Case Program €16-93-1197.0 Kennedy School of Government Preventing Pollution in Massachusetts: The Blackstone Project In 1989, officials in the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) began laying plans for a pilot project that would alter the way the department carried out its inspection and ‘enforcement responsibilities in the state. Instead of scrutinizing a firm’s air, water, and hazardous ‘waste controls separately, inspectors participating in the pilot would conduct “cross-media” inspections that would encompass the entire facility in one visit, enabling them to take a comprehensive look at its inputs, processes, and outputs (including pollution). Such whole facility, cross-media inspections were designed to avoid the pollution “shell game,” whereby compliance with regulations in one medium not infrequently created a pollution problem in another. More ambitiously, DEP officials hoped to make cross-media inspections a tool for implementing, ‘a new approach to environmental protection that had been gaining currency among environmentalists and regulators in recent years: pollution prevention. Instead of controlling pollution by treating the end. point of industrial processes, advocates argued, regulators should also seek to reduce the amount of pollution generated in the first place. Cross-media inspections could help achieve that aim by ‘acquainting inspectors with the full range of a facility's production system: the reports and enforcement, actions that followed would emphasize steps that businesses could take—with the aid of free technical assistance from another state agency—to cut down an the use of toxic substances and the ‘generation of polluting wastes. Dut the implementation of a whole facility, cross-media inspection strategy would mean ‘wrenching the DEP out of practices that had been in place, and finely honed, over two decades. Frontline and supervisory inspectors had typically devoted their careers to mastering the complex scientific and technical issues and the equally complex web of federal and state law for a medium- specific program, such as air, water, or hazardous waste, They were skeptical of the notion of a “super inspector” who would master the intricacies of all the programs. Moreover, the media programs had no ‘experience in cooperative ventures: they had operated independently of each other, maintaining separate inspection routines and files. Overseeing the development and implementation of an operational plan for the project would be the responsibility of Patricia Deese Stanton, newly appointed assistant commissioner of the recently ‘created Bureau of Waste Prevention. Stanton came to her job from DEP's Division of Water Supply in the aftermath of a reorganization instituted by DEP Commissioner Daniel Greenbaum. The reorganization had brought the media programs under the waste prevention umbrella (see Exhibit 1), but as a practical matter, they continued to operate separately in DEP's central office and in its four regional offices, which carried out the frontline work of inspection and enforcement. As the first person. to occupy the waste prevention post, Stanton would have to find a way to make these programs work This case was written by Esther Scott for Michael Barzelay, Associate Professor of Public Policy, for the Program on Innovations in State and Local Government, John E. Kennedy School of Government. Funding for the case was provided by the Ford Foundation. (0393) Copyright © 1993 by the President and Fellows of Harvard CollegePreventing Pollution in Massachusetts: The Blackstone Project C16-93-1197.0 together in the pilot. It would not be an easy task. Beyond top management and policy officials in DEP hheadquarters in Boston, there was only a modicum of support for the project, especially in the field. “I Used to joke,” she recalls, “[that] when the ... pilot was conceived there were probably—t'm not exaggerating—maybe six people in the agency who thought it was a remotely viable idea.” Source Reduction in Massachusetts, The idea of reducing the amount of waste generated—known variously as source reduction, ‘waste minimization, waste prevention, and pollution prevention—grew out of dissatisfaction with the focus on control or treatment as the primary tool of environmental regulation. It surfaced in the mid- 1980s, at a time, says Patricia Deese Stanton, when gains from control technology had slowed to a costly trickle, “We had done the #0 percent that was easy” through pollution control devices, she says, “and the last 20 percent was very expensive. ... We had gotten as many of the improvements that we could Set with that strategy, and then we really needed to take a different strategy.” The new tack, Stanton continues, sought to change the regulatory focus, as embodied in federal law, from one that dictated “where you dump stuff” to one that asked “do we need to create this stuff in the first place?” By the end of the decade, waste prevention was, says Daniel Greenbaum, “emerging ... in the national environmental agenda,” and had won the notice of William Reilly, EPA administrator in the Bush administration. In 1990, pollution prevention would be defined and codified in federal law as a Priority for the agency. In Massachusetts, pollution prevention got an early start in the Department of Environmental