Green movement pales in Bay State

Massachusetts was once a favorite of the national environmental movement, passing some of the country's strongest laws to protect its air, water, and land. But today, after 15 years of budget cuts, it is failing to deliver key services.

Across the state, the results are apparent: almost $800 million in deferred park maintenance, a shortage of rangers and environmental police officers in state parks, and less attention to identifying hazardous waste sites, keeping streams and rivers clean, monitoring mercury contamination, and cutting levels of acid rain.

Spending on the environment has fallen, in inflation-adjusted dollars, from $253 million a year in 1989 to $169 million this year -- a 33 percent drop that "cannot be sustained without significantly increasing risks to public health and the environment," according to an internal state document. The federal government recently fined the state $92,000 for a policy it said encouraged contractors to ignore contaminated waste.

"The message from the governor's office and from the legislative leadership is that environment isn't something to pay attention to anymore," said Jim Gomes, president of the Environmental League of Massachusetts, an environmental advocacy group. "We still have laws that stack up well compared to the rest of the country, but when we fail to fund them, when we fail to enforce them, and when we fail to give them sufficient management to make sure the promises are fulfilled . . . services suffer."

State officials acknowledge budget cuts have been severe -- but say they were necessary during recessions and as other priorities such as healthcare rose to the top. They say Massachusetts has done the best it can with less money and point to more enforcement actions, stricter air-quality laws for dirty power plants, a stepped-up effort to test for drinking water contaminants such as perchlorate, and a push to redevelop old industrial sites.

"Everyone took cuts through the budget crisis, and the environmental agencies are not immune. It forced all of us to do more with less," said Douglas Foy, secretary of the state Office of Commonwealth Development. He said skyrocketing healthcare costs consume the state's discretionary spending. "Times are tight."

Starting in the 1970s, when the environmental movement first took hold nationally, Massachusetts soon became one of the leading states, passing laws to reduce businesses' dependence on toxic chemicals, identifying new hazardous waste sites, and approving some of the most protective wetlands laws in the country. But after an initial push, observers say, the state became complacent.

"Those bursts of enthusiasm in the late '70s and early '80s have diminished," said Christopher Hardy, director of legislative affairs for the Massachusetts Audubon Society. "There has been a bipartisan collapse in state investment of environmental programs, and it's both the Legislature and executive branch."

In 2000, the state ranked 48th in the country for environmental spending as a proportion of its total budget, according to the Institute for Southern Studies, a North Carolina think tank that developed a widely used, state-by-state measure of the quality of the environment. And that was before the most punishing round of budget cuts. But no category of the state budget has been hit as hard as the environment, according to the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation.

Consider Middlesex Fells Reservation north of Boston. Its headquarters is in severe disrepair, with broken windows and leaking ceilings. A historic tower overlooking Route 93 has been padlocked since vandals attacked the building in July. Even if money is found to fix the tower, it won't reopen: There are not enough rangers to police it. "It's like the Wild West here," said Michael Ryan, president of the Friends of the Middlesex Reservation.

In Western Massachusetts, Mount Greylock's main road has become so decrepit and dangerous that officials are considering closing it.

Staffing cuts have reduced the number of environmental police officers by 19 percent in the last seven years. Rangers' numbers have also been sliced: The Berkshire's popular Bash Bish Falls State Park, with its dangerous 80-foot falls, has no staff, and its phone is disconnected.

The cuts have also hurt communities and volunteer groups. The state has dramatically trimmed programs that offered advice to the groups to protect wetlands, water, and open space.

"We need that leadership," said Jennifer Hill, executive director of Groundwork Somerville, a community-based environmental, economic, and social advocacy group.

And some say the budget slicing has misled individual residents. The Natural Heritage & Endangered Species program, which protects rare plant and animal species, has not received any state funding for the past two years, relying entirely on donations that 19,000 residents make on their tax returns. But 36 cents of each of those dollars goes instead to the state's general fund.

More serious problems are even harder to see. A 2004 memo written by an official in the Department of Environmental Protection said that $1 million is critically needed to better track threats to streams and rivers, saying the agency finds out about problems only after the public has been put at risk. The memo noted that several mercury and acid rain projects have been eliminated, and the department is in danger of losing federal grants because it is so far behind in submitting some of its air monitoring data.

Few cases, however, illustrate the lapse in environmental oversight more strikingly than the case that led to the recent federal fine against the state Department of Conservation and Recreation. In Lawrence, a contractor was told by state environmental officials in 2002 to run tests on suspicious-looking soils at a former industrial site being converted into a state park. But to cut costs, the state said, it would pay for the tests only if the soil proved to be contaminated -- if clean, the contractor had to foot the bill.

Clearly, the contractor had no incentive to test the soil, and 619 tons of cadmium-contaminated dirt ended up in New Hampshire at a company that resells dirt as topsoil.

The state later spent more than $40,000 to clean up the hazardous dirt and was forced by the US Environmental Protection Agency to formally change its policy to prevent the incident from happening again. A state environmental spokesman said the incident took place before the current administration took office and was a one-time event.

But Audubon's Hardy had a different take: "The crisis in funding has led to desperate policy changes."

Beth Daley can be reached at bdaley@globe.com