DEQ ‘precariously close’ to losing state primacy

State funding for Idaho’s Department of Environmental Quality dropped sharply in 2010 and has continued falling. “As a matter of fact, the general fund appropriation I am requesting today will be the smallest general fund appropriation the agency has had since we became a department in the year 2000,” DEQ Director Toni Hardesty told JFAC this morning. At the same time, dedicated and federal funds for the agency rose due to the federal stimulus, but those one-time funds are mostly gone now.

DEQ currently has 27 positions vacant due to lack of funding, and has the lowest number of workers since it was formed in 2000. Since then, the department has taken on big new programs, including taking over primacy on the federal underground storage tank program; overseeing field burning; a “brownfields” program; work in the Coeur d’Alene basin; and a drinking water and wastewater loan fund portfolio of $340 million.

DEQ employees “have been stalwart in their quest to do more with less,” Hardesty told lawmakers. All employees have been furloughed; they’ve taken on different jobs than the ones they were hired for; and they’ve foregone training and travel. Yet, she said, they’re “continuing to emphasize partnership and collaboration as a way to solve problems, even though this approach can take more resources and time.”

The agency is now “precariously close in several programs” to losing state primacy, Hardesty warned, which would mean the federal government would step back in to take over the environmental regulation programs in the state; further budget cuts could force that, she said. “It is my firm conviction that the maintenance and maintaining state control of environmental permitting, regulatory and enforcement programs is beneficial to the state and to the economic recovery of Idaho,” Hardesty said.