Management (DEM), a “sister” agency in the state Environmental Affairs Secretariat which managed the state's forests, parks, recreation facilities, and watersheds. Since the early 1980s, DEM’s Bureau of Solid and Hazardous Waste, under the direction of James Miller, had been running workshops and ‘conferences on source reduction and hazardous waste managemnent—an outgrowth in part of the department's responsibility for siting hazardous waste facilites in the state. In 1986, Miller and some ‘of his staff migrated over to the Division of Solid Waste Management in DEP—or the Department of Environmental Quality Engineering (DEQE), as DEP was then called. (ee Appendix A for background on DEQE/DEP.) Miller let behind a small technical assistance unit in DEM—the Office of Safe Waste Management. That same year, the staff at Safe Waste Management launched a pilot program in southeastern Massachusetts to provide on-site technical assistance in source reduction to the jewelry plating industry, which produced a high volume of toxic wastes in all media. The project did not include any participation by DEQE—a reflection of the two agencies’ differing roles. DEM or, more precisely, the Office of Safe Waste Management viewed its mission in strictly service terms; it had no interest, says Tim Greiner, an engineer in the office at the time, in being “the eyes and spies” of a regulatory authority. ‘Meanwhile, over at DEQE, Miller had followed up on his interest in pollution prevention by creating three staff positions that would be dedicated to hazardous waste source reduction. In time, ‘hat number shrank to one, but the remaining staff member—Manik “Nikki” Roy, then a PhD candidate at the Kennedy School of Government—stayed on, eventually assuming the title of source seduction policy coordinator. It was Roy who combined a source reduction approach with the idea ofPreventing Pollution in Massachusetts: The Blackstone Project______C16-93-1197.0 «ross- or multi-media inspections and planted the seeds for the pilot program that ultimately became Innowmn as the Blackstone Project The Emerging Idea. As Roy recalls, it was while working on a source reduction project in the plastic coating industry—at the suggestion of Kenneth Hagg, then deputy commissioner at DEQE and an early proponent of waste prevention—that he realized that “at DEQE we had a net that was full of holes.” AA review of 50 companies revealed that many of them were known to only one regulatory rogram, and some were not known at all. At the same time, he took note of the problem of “media transfers,” whereby polluting waste was shifted from one medium to another. Sometimes this was done by a company in order to avoid coming under regulatory control. For example, Roy explains, “if you were a hazardous waste generator, you would be insane fo manifest that waste [.e, report and dispose of it according to regulations}. You'd be much smarter to dump it down the sewer”—taking advantage of the often weak regulatory management of many sewage treatment plants at the time. Ifa company was being inspected in only one medium, moreover, it would be relatively easy to get away with such behavior. Patricia Deese Stanton points to the example of a firm that was discharging a highly toxic ‘chemical through a hole in the floor, where it ended up in the groundwater supply; the facility was inspected annually, but only by an inspector from the air quality program. The company “just didn’t tell anybody” about the discharge, she says, “and nobody happened to notice’ ‘At other times, however, the media transfer was the unintended result of end-of-the-pipe environmental controls, whereby regulators found themselves caught in what Douglas Fine of the department's Central Regional Office called a “pollution shell game.” Thus, for example, installing a serubber, which used water to remove smokestack pollutants, would create a new pollution problem in the form of contaminated water; applying treatment technologies that would settle the contaminants ‘out of the water would leave behind a hazardous waste in the form of sludge, which would then have ‘to be incinerated or disposed of in a landfill! The end result, says Greenbaum was the “perception” that regulators were simply “pushing pollution around.” Eventually, Roy concluded that both source reduction and the media transfer problem could be addressed in a program of cross-media, whole facility inspections. Under this scheme, an inspector or a ‘team of inspectors would examine the entire facility, singly or in groups, and identify all of the emissions and discharges from a plant's industrial processes. Any enforcement actions that resulted from the inspections would be slanted in the direction of source reduction. Businesses would be ‘encouraged to come into compliance less through control technologies than through changes in thelr production processes that would reduce the amount of pollutants they used. Such a program would include an offer of free technical assistance from a separate state agency to companies that needed advice and information in rethinking and retooling their operations. With Hagg’s encouragement, Roy put these ideas into an internal memorandum, dated March 2, 1987, proposing a “comprehensive source reduction pilot program."2 “The proposal basically said,” he 1 Douglas Fine, “Where Everybody Wins," Worcester Businest Journal, April 27-May 10, 1992, p. 29. 