White Pass Highway Shopper, Aug. 5, 1998

Shopper Opinion

Federally mandated environmental costs to be borne again by Pacific Northwest citizens alone? Maybe not!

Current and proposed environmental protections are astronomically expensive. Nearly everyone favors environmental protections, but many activities seek perfect "every last microbe" protection at ruinously large cost when 90% and fully effective protection could be achieved for 90% lower, far more sustainable cost. Many people foresee a time in the not-too-distant future when these environmental protections will cost more than our society can afford.

Environmental protection is most painful and troublesome when it is mandated by the U.S. Congress on behalf of all the American people but its affects and costs must be borne by only a small area of the country. The spotted owl protections, for example, mandated by the U.S. Congress representing all the American people have had almost all of their four billion dollar per year cost borne not by the American people generally but by the people of the Pacific Northwest alone. Two hundred mills closed with their 40,000 workers put out of work, eliminating 1.4 billion dollars of annual wages. The timber industry wage base of hundreds of timber communities was wiped out.

The coming protections of the salmon and steelhead may cost a similar amount, four billion dollars per year, and again, the activities will occur entirely in the Pacific northwest. Is the cost again to be borne by Pacific Northwest people without assistance from the rest of the American people who mandate the protections?

In this connection, an interesting but almost unnoticed event occurred in the Washington State legislature in July.

New laws had been passed by the U.S. Congress requiring very expensive new efforts under the Clean Water Act (CWA). The Clean Water Act is very closely associated with the huge, astronomically expensive efforts just beginning to save the salmon under the Environmental Protection Act.

A small Seattle group of wealthy elitist do-gooder citizens calling themselves Northwest Environmental Advocates (NEA) sued our Washington Department of Ecology (DOE) in 1991, demanding that it do tens or hundreds of millions of dollars' more worth of activities to fulfill the requirements of the Clean Water Act. Last January, our DOE settled the lawsuit with NEA, agreeing to do the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars more work to fulfill the CWA. Then DOE went to our State legislature requesting the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of our money to do this work.

On July 6, in a hearing on the request by our Washington State House Agriculture and Ecology Committee, our representatives refused to appropriate the money!

Committee Chairman Gary Chandler said, "It may be better for the citizens of the state of Washington if we make the (federal) agencies work the issue out."

My, oh my!

Whatever will happen?

 

Publisher's Note: We rarely run opinion in the Shopper, but we just couldn't let this pass without comment.

Dave Bunting, Publisher