The Department of Environmental Conservation added 13 new positions this year to take on the major water quality efforts underway in the state. But it did so by removing 13 positions elsewhere in the department, a move officials hope won’t affect the department’s ability to protect the environment.
David Mears, the commissioner of the Department of Environmental Conservation, said the push for water quality led to cuts elsewhere in his department.
“When you look at the total numbers of staff at the department, while we were able to increase the number of people working in the clean water programs, we achieved that in part by having to take cuts in other places, so there are other programs that took cuts,” he said.
The hardest hit program was the one that permits private septic systems that aren’t connected to a wastewater system.
“That’s a program that we are going to have to shift the way in which we do that work so we spend less time on the more routine projects and rely more heavily on the consultants and the installers of those systems to do it effectively, and we’ll rely on more of an audio oversight system as opposed to a more case-by-case review,” he said.
Mears said eight of the 13 new water quality positions in the department will be filled by people from that program. Another five, he said, will be made up of vacancies in “that are just kind of random positions that were open and vacant and that we determined on balance we could fill the service those positions were providing in other ways.”
Natural Resources Secretary Deb Markowitz said the staff shift doesn’t indicate a loss of focus on issues unrelated to water quality.
“The [Department of Environmental Conservation] has always been an agency that’s been able to do a lot of things at once. In fact, we’re charged to do a lot of things at once. We’re charged to protect public health by ensuring that the air is clean and that we’re not being harmed by toxic pollution in our land, that we’re making sure the water is clean,” she said. “And we’ve got expert staff who make that happen every day.”
Mears said he hopes the decision was right.
“We’ll see how that plays out,” he said. “The goal is to not have any significant impact on public health or the environment, and on balance the larger need has been to invest more staff resources and time and energy in working to deal with the problem of polluted stormwater runoff. But there are no easy choices in an environment where public resources are tight.”