2 The scheme took the form of a pilot, sccording to Roy, becavse he bad initially put the proposal together io response to anticipated funding from the state legislature for research om source reduction, The funding never ‘trialized, but Roy retained the format for bis DEQE propel.Preventing Pollution in Massachusetts: The Blackstone Project___C16-93-1197.0 recalls, “that we ought to put together a team of air, water, and hazardous waste inspectors, and a team of technical assistance people, and focus them on the same industry, with the charge of making sure that there is environmental protection across all media within that industry, and advising that industry towards pollution prevention.” That same month, Hagg convened a meeting of the directors of DEQE's four regional offices to discuss the proposal. As Roy recalls, “They all said, ‘Well, it sounds like an interesting idea, but weneed to have a bunch of questions answered about it” Roy's efforts to «all together a follow-up meeting to review his answers to those questions, however, proved fruitless. “Tfelt Iwas just being given the runaround,” he says. “ ... It was clearly not a top priority for them.” Hagg would not, however, let the idea fade away. In July 1987, he organized a Source Reduction Policy Advisory Committee, chaired by Nikki Roy, to come up with recommendations for promoting source reduction. Committee membership consisted of representatives from DEQE’s major regulatory programs—air, water, hazardous waste, and solid waste—along with Barry Fogel, director of the Central Regional Office, who represented the regions. When the committee came out with its findings in early 1988, it strongly endorsed, among other things, the principle of cross-media, whole facility inspections.3 But while pleased with the outcome, Roy also felt impatient with the delay. “The main thing that the committee did,” he maintains, “beyond endorsing the general concept, was to put the [pilot] project on hold fora year. It took me out of a project-moving mode ... and into a study and group management mode.” ‘A mode shift was in the offing for Roy, and forall of DEQE, however. In May 1988, Governor Michael Dukakis named Daniel Greenbaum as the new commissioner of the department. Greenbaum, formerly vice president for public policy and strategic planning at the Massachusetts Audubon Society, ‘was coming in with ambitious plans to revamp the organization and its regulatory orientation. The word was, Roy recalls, that “among other things, Dan wanted to make a big jump on a lot of issues, including source reduction.” Overhauling DEQE Greenbaum came to the department at a time when it, and other state agencies with environmental responsibilities, had become the subject of “scathing criticism” from the Massachusetts legislature and envvironmentalists. In its FY 1988 budget, the State Senate Ways and Means Committee had inserted language creating a commission to investigate these agencies and make recommendations for steps they could take to improve thelr operations. The commission, chaired by former US Senator Paul Tsongas, completed a draft report ust as Greenbaum was about to assume his new duties at DEQE. ‘The report concluded, among other things, says Greenbaum, that DEQE did “not have a clear sense of mission, ... did not have a proactive sense of moving out to prevent pollution. It was too much involved in reacting to clean up problems after the fact.” While environmental groups “distrusted” the department, Greenbaum continues, the “business community had serious concems” as well. These concerns focused largely on the “massive backlog” of permitapplications, but there was unhappiness 3 The commitee also proposed a pilot project in cross-media permitting. In addition, it recommended incorporating source reduction incentives in all new regolations a proposal that Hage, then the acting commissioner of DEQE, ordered to be implemented that March.Preventing Pollution in Massachusetts: The Blackstone Project, C16-95-1197.0 over inspections as well. The staff at DEQE was considered arrogant and frequently adversarial. Small firms in particular shrank from contact with the agency. DEQE was “a dirty word,” says Jonathan Brunell, president of a small, 100-year-old, family-owned electroplating company in Worcester. “We didn’t want to see them, and we hoped that they never saw us.” Companies like Brunell’ hesitated to seek DEQE’s help on environmental problems, he told the Worcester Business Journal, because ofits regulatory role. “I would be afraid to call the department," he said, “for fear of being inspected.” ‘Among the remedies the Tsongas commission proposed in its report was the recommendation that the department restructure its operations to stress pollution prevention, and rename itself the Department of Environmental Protection. Is original name had left “a perception among some,” Greenbaum explains, “that [the agency] seemed to have the mission of [finding] engineering answers, ‘which may not be protective.” Even while the commission was putting the final touches on its report, Greenbaum (who had met several times with commission members) was doing the same with a reorganization of DEQE, which was formally announced in September 1988, ‘The reorganization