Progress Made, Goals Not Met

Connecticut has made measurable progress over three decades:

• Connecticut reduced air pollution even as the state gained people, traffic and power plants. Progress came at considerable expense, but the largest costs fell on consumers and private companies rather than on the public purse. There is only a small chance, however, that Connecticut will be able to meet the 2010 federal deadline for keeping ground-level ozone at healthful levels for nearly an entire summer.

• The treatment of sewage is much better than it was a generation ago, and about half of the major sewer overflows were corrected by two decades of reconstruction.

• State government and the shellfish industry invested several million dollars since 1987 in the improvement and monitoring of oyster beds, and the result has been a fairly constant expansion of the areas suitable for shellfish growth. Oyster stocks were hit hard by two diseases in 1997 and 1998 and have not yet recovered.

• More than 500 acres of compromised tidal wetlands have been restored to ecological health by direct action of the state and many partners since 1994. During that time, only a few acres were lost to permitted activities. (Many old unpermitted disturbances and structures remain, however.)

• Each year, the DEP finds about 90 percent of inspected facilities to be in compliance with pertinent regulations. This rate has stayed much the same for ten years, even as the DEP reduced by half the number of inspections it conducted. It is difficult to judge the degree of success. The ideal trend would show improvement toward full compliance. In 2006, when the DEP increased the number of inspections slightly, the compliance rate improved slightly.

• Bald eagles have returned to Connecticut because their habitat now is relatively free of the harmful chemicals that led to their disappearance in the 1950s.

In pursuit of its goals, Connecticut deployed a varied arsenal:

• protective standards and regulations: air, water, waste and wetlands

• prohibitions: certain pesticides, fuel additives, and other harmful products

• public investment: sewage treatment, land conservation, greenways

• public involvement: willingness of citizens and businesses to get involved in recycling, compliance, service on local commissions and innumerable voluntary projects

The overall result was slow and steady progress, but not enough to reach most statewide goals and not across all programs. Some of the greatest improvements have been achieved in programs that require only small amounts of public funding, such as wetlands conservation, air pollution control and industrial waste management. Meanwhile, programs that require substantial state investment are lagging.

To attain most of the goals that remain, there is no realistic alternative to adequate state funding. This is particularly true for the conservation of land and improvement of water quality. The full cost of meeting the state’s goals for farmland, natural lands, clean rivers and a productive Long Island Sound, as well as waste recycling and efficient energy use, can be calculated with some certainty. That, in fact, is the good news: most of the state’s environmental shortcomings can be corrected with a defined amount of public funding. (A major exception is the challenge of creating a more land-conserving pattern of new development, though that also has a fiscal element.) The task at hand is to calculate that amount and produce a financial blueprint for Connecticut’s environmental success. The Council will take on that task in the coming year, and looks forward to working with other citizens, organizations and agencies.