by Peter Paden
Published March 2, 2012 in the Register-Star
Once again, it is budget season in Albany. The governor has submitted his opening bid, a proposed budget for 2012-2013, to the legislature. The Senate and Assembly now have a couple of months to review it, debate it, tweak it, and adopt a budget by or near the beginning of the upcoming fiscal year, which starts April 1.
In recent years there has been a lot of pain to spread around. Most people of good will have understood the need for austerity and tried to accommodate. As always seems to happen in times of economic stress, conservation and environmental protection programs have experienced some of the most severe cuts, vastly disproportionate to cutbacks in other areas, even though total budgeted expenditures are a minuscule fraction of the overall spending package.
This year, the state still has a budget deficit to deal with, but at $2 billion it is considerably less than the $10 billion deficit that had to be bridged last year.
So what’s in store for conservation? The short answer is at least one more year of severe austerity. This will create enormous challenges for everyone working to ensure the long term health of New York’s natural resources and to secure the substantial associated economic benefits. It is critically important to begin working now to ensure that this dynamic will be reversed in the years ahead.
The Environmental Protection Fund
Among thousands of items in the State budget is something called the Environmental Protection Fund (the “EPF”). It encompasses programs specifically designed to acquire and maintain park land and high value open spaces, to support farmland protection, to protect drinking water supplies, and to study and protect of sensitive ecological systems. It includes an array of programs to assist farmers in complying with environmental regulations and good stewardship of the land. It supports the construction of municipal waste water treatment plants, the rejuvenation of urban waterfronts, and the closure of municipal landfills. It is designed to assist communities and organizations in achieving significant conservation goals. In doing so, it brings major economic benefits to local communities – creating jobs and attractive business and living environments and saving millions of public dollars that would otherwise have to be spent cleaning up or mitigating negative environmental conditions. EPF funds have pumped more than $15 million into Columbia County’s economy over the years. CONTINUE READING
