn, and then you can generalize. Towards the end of my term, we proposed a bill that would allow the States to take twenty percent of their federal grants and reprogram them to reflect the fact that, for example, in Connecticut some of your concerns might be different than in Idaho or Arkansas, and you could address them. You need that flexibility in the application of part of your resources.
Maybe a State's greatest priority was the loss of wetlands; or maybe the state agency wanted to invest twenty percent of its federal program funding in public education programs. We didn't have any doubt the monies would be well spent. I think in that respect, the Agency was a strong proponent of State programs. Anyway, the flexibility proposal was shot down on the Hill.
But we tried, wanting to reward and encourage States that were being progressive. But it's tough. EPA had to be sensitive to the distinction between nurturing on the one hand and patronizing on the other. You know there are going to be strong state programs and poor state programs. Where you have good people trying to do a good job, the challenge is to help them, to give them the flexibility to be creative. This principle applies just as much within the Agency as with the States.
Q: Was that a hard message to get across inside the Agency?
MR. COSTLE: It can be hard in Washington. Headquarters people tend to be more isolated from the field and from problems involving day-to-day give and take. While they are no less dedicated and concerned about real environmental progress, the tools they have to effect that are limited. Their perspective is necessarily limited, because they have to try to solve problems by remote control. That's a problem with any bureaucracy.
Q: Is that a solvable problem, or one that just has to be accepted?
MR. COSTLE: To some extent, it's just one of the givens. But there are things that can be done. One way to address it is by rotating people in and out of Headquarters, regions and States. We were fairly free in granting people IPAs [Interagency Personnel Agreement assignments], where they could go to work for a state or local agency for a year or two and then return to EPA with the experience and perspective they had gained.
Q: What other problems did you face in trying to deal with the States in implementing new laws?
MR. COSTLE: Some programs were easier than others to implement. For example, we were getting along faster and further with NPDES than we were with many of the air quality activities. Many of the problems, I think, were inherent in the design of the statutes and the programs themselves. The water program, for instance, was more mature, as were water pollution control technologies. And the reality is that there were some hard problems out there, and there was no mold, no cookie cutter, for much of what EPA had to do. EPA has had a tremendous challenge as an agency. I think the continuity the Agency has had in leadership -- despite one rocky period -- has been more important than any single law, policy, or individual administrator during its history.
Q: And is that what States need most: continuity?
MR. COSTLE: I think what they need most, in most instances -- and what they most appreciate -- is probably the same operating principle as business seeks. "Give me a red light or a green light. But not a flashing yellow; that drives me crazy." Make a decision, and understand that time is money and resources. In a free market economy, that is literally truth. Delays in getting decisions can be terribly expensive for everybody involved, and that wins you few friends.
Q: Does science make that problem of delay more difficult?
MR. COSTLE: It certainly does; that is the nature of the beast. But in most instances where you are dealing with a State program, it does not involve a debate about science. It is a debate about a permit or a standard or an air quality criteria document or something similar. The States make a decision based on the information they have; they don't pretend to be able to do the back-up research. Occasionally, they'd like to have help from EPA to do specific studies, for example, on what effect is likely to result from allowing a particular permit in a particular watershed.
One of the best mini-programs we undertook in Connecticut was to set aside a small amount of money for special studies. We would get a permit application, for instance, to fill in a wetland and would put a little funding into a hydrological study. Two cases I remember vividly. One involved the New Haven Airport, which was located in a neighboring town in a wetland area surrounded by a business district. That wetland area was the only developable area in that part of the town; the rest was all residential. The tax base was dying, and the town proposed a new industrial park to increase its industrial tax base. It was a classic environmental conflict, protecting this useless-looking wetland from a development that would create jobs in a declining local economy.
Using our set-aside money, we did a quick hydrological study and determined that the wetland had no redeeming value in terms of wildlife habitat, which was the basis for protection cited by the local wetland preservationists. But interestingly enough, that unimpressive wetland played a very important hydrological role in terms of flooding. If the wrong part were filled in for the industrial park, this would create the need for about $30 or $40 million worth of flood control projects downstream. We were able to determine that there was a place downstream where a smaller industrial park could be sited so as not to compromise the hydrologic function of that particular wetland. So we were able to have our cake and eat it too. But it took that modest investment of research funds to discover that.
In the other instance, residents wanted to repair a deteriorating dam on a man-made lake that had basically served a summer resort area. The water level had fallen and people were having to build their docks out. They were seeking a permit to rebuild the dam and refill the lake. A study funded from that small set-aside showed that this course would result in eutrophication of the lake. The water flowing over the broken dam was actually cleaning out the pollution from the septic tanks serving what had once been only summer cottages. What was really needed was to sewer the area to accommodate the now-year-round residents. Our State people had to argue with EPA to apply a portion of our federal funding to the sewering, but we succeeded because we had the study data to show the water quality benefits. Again, this demonstrates the value of having the flexibility and resources to address the specific problem. All the States need this, and EPA needs to let them exercise it.
I'd like to think that we didn't beat up on the States too much, but that we kept the right amount of pressure on them and on ourselves. While in the end we always had the option of cracking down, I could tell the Agency to stay out of their hair where the State people were doing a good job. When they know what they're doing, just hold them to some performance standards. To do this, we developed the State/Regional Administrator agreements. Basically, each Regional Administrator would negotiate a master agreement with each State in the region, so that everybody would be singing out of the same hymn book in terms of priorities, allocation of funds, performance measures, etc. I think these agreements did have the salutary effect of putting relationships in slightly more formal terms. This gave the States a sense of bargaining power, too.