that Greenbaum fashioned was intended both to streamline and integrate DEQE’s programs, and to highlight the priorities he had articulated soon after arriving at his new (Post: resource protection and waste prevention. ‘The key changes took place in the bailiwick of the deputy commissioner for policy and program development, where three new bureaus were created, each to be headed by an assistant commissioner; a parallel structure would be put in place in the regional offices, with each bureau overseen by a regional engineer. The three new bureaus, says Patricia Deese ‘Stanton, could be broadly characterized as “past sins” (Bureau of Waste Site Cleanup), “present sins” (Bureau of Waste Prevention), and “future sins” (Bureau of Resource Protection). Putting them together, Greenbaum recalls, entalled “major wrestling” within the department, as the divisions and smaller ‘units were reshuifled to fit the guiding mission of each bureau, Under the Bureau of Waste Prevention, for example, Greenbaum wanted to lump together “all of te programs that regulate any kind of waste product from industry.” Accordingly, he took the industrial wastewater program, a small unit of about seven employees which primarily did permitting, out of the Water Pollution Control Division (in the Bureau of Resources Protection) and moved it into the waste prevention bureau, “giving it a new, higher priority.”"+ By the end of 1988, the reorganization was in place, and DEQE was now DEP. In the meantime, while these changes were taking place, Nikki Roy's source reduction pilot was being rescued from the dustbin of policy recommendations and given new prominence in the department ‘The Blackstone Project Is Born In the months since his Source Reduction Advisory Committee had made its recommendations, ‘ikki Roy had pressed on with his proposal for a pilot multimedia inspection program. In May 1988, 4 In Massachusetts, the chief role in wastewater regula facilities (often referrd to as publicly owned sewage ‘reatment works, of POTWs), to whom EPA delegsied regulatory and enforcement euthority for discharges to their sexe systems; DEQE in tara regulated the POTWs for ‘their discharges and/or incinerstor emissions, Fell to municipal and regional wastewater treatmentPreventing Pollution in Massachusetts: The Blackstone Project. €16-93.1197.0 ‘he applied for $300,000 in EPA funds, under a new grant program in waste minimization, with $100,000 of the money to go to DEM to provide technical assistance. At the same time, however, Kenneth Hagy, ‘who had stayed on as deputy commissioner, had brought the pilot program, along with the other Proposals of the advisory committee, to Greenbaum’s attention, Together, says Greenbaum, they decided to pursue the pilot project in cross-media inspections as a source reduction opportunity. “Our bias was clearly action-oriented,” Greenbaum recalls. “... We didn’t want to spend a lot of time having another committee look into how to do this.” Accordingly, in July, the new commissioner announced ‘hat, regardless of EPA’s decision on Roy's application, the department would proceed with the pilot. When, the following month, the grant request was tumed down,5 Greenbaum went ahead and funded ‘two staff positions for the as yet unnamed project. Outside funding was in the offing, however. In September 1988, DEM applied for funds froma different EPA grant program to extend its technical assistance project in source reduction to metal- intensive industries in central Massachusetts, Unlike its southeastern Massachusetts project, in which the old DEQE had played no role, this time DEM included provisions for working with a DEP pilot inspection program. Specifically, DEM proposed that DEP would set up a multimedia inspection pilot Within the central Massachusetts project aree; DEM, through its Office of Safe Waste Management, ‘would coordinate its technical services with firms inspected under the pilot “in order to determine the effectiveness of non-regulatory assistance in the context of regulatory attention.” Under this arrangement, DEP inspectors would refer companies, particularly those that were out of compliance, to DEM’s Office of Safe Waste Management for technical assistance, and the DEM unit would give these referrals priority. This unprecedented alliance with DEP had grown out of discussions between Nikki Roy and his counterparts at the Office of Safe Waste Management. Out of those conversations, says Tim Greiner, a staff member with the Safe Waste Management unit, had come an agreement that DEP ‘would focus its pilot program on metal-intensive businesses s0 that the Office of Safe Waste ‘Management could train inspectors in source reduction techniques in that industry; that DEP would select “a sensitive ecosystem” as its pilot locale; and that DEP would find a regional director “willing to have such a pilot project in their area.” ‘The last of these stipulations did not prove easy to do, according to Patricia Deese Stanton (who arrived at her assistant commissioner post some months later). Ken Hagg, she says, “tried to ‘muscle the four regional [directors] to get one of them to agree to do this.” Eventually, Barry Fogel, director of the Central Regional Office in Worcester came forward—the only regional chief who ‘offered to serve as host to the pilot. Fogel’s acquiescence