State Chamber Fixes Its Guns On Coastal Zone Act
Having apparently despoiled all there is to despoil within the law or, to be more accurate, within the see-no-evil boundaries ignored by DNREC on a daily basis, the big business boys are now targeting Delaware’s Coastal Zone Act. Here is the article from the Delaware Business Magazine, titled ‘Modernizing the Coastal Zone Act,’ that a wonderful tipster shared with me. You see, the CZA has created a ‘logjam’:
Whether it was meant to eventually force manufacturing and industry to “wither on the vine” or to balance the types of allowable companies with keeping our natural resources pristine, it has created a logjam in the process. Regardless of the intent of the legislation, it is clear (to the Chamber) that Delaware’s Coastal Zone Act must be modernized in order for Delaware to grow.
You already see the false meme, don’t you? The implication that perhaps, just perhaps, such radical environmentalists as DuPont Company alumni former Gov. Russell Peterson and former State Senator Andy Knox must have wanted to force manufacturing jobs to wither on the vine. Don’t worry, there’s more.
Per usual, the Chamber sets itself up as the alleged neutral arbiter:
As our jobs shift away from the chemical industry, Delaware must make itself as attractive as possible in order to bring new business to the state, and modernizing the Coastal Zone Act is a lynchpin to that success. To that end, the State Chamber will begin, and lead, the discussions and debate surrounding how to modernize the Coastal Zone Act.
You know, just how they began, and led, the discussions and debate surrounding balancing the state budget and setting up themselves as the biggest beneficiaries of their proposals.
And here is the straw man:
Delaware cannot afford to have its economic policy dictated by extreme or unreasonable elements of the environmental activist community if there is to be the future successful economic growth this state needs to survive.
The Chamber’s objectivity is in full view with that sentence.
Gee, I wonder whether Governor-In-Hiding Waiting John Carney can tear himself away from all that important congressional business to weigh in on this. We already pretty much know where Jack Markell stands.
Tags: Delaware Coastal Zone Act, El Somnambulo, Featured, Steve Tanzer Delaware
@delawarebusinessmagazine – it’s linchpin, not lynchpin.
F-these maggots
Delaware’s natural resources are no longer ‘pristine’ thanks to business’.
Consider the Coastal Zone Act as a correction for decade of business’ not doing the right thing and instead just dump/pumping their shit into Delaware’s water and air and onto Delaware’s land.
DNREC and Sussex council refuse to lift a finger to protect the Inland Bays. Much of the Inland Bay have signs posted noting the bacteriological contamination and warning against swimming or eating selfish. This is an embarrassment. Heavens forbid if we asked one of the national development companies throwing up ugly, high density generic plastic houses to create/leave a forested buffer to protect streams and to hide their eye sore. The home building industry is parasitic. They come in LLC and throw up this ugly crap for some cheapskate out of state retired tax refugee to move into for 400K. They hire illegals, screw workers and leave the tax payer to pay for the infrastructure since Sussex has no impact fee. I hate these POS maggots with with every fiber in me.
The Coastal Zone Act was an unprecedented approach to protecting our natural resources when it was first created. And Russell Peterson will go down in history as one of our finest governors because of his support of this important legislation.
So it’s funny to see proposals to attack and roll back this critical law just days after the report indicated Delaware had a record year for tourism. We had 8 million tourists coming into this state in 2014, and they generated 3 billion dollars (5% of our state GDP). And those figures don’t even account for the economic benefit derived from state residents who take advantage of our many ecotourism activities. Nor do the figures account for the health benefits of maintaining a cleaner environment which can properly support environmental recreation — but those kinds of benefits are well documented and one needs look no further than our SCORP to see them laid out.
In a narrow sense, yes, the Chamber is correct that Delaware must look to new employment opportunities to ensure that our communities can have good jobs as we see the continued decrease of the presence of the chemical sector in the state.
