Health, Safety & the Environment

Connecticut’s Council on Environmental Quality (“CEQ) is a state agency that works to improve environmental enforcement in Connecticut.  Significantly, it investigates citizen complaints that some individual or a state agency may be violating environmental laws.  Martha Phillips, the co-chair of the Connecticut League of Conservation Voters, recently warned that the CEQ (and other watchdog agencies) is receiving zero funding in the Governor’s recently unveiled proposed budget and many of its functions being transferred to the very agencies that CEQ is supposed to keep tabs on!  Ms. Phillips writes in a recent CTLCV blog post : “Surely we are not expected to imagine that the Department of Environmental Protection will blow the whistle to call attention to itself when it falls down on the job or has a less than stellar performance. Worse, these watchdog agency cutbacks are occurring at a time when the news media is retrenching and there are fewer knowledgeable reporters and investigative journalists than ever. How are citizens to find out when things are amiss? CEQ will no longer be there — its responsibilities will have been subsumed (submerged?) under the agency it formerly monitored. And we won’t read about any shortcomings it in the press either-because most of the reporters who knew the beat and had contacts and news sources have been laid off.   If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Evidently we are expected to believe that if environmental programs are mismanaged or environmental laws go unenforced, it won’t matter since we will hear nothing about it.”