appeared to be a combination of pragmatism— his office would get new staff slots as a result ofthe project—and genuine interest. “He felt a real ‘commitment to the idea,” says Nikki Roy, “and he was genuinely a sticking-the-neck-out type of guy.” ‘After that, finding the right ecosystem proved relatively straightforward, Save the Bay, an environmental group in Rhode Island concerned with pollution in Narragansett Bay, had recently ‘complained to Massachusetts officials about toxic metals filtering into the bay from the Blackstone River across the border in central Massachusetts, where there was @ heavy concentration of firms that 5. Acconting to Roy, EPA chose not to fund the project becuuse it “wasn't RCRA [Resource Conservation and Recovery Act}fecused” and dil not have a large enough training componentPreventing Pollution in Massachusetts: The Blackstone Project 16-99-1197 did electroplating, metal finishing, and electronics manufacturing. “So,” Greenbaum explains, “we ‘were in part looking at how to beef up our efforts in that area.” With the regional office and the specific site for DEP’s pilot lined up, DEM proceeded with its application for its technical assistance program, which it called the Central Massachusetts Pollution Prevention Project—of which DEP's Blackstone Project, as It was soon named, would be a subset. When its grant award came through in December 1988, to the tune of $289,000, the agency passed on funds to DEP to pay for one new siaff position in the pilot. Later, in the spring of 1989, DEP (as it was by then officially known) added another position, funded by a grant from the National Governors Association ® Accordingly, when Stanton was appointed assistant commissioner for waste prevention in March 1989, a total of four new staff positions were funded (two by DEP itself) for the pilot project. But while the location and the funds were settled, Stanton found that many other questions about the pilot remained. ‘Questions and Doubs “Most of the questions and doubts about the project were to be found in DEP itself, and many of them concemed the way the department had carried out its inspectional responsibilities, The organization that DEP had built up over the years mirrored that of the Environmental Protection ‘Agency, which in tum reflected the accretion of federal environmental law in discrete categories of pollution media—e.g, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (governing the disposal of hazardous waste). The individval programs at DEP had developed their own inspection styles and culture, driven in part by the technical and procedural aspects of the work they performed, They were overseen by dlfferent paris of EPA, kept separate files and, to an extent, visited separate parts of the facilities they inspected. Reporting formats likewise varied. The media programs did not circulate their inspection reports among each other (though inspectors would notify the appropriate program if they spotted a potential violation in another ‘medium during an inspection visit). "I sat literally adjacent to people in another program.” says Michael Maher, the regional engineer” in charge of the Central Regional Office's Bureau of Waste Prevention, who started his career as an ait quality inspector, “and knew very, very little about what that program did.” There was, Maher adds, “a very strong allegiance to the program” among the field inspectors and their immediate supervisors, the section chiefs, “ ., That's the program they grew to like and become more expert in, and they wanted to stay focused on that program.” Bullt into the idea of a multimedia inspection, however, was the assumption that inspectors in ‘one medium could be trained to conduct an inspection in other media. Most section chiefs questioned ‘whether such inspections would be thorough enough, arguing that—as their own careers attested— ‘years of training and on-the-job experience were needed to attain a suitable level of expertise, Tom Cusson, air quality section chief in DEP's Central Regional Office, a 21-year veteran of that program, 5 ‘The NGA grant stipulated thatthe money would be vsed to pay for an inspector check for compliance with federal and state toric use reporting laws, 7 Regional engineers had supervisory responsiblity for the burea beaded up the individual programs within a bureau, reported (0 fergocizational chart of a regional burezu of wasle prevention.)€16-98-1197.0 Preventing Pollution in Massachusetts: The Blackstone Project. points to the lengthy learning period for neophytes in his area. “Generally when I'm bringing in ‘somebody new,” he says, “especially if they don’t know anything about air quality, we figure [they ‘need! a year before we're able to turn them loose to don inspection on their own.” Air quality inspectors, he continues, had to master a range of technologies, from boilers to major power plants, as ‘well as the tangle of laws and regulations governing their medium. “Ihave two file drawers full of laws,” Cusson points out, “just on air quality.” ‘As the managers most directly responsible for the daily conduct of inspections, section chiefs felt concemed about signing off on reports done by an inspector from another program. It was in parta matter of control, says Mike Maher. Section chiefs had “years and years of background,” he