But the Chamber is completely wrong when they interpret that to mean that jobs can only flourish if we scale back our efforts at preserving and restoring our natural environment. There is nothing that needs to be modernized about the Coastal Zone Act, except perhaps to make it even MORE rigorous. We do not need heavy industry operating on our coastline in order to have good jobs in this state. Period. And any attempt to weaken this important law should be fought as vigorously as possible.
With any means necessary
It isn’t just swimming and shellfish advisories. Haven’t you ever seen the signs in Delaware that read “Do not eat fish caught in these waters”
Here is Delaware’s fish consumption advisories. Short answer: Don’t eat Delaware fish.
http://www.dnrec.delaware.gov/fw/Fisheries/Documents/2015-16_Delaware_Fish_Consumption_Advisories.pdf
Yeah, those are fin fish advisories for DE Bay. Don’t eat more than 1 ounce a year because of PCB’s
That’s (1) 8 oz. serving if you are an adult male. If you are a child or a woman of child bearing years, zero.
Good job DNREC. Keep doing business’ bidding. Like they are in Harbeson. Expired permit, discharging amounts exceeding allowable limits? No problem. Want to sign it over to a new company that wants to double the amount of discharge while getting 3+ years go “improve” the discharge? Great idea. Not.
Who needs the chamber destroying the coastal zone act when you already have DNREC doing it for them.
Let’s remind ourselves that the attacks on the Coastal Zone Act two years ago would have stalled without the AG’s office going to court to deny standing to the Sierra Club to litigate violations condoned by the State.
In some ways not worth fighting (he said dejectedly) because the fix is already in. Given that this is a state that has all but decided to balance its budget by decreasing the taxes on corporations and increasing them on the middle class/seniors, exactly what part of this comes as a surprise?
Last year, Jack Markell proposed a program (and funding mechanism) to launch a major cleanup of some of the inland waterways and water bodies. It was rejected (as was the gas tax). The Chamber already knows that Delawareans don’t much care about the quality of their water, so why not try to damage the Coastal Zone Act?
How much is Delaware’s tourism industry worth? Amazing that the Chamber wants to put that at risk.
While it’s true Delaware is not an environmental state, I am pretty sure Markell’s proposal to fund clean ups fell on deaf ears because some people have this crazy notion that business’ should pay to clean up their own shit.
Markell has been pretty much a lame duck since the moment he won re-election.
And tourism brings in $3 billion in revenue in 2014 so sayeth the Delaware Tourism Office.
That straw man just cost the state of 1 billion for one project alone. the data center in newark. that same straw man is at it again in middletown.
Didn’t know that the Data Center was in the Coastal Zone, but what do I know?
have this crazy notion that business’ should pay to clean up their own shit?
The problem with this is that alot of the businesses responsible for much of the legacy cleanup targeted here no longer exist. Think of the sediment contamination in the Christina — what businesses do you go after to clean up that sediment? DuPont cleaned up their sediments outside of their plant in Newport years ago, but for the sediments off of the Wilmington Riverfront, who do you go after? During the Baker Admin, the city was slowly but surely remedying its CSO problem (and making good progress). Then there's the problem of farm and lawn runoff — neither party pays for the excess nutrients that they add to the waterways. Or how about the sediments in the Brandywine? There's a decent amount of the contaminants that come from Pennsylvania — so how does this get paid for?
It isn't just businesses and it isn't all recent contamination we are looking at. But while we point our fingers at just one of the responsible parties (and in NCCo at least, a bunch of those parties no longer exist), we still have fouled waterways. Markell's plan would have at least provided a pathway to start fixing some of these.
Asking for more money to fix a problem when the state isn’t doing what it can now to fix it. DE isn’t even going after the ones that still exist. And they aren’t shutting down things that are toxic despite exceeding levels, permit expired, and the company that had the permit is no longer in the state, yet the shit continues to pump.
Vlasic is still in business. They aren’t paying to clean up their crap. And they haven’t yet been asked to.
