Environmental Advocate of New York’s Fiscal Policy Program focuses on three key activities: researching trends in overall financial support for the state's lead environmental agency and the effect of these trends on policy implementation; identifying state spending, broadly defined, that is environmentally harmful or inherently wasteful; and analyzing and identifying spending bottlenecks associated with the Environmental Protection Fund.

Fiscal Trends & Policy Implementation
As the lead agency for enforcing environmental law, the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) is charged with enormous responsibilities. In addition to implementing the Clean Air and Water acts and other federal law, the DEC is charged with invasive species control, cleaning up contaminated waste sites, issuing hunting and fishing licenses, inspecting dams, and controlling coastal erosion, as well as reducing the emissions responsible for global warming and other critical tasks. From monitoring moose populations in upstate New York to protecting our waterways, the agency's tasks are varied and complex.

Every year, new responsibilities are piled upon the DEC in the form of legislative mandates and changes in federal regulations and requirements. At the same time, the financial resources made available to the agency have remained fairly constant. Further analysis into appropriations of the state’s support for environmental protection uncovers disturbing trends. Federal grants have declined and state support for environmental protection has not kept pace with inflation. While the funding levels remain the same, in terms of overall purchasing power, the DEC is called on to do more with less.

Environmental Advocates of New York's first look at the relationship between fiscal policy and environmental protection resulted in our reports Endangered Agency I & II, which described how the twin policies of hiring freezes and failure to fill open positions helped to eviscerate the DEC and jeopardized the implementation of environmental law.

During the Pataki years, almost 800 positions were either cut or went unfilled at the DEC, which resulted in failures across program areas. New Yorkers still feel the effects of these cuts today. Our reports Muddying the Waters and Permission to Pollute on the state’s deeply flawed water pollution permitting programs showed that lack of staff have forced the agency to rubber stamp approximately 90 percent of the permits that come up for review.

In part as a result of this work, “reinvigorating” the agency and adding staff positions became a New York gubernatorial campaign issue during 2006. And in Governor Spitzer’s first budget, 109 new positions were added to the DEC to fulfill his campaign promises.

Looming economic recession and declining fiscal conditions resulted in a budget for State Fiscal Year 2008-2009 that included five fewer positions at the agency than originally proposed by the Governor. And in the near future, the Governor and the State Legislature will be faced with making increasingly unpopular choices.

Environmentally Harmful & Wasteful State Spending
Our report Wa$ted Green highlights a few examples of environmentally harmful and wasteful state spending. In this look at the state budget, we identified three areas that if substantially overhauled would make significant headway toward closing projected out-year budget gaps.

REPORTS & RESOURCES

• Endangered Agency

• Endangered Agency II

• Muddying the Waters: The Unknown Consequences of New York's Failed Water Pollution Permitting Program

• Wa$ted Green: How State Spending & Lost Revenue Shortchange New York Taxpayers & the Environment

• Permission to Pollute

• New York State Environmental Protection Fund History (1993 - 2007)