notes, and were used to thinking, for example, that ““only air could do air [inspections] and now fin the pilot] somebody else would be planning what the air inspections would be; maybe an air person wouldn't even bbe going out on that inspection, but I'm still responsible as the air section chief for what happens at that plant’ So if starts to build tension.” ‘Along with questions of expertise, there was the matter of how the different inspection and enforcement routines that had grown up among the programs over the years would be reconciled. The differences, stylistic and otherwise, could run deep. “We have been accused of being very picky,” ‘observes John Kronopolus, hazardous waste section chief in the Central Regional Office. “A lotof times ‘our regulations say, it [ue,, a violation] is there or not. Whereas ... potentially IWW [Industrial Wastewater] has a discharge that may or may not violate a sewer use permit, or [there's] an air quality issue that may or may not require enforcement. ... You know, 21c [the portion of state law regulating the ‘management of transportable hazardous waste] is picky, and air is not. There's a philosophical difference. We cite everything [as a violation]. They pick and choose what they want to [enforce].” It ‘may be, Kronopolus speculates, that “the people who came to this group [hazardous waste] fee! comfortable with saying, it’s black or white. And then other people are happy with gray.” ‘Cusson seconds the notion that inspectors were not necessarily fungible when it came to the medium they worked in. “Some people choose to be lawyers,” he says, “some people choose to be ‘engineers, some people choose to be inspectors or analysts—because that's not only what they like to do, but because that's what they do best. You can't just look at a title on a sheet of paper that says ‘environmental analyst’ [ie,, inspector] and therefore [assume] that person must be able to do everything that has to do with the environment. That isn’t how it works.” Moreover, Cusson believed, specialization was important in regulating complex environmental sysiems. “I like to use the analogy of the medical profession,” he says. “You have general practitioners that you go to when you're sick. ‘They tell you, “You have heart disease, you need open heart surgery.’ Now, you're not going to lay down ‘ona table and say, ‘Okay, cut me open and do it’ You're going to go toa heart specialist. The ‘environmental area is pretty much the same kind of thing. You have a very strong need for specialists in each of the different media.” What the DEP pilot was trying to do, he feared, “is take the specialists and make them into generalists.”Preventing Pollution in Massachusetts: The Blackstone Project 16-93-1197. Interagency Relations Concems about the Blackstone project were not limited to those who worked in DEP. In DEM’s Office of Safe Waste Management, which would provide the technical assistance for the pilot, there ‘were worries about teaming up with an agency whose relations with industry were primarily adversarial. The Safe Waste Management office was in the process of being, transformed from a small ‘group of about seven or eight employees to a stand-alone unit—called the Office of Technical Assistance (OTA)—in the Environmental Affairs Secretariat that would eventually grow to employ about30. OTA owed its new prominence to the Toxic Use Reduction Act (TURA), which was wending its way through the state legislature and would be officially signed into law in July 1989. The new law would, among other things, expand the number of firms currently required to report toxic substance use ‘under federal statutory provisions (usually referred to as SARA 313) and require “large quantity users” to develop plans for reducing use of toxics in their industrial processes. TURA gave to OTA the task of providing technical assistance to toxics users, stipulating that the “office shall not make available to IDEP] information it obtains in the course of providing technical assistance,” unless the user agreed or @ ‘threat to public health was involved. {twas how to maintain this confidentiality that was of chief concem to OTA. The issue of ‘whether technical assistance personnel should report violations they observed had been “a major bane ‘of contention [with DEP] forever,” says Tim Greiner who worked in the Oifice of Safe Waste Management and later in OTA. From the technical assistance viewpoint, he explains, “we had spent a Jot of time building trust among firms who thought, ‘The only reason government comes to our plants is to inspect us and fine us’ And we said, 'No, we're here to provide technical assistance, ... We do not report anything to DEP unless what we see is an imminent threat to human health.’ There were fears that an. alliance with DEP could undermine that understanding. “The culture at OTA, or at DEM at the time,” Greiner continues, “was always that DEP could really muff it up if we interacted with them. They ‘could ruin the trust we built with industry.” From DEP's standpoint, the problem was, in Daniel Greenbaum’s words, a "good guy-bad guy, white hat-black hat syndrome.” DEP staff, he wrote in 1992, were “wary of their colleagues in ‘white hats’ and the OTA staff unwilling to tum anyone, even significant violators they found, in to [DEPL.”