Funding urged to preserve ecology

Saying that the state's national reputation as an environmental leader is eroding at an alarming pace, more than 100 environmental lawyers urged legislative leaders yesterday to increase funding for protection and conservation programs ravaged by years of budget cuts.

In a letter addressed to budget leaders on Beacon Hill, the lawyers said the state has eliminated efforts to identify hazardous waste sites, cut back on parks used by lower-income residents, and fallen from a position of leadership to 44th out of 50 states in overall environmental spending.

As examples, the letter cites the budget for the Department of Conservation and Recreation, which has been cut by nearly 40 percent in the last 3½ years, and the budget for the Department of Environmental Protection, which has been cut nearly as deeply.

''Overall, the purchasing power of our state's environmental agencies has never been lower than it is today," says the letter, which was sent this week to the Senate Ways and Means Committee chairwoman, Therese Murray, Democrat of Plymouth, and the House Ways and Means chairman, Robert A. DeLeo, Democrat of Winthrop.

''These numbers and percentages are disturbing, in and of themselves, but the reality on the ground is even more so," the letter states. ''In our practices, we have the opportunity to observe firsthand the effects of chronic underfunding of agencies the Legislature created to protect our Commonwealth's air, water, land, and health."

Lawmakers and officials on Beacon Hill acknowledged yesterday that the state's environmental agencies have been among the hardest hit during the budget problems of the last four years, and they held out little hope that the situation would improve in the short term.

James Eisenberg, DeLeo's chief of staff, said yesterday that while no final decisions have been made on departmental allocations for the fiscal year 2006 budget, lawmakers are facing a $600 million shortfall in just giving agencies the spending power they now have.

''We are well aware of the hits the environmental budgets have taken over the years," Eisenberg said. ''These concerns have not fallen on deaf ears. We have seen the effects of these cuts in our own district."

Current and former high-ranking environmental figures signed the letter, including a former regional administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, a former state environmental secretary, the president of the Conservation Law Foundation, and two former chiefs of the attorney general's Environmental Protection Division.

''Massachusetts has led the nation on the environment, but you don't keep that lead on the cheap, not after year after year of budget cuts to enforcement and staff and maintenance," said James Gomes, president of the Environmental League of Massachusetts, who also signed the letter.

''Over time, your inflated opinion of yourself matches reality less and less," he said.

Joseph O'Keefe, a spokesman for the Executive Office of Environmental Affairs, said Governor Mitt Romney has essentially asked for level funding in his fiscal 2006 budget recommendations released earlier this year.

While not ideal, O'Keefe said the administration believes that the current budget allocations combined with more efficient practices have allowed the state's environmental agencies to do an adequate job. ''We're convinced that they have the tools to complete their core missions," he said.

The lawyers' letter and recent articles by the Globe, however, have painted a bleak picture of current environmental efforts: 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 obtained by the Globe last month.