Report seeks to spur reinvestment in IEPA

Environmental watchdog ‘between a rock and a hard place’ with fading federal commitment, additional state mandates

Chicago’s infamous Bubbly Creek still needs to be regularly tested and monitored for clean water, an assignment typically handled by the IEPA. (One Illinois/Ted Cox)

By Ted Cox

A new report released Tuesday calls for urgent reinvestment in the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency.

“Protecting the Illinois EPA’s Health, so That It Can Protect Ours” was written by Mark Templeton, heading a team from the Abrams Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School, as well as former IEPA and U.S. EPA staffers Mary Gade, Doug Scott, and Bharat Mathur — all of whom took part in a media conference call Tuesday.

Templeton said the report stemmed from “mutual shared concern about Illinois EPA” and its role “to protect public health and the environment.” They cited dwindling staff and resources at the agency dating back to 2003. According to Templeton, staffing last year was down to 639, almost half of the 1,265 EPA workers on staff in 2003. IEPA staffing and budget were cut every year going back to 2003, and stood at $382 million in the current budget for the 2020 fiscal year. down from $522 million in 2003. He pointed out that all came from a fee system that hadn’t been readjusted since 2003. Gade added that Illinois is the only state in the Great Lakes Region 5 area of the U.S. EPA that doesn’t fund its state EPA through general appropriations.

Gade, who headed IEPA throughout the ‘90s, added that statewide inspections had dropped from a couple thousand a year to a few hundred. Citing the “cumulative impact of years of declining IEPA budgets,” she said the “slow, gradual decline … needs to be reversed and reversed quickly.” She said failure to adequately test emissions of ethylene oxide at Sterigenics in Willowbrook as well as firms in Lake County were one thing that had attracted much attention, but perhaps the greater danger was the smaller, unobserved “accumulating” problems in air and water statewide “that isn’t as clean as it needs to be.”

The report also cited that IEPA referrals to the Office of the Attorney General had declined from 212 under Gov. Pat Quinn in 2014 to just 78 under Gov. Bruce Rauner in 2016 before rebounding a little to 116 in 2017.

According to Mathur, there are now just four engineers in IEPA’s Chicago office, where previously there were more than a dozen, and the staffing situation was even more dire in central and southern Illinois.

Templeton pointed out that the IEPA was already mandated to do much of the work on the ground for the U.S. EPA in Illinois, and those chores were increasing as the Trump administration rolls back federal environmental regulations on an almost daily basis. He added that the state was also placing additional responsibilities on the agency — especially on climate change — without giving it the funds to carry them out.

IEPA resources “have not kept pace with the increasing challenges in the agency,” Templeton said.

“As the federal government has been stepping back on enforcement and inspections, we at the state level have also been putting more and more requirements on IEPA,” he added. “Climate change is being totally disregarded and denied by the current federal administration. We need Illinois EPA to do more and more.”

“We are putting the Illinois EPA between a rock and a hard place,” Gade said, “and in doing so we’re jeopardizing the health and safety of Illinois citizens, (and) the economic well-being of its businesses that rely on the EPA for standard-setting, timely permits, and fair and evenhanded enforcement.”

“With the Trump administration actively cutting and restricting the U.S. EPA’s ability to protect our air and water, it has never been more important for Illinois to step up to keep our communities safe,” said Jack Darin, director of the Sierra Club’s Illinois Chapter. “It’s time for Illinois to step up and rebuild the Illinois EPA so it has the science and professionals it needs to assure environmental justice for everyone in our state, and ensure that Trump’s rollbacks and cuts don’t put our health at risk.”

“It’s time for Illinois to step up and rebuild the Illinois EPA so it has the science and professionals it needs to assure environmental justice for everyone in our state, and ensure that Trump’s rollbacks and cuts don’t put our health at risk.”

Jack Darin, director of the Sierra Club’s Illinois Chapter (One Illinois/Ted Cox)

The group said the IEPA was building up a backlog of permits required by firms to do business, and it was also falling behind on technology. “Not only does the agency need more people,” Mathur said, “it needs to innovate.”

Templeton and Gade both took pains to emphasize they were not criticizing staff or management at the agency, but instead were simply pointing out that staff needs more resources to do the things IEPA is assigned to do.

“There are real problems at the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency,” Templeton said. “There are great people there, but they’re just outgunned, underresourced, outmanned.”

Scott called IEPA workers “really dedicated professionals,” but added, “They have to do more if the feds are doing less.”

“I see this report as both a wakeup call and a call to action,” Gade added. “It’s an urgent request for Gov. Pritzker and the General Assembly to take notice and take action — now.”

“We’re calling on policymakers in Illinois to address these funding challenges,” Templeton said.

Gade said the report doesn’t present legislators with demands for set amounts of funding, but instead she suggested Pritzker form a blue-ribbon panel to study the issue and arrive at revenue solutions. The report does call for the industrial fee system that sustains the agency to be reassessed, along with new sources of revenue and additional resources.

Gade and Mathur said the staffing problem would only get worse as both the state and federal EPA face the imminent retirement of aging workers in the years ahead.

Gade called on Illinois government to “reinvest in the health of IEPA,” adding, “Illinois lives depend on it.”