® It would sometimes happen, Greenbaum says, that DEP inspectors would show up at a site recently visited by OTA and spot a serious violation. “And [the company representative] would say, ‘Oh, well, somebody from the state was here and they didn't say anything about this.” While relations between the two organizations had warmed in recent months, as the Idea for the project took shape, both sides had questions about how to fashion a modus operandi that would suit their different missions and strategies. Another kind of modus operandi would also eventually have to be worked out with EPA, Despite interest in source reduction at the policy level, the federal agency was still organized along strict program lines and, at least at the regional level, not inclined to change. “Over a 20 years’ time span,” says Stanton, “.. these independent environmental watchdog groups within EPA developed 8 Daniel Greenbaum, “The Massachusetts Potusion Prevention Initiative,” July 1992.Preventing Pollution in Massachusetts: The Blackstone Project. C16.93-1197.0 relatively independently of each other. They tended to look at different things; they tended to like their paperwork done differently.” And, as Daniel Greenbaum points out, they liked to count their inspection “beans” separately; program grants from EPA were ted to the volume of inspections conducted by specialists within a given program area. It was not clear how inspections under the proposed pilot could meet EPA program requirements and still retain a whole-facility, multimedia orientation. Relations with Regulated Firms Finally, there was the question of the impact of the pllot on regulated companies. DEP anticipated some benefits to companies in the form of fewer inspections per year—a benefit most likely to be approciated by firms that were classified as “major sources” in more than one medium, and therefore subject to more than one inspection per year. Greenbaum also expected companies would have fewer contradictory requirements to deal with, and fewer regulators to track down. He had heard ‘complaints from businesses that “I can never get the answer from DEP, itjust takes forever. And one guy ‘came in here and told me to do this, and another one came in here and told me to do that.”” Smaller firms, on the other hand, were expected to benefit from increased exposure to OTA, to whom DEP. inspectors would refer them for help in source reduction approaches to compliance, [At the same time, however, there were questions about how the largest companies would cope ‘witha team of inspectors descending on them to conduct a one-stop inspection. Greenbaum recalls asking, “We're going to send all four inspectors under this [pilot] to the same plant on the same day?? Isn't that going to scare the bejesus out of them? Aren't they going to go crazy?” Some lange companies, such as Wyman-Gordon, a firm that made aerospace parts and employed over 2500 people in 1989, had set up their environmental engineering departments to correspond to DEP's program organization, so that individual engineers were assigned to a specific medium. The company’s engineers, says one, understood the regulations “probably on a par” with DEP's own inspectors. When a program inspector from DEP visited Wyman-Gordon, the corresponding company specialist would accompany him or her con the inspection. Over time, a sense of continulty and rapport developed, says one Wyman-Gordon engineer; the inspector grew familiar with the plant and “knew where to look” during the two to four hours it took to tour the facility. Multimedia inspections would inevitably rearrange those relationships and the divisions of labor that had grown up around them. Stanton’s Task ‘The job of designing an operational plan that would determine how all of these internal and extemal relations would be arranged for the life of the pilot project, and perhaps beyond, fell to the ‘new assistant commissioner for waste prevention. Patricia Deese Stanton had come to her new position (having beaten out Central Regional Office Director Barry Fogel for the job) after two-and-a-half {years as director of the DEP”s Division of Water Supply: previously, she had worked as a project 9 Taree of the inspectors would come from the water, sir quality, and hazardous waste programs: the fourth would inspect for compliance with federal and stale toxie use reporting laws (SARA 313 and TURA), 10Preventing Pollution in Massachusetts: The Blackstone Project________16-99-1197.0 manager at the consulting firm of Arthur D. Little—experience that would serve her well in dealing ‘with the still inchoate Blackstone project. In the newly reorganized agency, Stanton was the official in DEP headquarters with direct responsibility for the air quality, industrial wastewater, and hazardous waste programs, She would, however, be operating from a position of some weakness in relation to the Central Regional Cifice: she did not have direct line authority over the regional offices and inspectors. unDEQE DEP DEM Office of Safe Waste Management OTA Glossary of Agencics Department of Environmental Quality Engineering, original ame of sate environmental regulatory agency Department of Environmental Protection, new name given to DEQE after departmental reorganization Department of Environmental Management, a sister agency of DEP in the state Executive Office of