Environmental Governance: A Report on the Next Generation of Environmental Policy

Chapter Three: Measurement That Matters: Cleaning Up the Charles River

On October 22, 1995, the regional administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) New England office, John DeVillars, proclaimed to the press and all who would listen that the long-contaminated Lower Charles River— running between Cambridge and Boston out to the Boston Harbor— would be clean enough for swimming by 2005. Hooray, river advocates cheered, daring to dream for what had so long seemed impossible. Outrageous , skeptics cried. The sources of contamination to the river were not even known. How could the river be clean enough to swim in within ten years? Five years after the initial announcement, as this chapter is being written, DeVillars’s promise is becoming reality. By April 2000, the 58 chapter three Measurement That Matters: Cleaning Up the Charles River Shelley H. Metzenbaum I am grateful to the members of the Executive Session on Public Sector Performance Management, Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government, and the members of the Environmental Compliance Consortium, University of Maryland School of Public Affairs. The participants in these projects have helped me understand and articulate the ideas presented in this chapter much more vividly than would have been possible otherwise . Ken Jones, Jason Morrison, and those who attended several roundtable Brookings discussions on environmental management convened between 1988 and 2000 also contributed many valuable suggestions to improve this chapter. Many of the people interviewed , notably Ken Moraff, Bill Walsh-Rogalski, and John De Villars, not only helped me learn about the Clean Charles initiative but also graciously reviewed and commented on the accuracy of this chapter. Lower Charles River was clean enough for boating 90 percent of the time, up from 39 percent in 1995. It was safe for swimming 65 percent of the time, compared with 19 percent of the time five years earlier.1 Where is the story here? An environmental agency leader announces an environmental goal. Progress toward the goal is measured. Progress toward the goal is made. Most citizens would assume that this is what environmental protection agencies and their leaders routinely do—identify environmental problems and opportunities, set goals for making progress, direct attention and resources to the problem, make and measure progress toward the goal, and revise the strategy if it is not working. Unfortunately, as any employee of an environmental regulatory agency would tell you, this almost intuitive order of business is the exception rather than the rule. Despite major federal and state environmental laws that set environmental goals, the decisions and compromises that get made during passage and implementation of the laws often weaken the link between agency activities and environmental outcomes . In implementing these laws, both regulators and regulated parties tend to focus on activities and lose sight of the environmental outcomes sought. Although these activity-focused compromises are often necessary and valuable in the short term, they can lose their value over time if the focus on activities overwhelms attention to outcomes and the connection between the activity and the environmental goal gets lost in the implementation. Perhaps the most striking example of this problem is the paltry state of water quality information in the United States. To achieve rapid advances in water quality, the 1972 Amendments to the Clean Water Act concentrated on getting large wastewater dischargers to install equipment meeting national technology standards.2 The law also included a back-up strategy calling for states and the EPA to take additional actions to meet water quality standards if the technology standards failed to achieve them.3 Yet almost thirty years after passage of the federal Clean Water Act, water quality has been assessed for only 23 percent of the nation’s river miles, 43 percent of its lakes, and 32 percent of its estuaries . Water quality data are available for only 5 percent of ocean shorelines .4 How can federal and state agencies possibly meet water quality standards if they do not even know how clean the waters are? The system’s concentration on activities seems to overwhelm its ability to clean up even those waters that have been assessed, only 40 percent of which currently meet water quality standards.5 The problem is measurement that matters 59 that the program’s early focus on controlling discharges from large sources through permits and routine inspection of permitted facilities has long consumed government attention. Maintaining this focus has left government agencies with limited additional resources to deal with other possible sources, even...