MONTGOMERYAlabama spends less per capita on environmental protection and has fewer employees handling the job than nearly any other state.
State funding for the Alabama Department of Environmental Management has declined 19 percent since 1991 and federal officials are monitoring the impact from the cutbacks.
Officials at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency say there are no current plans to revoke ADEM’s right to administer federal programs and enforce federal laws. But federal officials have conducted an audit of enforcement in all four of ADEM’s major programs: air, land, water and drinking water.
EPA’s new southeastern administrator, Jimmy Palmer, said a federal takeover is possible if ADEM doesn’t get more money.
And that money comes from the Legislature. ADEM Director Jim Warr said his agency’s name on legislation can be enough to doom it.
“What you hear a lot of times from the Legislature is, ‘This is another ADEM bill,”’ he said. “ ‘We don’t want to give ADEM any more authority.”’
ADEM’s relationship with the Legislature has never been good, said state Rep. Joe Carothers, D-Dothan, one of ADEM’s earliest and firmest supporters.
“They had the expertise,” he said. “They just didn’t have someone out there who could communicate with the public what the professionals were doing.”
ADEM plans a 50 percent cut in its Superfund investigation program and a 25 percent cut in its landfill inspections. It will cut water inspections to an undetermined level, though the EPA already estimates the surface water monitoring program needs a 30 percent to 65 percent increase in funding.
It cut its staff of lawyers by 25 percent, and its legal approach to enforcement in recent years made a sharp turn from take-no-prisoners to compromise-and-incur-no-legal-fees.
ADEM has avoided bottoming out by turning to permit fees and fines, which now account for more than one-third of its budget.
Warr said the question is whether the EPA will continue to consider the state’s funding adequate to do the job or whether it will step in and take over the work it is already, largely, paying for.
“We see the storm clouds gathering,” he said.
Nationally, state environmental funding rose 140 percent between 1986 and 1996, according to a study by the Environmental Council of the States.
The News’ comparison of 49 states’ spending, published Sunday, found that Alabama’s environmental agency ranked at or near the bottom in dollars per resident, for its land and water size.
ADEM has 10.6 employees for every 100,000 Alabama residents, less than any of the 24 states with comparable environmental agencies. The average was more than twice that.
Alabama spent $1.10 per resident on environmental programs. Nationally, states spent ten times that.
Per square mile, other states spent an average of 28 times as much as Alabama.
As a portion of its total state revenues, Alabama’s environmental spending was the lowest in the Southeast. In 1998, the state spent less than one-eighth of one percent of its revenues on the environment. That compared to 1 percent nationwide.
Several states spend more than Alabama for environmental protection but have fewer responsibilities.
In the Southeast, Mississippi maintains a higher level of funding and staffing without one of the major programs ADEM supports, a drinking water program. Florida funded environmental protection at a rate 52 times Alabama’s in 1998, while also supporting a network of water management districts with their own tax systems.