Environmental Affairs, charged with management of state parks, forests, recreational facilities, and watersheds ‘Unit within DEM that offered free technical assistance in source reduction techniques Office of Technical Assistance, former Office of Safe Waste ‘Management, now removed from DEM and made a free- standing unit within Executive Office of Environmental Affairs 2Deparment of Environmental Protection ‘Organization Chart Depuiy [Commissioner Adminstration 13. Source: Daniel S. Greenbaum, “The Massachusetts Pollution Prevention Initiative,” July 1992.Exhibit 2 Organizational Chart: Regional Bureau of Waste Prevention Commissioner fae creeeeaead aa cmemmuion| | eter Operations, ‘Development a a feet saeaeen com Regional Engineer Waste Prevention Section Chiefs: Air Quality Control Hazardous Waste Management| Industrial Wastewater Solid Waste Management Source: Department of Environmental ProtectionAppendix A Background Note on the Department of Environmental Protection. Until late in 1988, DEP was known as the Department of Environmental Quality Engineering (DEQE). Established in 1975, DEQE was one of four departments under the umbrella of the state Executive Office of Environmental Affairs. In broad terms, the department was given responsibility for “ensuring clean air and water, the safe management and disposal of solid and hazardous wastes, the timely cleanup of hazardous waste sites and spills, and the preservation of wetlands and coastal resources."! Some 13,000 facilities in Massachusetts—everything from factories to wastewater treatment plants to gas stations to landfills—fell under the DEQE’s regulatory purview. Each yeat, ‘among other tasks, the department issued over 4,000 environmental permits and licenses? and conducted roughly the same number of or-site inspections of facilites that discharged wastewater, emitted air pollution, or generated hazardous waste. To carry out its responsibilities, DEQE had an operating budget of about $45 million and roughly 1,000 employees—many of them with backgrounds in civil, environmental, or chemical engineering—who worked either at headquarters in Boston or in one of its four regional offices. ‘The mandate and much of the direction for DEQE’s duties came from an imposing mass of fecleral and state law, amended many times over as environmental issues in the US grew more prominent, and increasingly complicated. At the top of the environmental regulatory pyramid stood the EPA, which funded about 25 percent of DEQE’s budget? The EPA delegated much of its authority under federal law to states that met its standards and regulations; its program grants—eg,, in alr pollution, water pollution, hazardous waste—typically stipulated what kind of permitting, inspection, and enforcement activities the delegatee was expected to do, sometimes even specifying which facilities were to be inspected. 1 Finding Your Way Through DEP, November 1992. 2 Among other things. the department issued permits for new facilities or modifications of existing ones that were fxpacied to bave en impact oa the envizonment; program engingers reviewed facility plane as part of the Permitting process. 3 Tu budgetary impact on some todividval programs was much higher. About $$ percent of the air quality program, for example, was federally funded, 5Internal Organization. At DEQE headquarters, the deputy commissioner for policy and. Program development oversaw nine divisions, most of which paralleled EPA programs and the congressional mandates that had called them into being, Out in the four regional offices, a corresponding structure of programs, organized by medium and headed by section chiefs, carried out ‘work of inspecting facilities, taking appropriate enforcement actions, and reviewing plans and issuing permits. After the 1988 reorganization, in which DEQE became DEP, the programs were grouped into three bureaus, each headed by an assistant commissioner in the central office and a regional engineer in the regional offices. Tt was the section chiefs—most of whom were drawn from the ranks of inspectors and engineers in thelr respective programs—who assigned the inspectors’ work and reviewed their post-inspection reports. The inspections aimed to ensure compliance with state and federal environmental laws and, where applicable, the requirements of state licenses and permits. Basically, they were the task of three progrems—air quality, hazardous waste, and industrial wastewater, which inspected facilities that discharged to groundwater and surface water; a fourth unit, the Rightto-Know Office, checked for compliance with federal and state reporting laws for “large quantity toxic users.” Typically, inspectors visited a “major source” of pollution in their medium once a year—usually in accordance with EPA guidelines—and a “minor source” ona less frequent basis. After conducting theit inspections, DEP inspectors wrote up reports of their findings and, where necessary, started enforcement procedures, ‘These latter ranged from notices of noncompliance, which one DEP official characterizes as “a slap on the hand,” to administrative orders and penalty assessments, which were appealable, to consent orders, which were not. After review by the appropriate section chief, reports and enforcement notices ‘were then signed by one of the office’s regional engineers. 16