IN THE last week of September, Senators Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and David Vitter (R-LA) proposed Senate bills 1765 and 1766, both ostensibly designed to provide an expansive long-term response to the tragic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. These bills, calling for the approximate spending of well over $200 billion, have been criticized on many levels -- by the Taxpayers for Common Sense for its ridiculous amount of pork-barrel legislation and special interest favoritism, by the San Francisco Chronicle for the fact that it could just give about $400,000 to every family instead and by many other groups and individuals who question (and rightly so) how $200-plus billion, the cost of three years of warring with Iraq, will be spent. The Washington Post went as far as to describe the two bills as analogous to legislative "looting." One under-voiced concern, however, is how sections of these bills, particularly section 501 and 502, contain a language and structure unequivocally detrimental to the environment.
Section 501 creates the so-called "Pelican Commission;" this commission, made up primarily of presidential appointees,will oversee projects unnecessarily exempt from the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Water Act. Exempting projects from regulations designed explicitly to provide clean water is a questionable if not outright offensive governmental maneuver, seeing as how clean water is in the interest of everyone except those who wish to freely dump contaminants into water sources (polluting companies).
According to the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), section 501 will also give the Army Corps of Engineers (which will handle many of the projects) a green light to maintain projects such as the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a "barely used shipping channel," long opposed by "local communities, fishermen, environmentalists and scientists." The Gulf Outlet, a 50 year old project, has been condemned by the Taxpayers for Common Sense as one of the most wasteful projects in the nation and by environmentalists as disastrous to local ecosystems.
The ensuing section, 502, allows the president to grant permits for projects that will be exempt from "any applicable federal law (including regulations)." Local environmentalists have voiced strong, albeit generally unheard, concerns over the disaster such projects can create. One popular worry is the possible destruction of wetlands -- admittedly not a new worry -- but now the threat is no longer assuaged by federal protections.
The NRDC predicts, that among incorrigible damage to relevant ecosystems, such destruction can lead to major flooding events, "even during routine rain events." Furthermore, profit-seeking corporations "reconstructing" the area can disregard all regulations relevant to clean air and water, and in the process of their construction, wipe out endangered species without fear of legal repercussions.
Finally, the exorbitant amount of money these sections and others dump onto environmental organizations will likely have little effect. The $3 billion being added onto the EPA's $8 billion budget and the $6 billion being added onto the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality's $141 million budget will probably overwhelm the two agencies, both of which are no doubt structurally ill-prepared to handle such violent budget changes. The result is inevitable: inefficiency. And from this result stems another: very little will be done for the environment. And from these results, perhaps our senators, both Democrat and Republican should draw an old yet astute conclusion: merely dumping money onto problems does not necessarily solve them.
Bill Hoagland, senior advisor to Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), said it well: "It sounds cruel and heartless [to question post-Katrina spending], but we have to be a little more cautious about throwing these numbers around." However, he did not say it best: not only must we question the numbers, but the means by which these numbers are being employed.
The fact that expenditures and "projects" (a term many watchdog groups have noticed to be undefined in the bills) can overlook federal regulations is intuitively wrong, if not simply outrageous. The federal laws that can be hypothetically overlooked are not limited to environmental issues, as these projects could freely disregard the Civil Rights Acts, minimum wage requirements and participate in price-gouging; nonetheless, it is the environmental concerns that seem most likely to materialize and pose grave long-term threats to the future of our nation. While most if not all Americans are eager to help the victims of Katrina's wrath, we nonetheless hold a duty to question the numbers and the means, a duty most of our representatives and even our media has largely failed to tackle.
Sina Kian's column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at skian@cavalierdaily.com.
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