Markell has been a disappointment on a structural level(among other reasons). He is too much of an executive to do any consensus building. His Clean Water Initiative and Gas Tax fell flat because he didn’t go after any support for it before he announced it.
Which is just fine if we’re in the complaining business. It doesn’t help the legacy issues in the Christiana or Brandywine, though.
It might help with legacy issues if 1) the state would take seriously environmental issues by not adding the the problem 2) the governor and/or legislature would build a consensus to fix the problem.
I am all for cleaning up the northern waters, and funding it. But it’s hard to take that seriously when the state is proposing to ADD to the problem in the Broadkill River, the Atlanitic Ocean and Possum Point. Sayin “no” is low hanging fruit compared to what is necessary up north.
Markells clean water initiative were weak and not thought out. Repeated attempts from enviro groups to Markell after his CWI announcement failed.
This isn’t just armchair complaining, I have been working with enviro groups for years to move the ball on clean water.
This is the kind of cleanup that the Governor’s program would have funded. Mirror Lake is small, but there are plenty of others like it where finding the responsible party is going to be useless. This plan was Collin O’Mara’s and it is still a visionary one. If you are going to try to attract people to your nice beaches, why not make the rest of the state’s waterways as nice? For a number of places, there is nothing but economic upside to this. And O’Mara spent a great deal of time discussing this with lawmakers — and of the lawmakers I spoke to, they noted to a one that there was much less objection to this tax than there was to the gas tax proposed at the same time. DNREC was doing the right thing here notwithstanding any real or imagined missteps in other places.
This is a pathetically corrupt and backward state with an apathetic electorate
@cassandra: When the GA had the opportunity to force DuPont to clean up the contaminated waste pile at Edgemoor, it did no such thing.
And yet, the grand plan never went anywhere. Wonder why? All the citizenry and environmental groups saw was Markell making speeches and nothing else. The legislative contingent down here were just as blindsided by the CWI as they were the gas tax. Not much warning or outreach prior. The CWI ended up being little more than a springboard for Colin to get the hell out of here before he had to rule on ocean outfall and other shit hitting the fan.
And BTW the Broadkill and Possum Point are not the beach. Colin did nothing on those two issues while he was here and punted on the ocean outfall. As much as I like Colin, he was most likely hamstrung by the realities of being at DNREC: That we don’t go after polluters much, if at all. Status quo is king at DNREC and that means saying yes to development and buisness’. He also did nothing about Delaware City’s refinery plan (which is yet another thing that DNREC could work on but isn’t).
And as long as a creek or body of water looks and smells clean and still catch fish in it, most people don’t care if it is polluted. Out of sight out of mind. The second it fills in with silt and can’t get a boat through it? EMERGENCY! The sky is falling!
I do know that the GA passed on the titanium dioxide pile. And I do know that there were reasonable reasons for that. One thing that environmentalists refuse to engage with is the regulatory environment that this work has to occur in. Just labelling this stuff dioxin and expecting hair on fire to be an adequate approach to forcing a cleanup clearly isn’t going to work. Everything you need to know why this site is going to stay as it is is right here. And everything you need to know about how to get that changed is pretty much here too. But that requires work to change alot of regulatory status of the Delaware River itself, really.
DNREC can’t even enforce its own rules on expired permits, exceeding maximum daily limits on effluent, and requiring business’ to do what they agreed to do (but haven’t). And when a lawsuit comes up, they quickly dismiss citizens complaints as lacking standing to sue them to do their job.
DNREC is a joke. So is the AGs office and the legislature when it comes to these issues. This isn’t about hair on fire dioxin. This is about what DNREC has done, continues to do, and has no intention of stopping. Which is to stand by and not even do things they are legally charged with doing.
Which is a pretty awesome reason to not take the chance to improve on a small part of the problem.
Nice thinking there.
Yeah, I’ve always wondered what’s in the ground behind the fence at the Seaford plant on the Naticoke