Managing Green Mandates: Local Rigors of U.S. Environmental Regulation

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Managing Green Mandates Local Rigors of U.S. Environmental Regulation Pietro S. Nivola Jon A. Shields AEI-BROOKINGS JOINT CENTER FOR REGULATORY STUDIES Managing Green Mandates Local Rigors of U.S. Environmental Regulation Pietro S. Nivola and Jon A. Shields Federal policies have made great progress protecting the environment . But those policies sometimes have imposed inordinate costs on local governments. Managing Green Mandates describes various federal environmental directives that are ill-suited to conditions at the local level and that compel communities to spend their revenues on reducing relatively minor risks to public health. While the federal government has imposed far-reaching requirements on local authorities, it is offering them less aid to comply with its increasingly stringent standards. The burden of those underfunded mandates can create further economic hardships for many fiscally overextended municipalities. Pietro S. Nivola is a senior fellow in the Governmental Studies program at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of Laws of the Landscape: How Policies Shape Cities in Europe and America (Brookings, 1999). Jon A. Shields is a graduate student in the Department of Government and Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia. American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20036 www.aei.org The Brookings Institution 1775 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20036 www.brookings.edu Managing Green Mandates frontmat.p65 6/28/01, 11:05 AM 1 frontmat.p65 6/28/01, 11:05 AM 2 ...