Only the Governor's veto can now stand in the way of the Minnesota legislature's most recent ineptitude, if not malfeasance.
Crossing the Governor's desk next week is the spectre of emasculation of Minnesota's environmental protection act, Senate File 42, and House File 1 This ill-conceived legislation would put the fox in charge of the hen house in an illusory attempt to decrease the time between applying for a permit to site an industrial plant and granting the permit. Playing upon the urban legend of "guv'mint inefficiency" the revision to Minnesota environmental statutes would be reworded:
Article 1, section 7, allows a project proposer to prepare a draft environment impact statement for a project for submission to and review, modification, and determination of completeness and adequacy by the responsible government unit.
Current law requires the local "responsible unit of government" to undertake the environmental review specifically to avoid real or perceived bias in the content of the review. But, we're not done yet! The new bill goes even further by violating basic principles of judicial review:
Article 1, section 9, modifies the procedures for judicial review of decisions regarding the need for an environmental assessment worksheet, the need for an environmental impact statement, and the adequacy of an environmental impact statement. Current law provides that these decisions may be reviewed by a declaratory judgment action in the district court of the county where the proposed action or any part of it would be undertaken. This section provides that these decisions would be subject to review by the Court of Appeals, rather than the district court.
Reasons for this miscreant revision are obvious enough, opposition to citing industrial plants, especially "dirty" ones, arises from the grassroots at the local level. Sending the citizenry to St. Paul to attend Appellate hearings will clearly reduce citizens' involvement in the review process. No evidence has been provided to show that such a diversion of responsibility from district courts to the appellate court will be more expeditious, or, could even be handled on the crowded docket of the appellate court.
A non-partisan Legislative Auditor's Report, considering how best to streamline the environmental review process, is already in preparation. Governor Dayton has already issued an Executive Order to require agency action on permit applications to be 30 days instead of the 90 days currently specified by Minnesota law. Surely a modicum of experience with the new permitting interval under the Executive Order would provide sufficient insight into its feasibility to allow for future permanent changes if they would, indeed, be useful.
We are faced with a badly conceived and poorly written legislative "solution" to a purported problem of permitting citing of industrial plants in a timely manner. The sacred cow of "efficiency in government" is raised without asking whether or not state environmental, resource, and legal institutions, emasculated by 8 years of "no new taxes" can adequately perform their duties of protecting Minnesota's air and water resources, even with the current time-lines. No evidence has been provided to substantiate the urban myth that agencies "take too long" to execute their mandated responsibilities.
We know from our experience with ethanol plants that insufficient planning and oversight have too frequently resulted in many of those plants being built without adequate provision for environmental protection. Up to 1/4 of our ethanol plants have clearly violated environmental laws. The MPCA has implied that this is due to plant operators not understanding the environmental regulations, a hopelessly charitable interpretation that can only bring into question their own competency.
The conclusion is obvious, we need more time, better oversight and better enforcement to protect the environment, rather than less.
Call the Governor's office by Monday, Feb. 28, to express your view of this legislation.
Cross-posted to The Renaissance Post
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