DIRECTOR'S CORNER

Achieving environmental results in Virginia
Adapted from a speech presented at Environment Virginia, April 20, 2006

In Virginia we are fortunate to enjoy natural and historic resources that are unparalleled in their beauty and their variety.  

Article 11 of the Virginia Constitution makes clear what our responsibilities are in protecting the environment – to ensure clean air, pure water, and the use and enjoyment of public lands. Secretary Bryant laid out this challenge during his remarks on protecting our natural resources creatively and cost effectively. And other speakers, including Bill McDonough and Tom Lovejoy, have offered their vision.

We have seen significant success in the past 30 years in our efforts to clean our air and water and to improve how we dispose of waste. As we move forward and continually improve our stewardship of the environment, I see two keys to success: collective responsibility and a focus on results.

Collective responsibility involves working together – forming partnerships – to solve environmental problems. It often is easy to identify our common goals, such as promoting economic growth in a way that enables us to sustain our natural resources, and achieving balance between these ideas. But how to get there can be tough.

Part of our responsibility is to understand the legitimate concerns of everyone involved in an environmental issue and to address those concerns to the best of our abilities.

A good example of this is the water supply planning process that has been under way in Virginia for the past several years. Thanks to creative, collective, diligent efforts, Virginia now has sound procedures in place that will enable local and regional interests to make long-term plans for developing and protecting water supplies. 

This leads to an important question: How do we know if we are succeeding? I believe the answer will be based on the environmental results we can demonstrate from our actions. We are looking for ways to go beyond the old regulatory, command-and-control paradigm. As Bill McDonough pointed out, the need for extensive government regulations – such as those that come from the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act – actually illustrates a design flaw in how we approach environmental protection.

I would suggest a new paradigm, one that encourages us to create opportunities to do better things, take better actions. We still will need the environmental rules, because they set the base line, the standards from which everyone operates. But the new paradigm will encourage better environmental results.  Good results provide incentives for even more improvements, and this continuing success leads to a better use of resources.

We have plenty of examples of this in Virginia even now, and I am optimistic that this trend will continue. I have often cited the case of International Paper in Franklin to illustrate this point. IP has worked with Virginia and the Environmental Protection Agency on a performance track environmental management system that focuses on results, rather than on following a set of pre-determined rules. And the results we’ve seen in Franklin are impressive.

IP has achieved 50 percent more methanol reductions in their air emissions – at 30 percent less cost, about $10 million – than would have been possible with the “maximum achievable control technology” that the rules call for.

We have a number of tools that will enable more success stories like this. The Virginia Environmental Excellence Program promotes pollution prevention and environmental management systems as ways to use our resources more wisely, improve economic performance, and enable us to enhance and improve the environment.

Paylor speaks at VMI at the Environment Virginia conference.

Our goals at DEQ are to improve our environmental results and to strengthen the processes we use to obtain those results. Setting goals like this means recognizing that the goals belong to all of us – those at DEQ and those outside DEQ. We have a lot to do, and if we plan well and look to the future we certainly will succeed. There is always room for great ideas, like Tom Lovejoy’s suggestion that Virginia join the Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment to develop a set of indicators so we can measure our environmental results.

Secretary Bryant and I welcome that kind of suggestion and look forward to beginning the work. Partnership means engaging the community in creating solutions, and working with the Heinz Center would demonstrate excellent progress in that direction.

Our goals for environmental results at DEQ make up a long list, but here are some of the highlights we’ll be working on for the next few years.

The processes we use at DEQ not only involve the DEQ staff – they involve everyone who has a stake in protecting the environment. We want to focus on certainty about what our tasks are, consistency in how we accomplish them, efficiency in meeting them, and timeliness in completing them.

Though we are doing these things better in many ways, there always is room for improvement. So at DEQ we will mean what we say, we will provide quick and certain responses, and we will help solve the problems our stakeholders encounter.

These ideas already are being applied in specific areas at DEQ. For example:

We can achieve these goals, and many more. By making more use of partnerships and collaborative efforts, by keeping the doors at DEQ open, by strengthening our community involvement efforts, DEQ is looking for new solutions to our environmental challenges. We invite discussion at all levels to obtain your thoughts, concerns and ideas.

We at DEQ are looking forward to great progress as we work together over the coming years.

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