Seastreak Wall Street docked at the East 34th Street Ferry Landing
NEW YORK (November 27, 2019) – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has awarded a $1,832,567 Diesel Emissions Reduction Act (DERA) grant to the Connecticut Maritime Foundation, Inc. to curb harmful pollution from ferries in the greater New York and New Jersey area.
“Upgrading older marine engines will improve air quality and reduce harmful air pollutants for ferry commuters and port communities in New York and northern New Jersey,” said EPA Regional Administrator Pete Lopez.
“EPA’s DERA funding to public and private entities allows it to strengthen partnerships and invest in innovative technologies that will benefit both the environment and the economy.”
EPA’s funding to the Connecticut Maritime Foundation will replace six marine diesel engines on a SeaStreak passenger ferry that operates in the waterways between New Jersey and New York City metropolitan area. The ferry, which has a capacity to carry 505 passengers, currently operates approximately 4,500 hours per year and transports an estimated 50,000 – 100,000 passengers annually between Highlands, NJ and Manhattan. Replacement of the vessel engines is expected to be completed by the end of June 2021.
The replacement of existing marine diesel engines with new, cleaner engines will reduce emissions of diesel particulate matter and other pollutants such as nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons and carbon dioxide, providing important public health and air quality benefits.
Exposure to diesel exhaust can lead to serious health conditions, like asthma and respiratory illnesses and can worsen existing heart and lung disease, especially in children and the elderly. EPA’s Diesel Emission Quantifier estimates the health benefit of this project as avoiding approximately $21.2 million in annual health care-related costs attributable to diesel emissions.
In FY 2019, EPA awarded over $89 million in DERA funding for state, national, and tribal grants to reduce emissions from a variety of diesel emission sources, including school buses, trucks, locomotive, marine engines, and other nonroad equipment.
CONCORD — A judge has temporarily stopped the state from implementing new regulations on groundwater contamination.
In his ruling, Merrimack County Superior Court Judge Richard B. McNamara wrote that it was likely that the Department of Environmental Services had not conducted an “adequate cost-benefit analysis” when the department decided to regulate chemicals known as PFOS, PFOA, PFHxS and PFNA.
The state’s earlier guideline of 70 parts per trillion standard for perfluorooctanoic acid was reduced to 12 ppt. A level of 38 ppt had been proposed.
On Sept. 30, Plymouth Village Water and Sewer District, Resource Management Inc., Charles G. Hansen and 3M sued the Department of Environmental Services to block the new regulations, which had been scheduled to take effect that day.
The strict standards made New Hampshire the first state to require routine testing and treatment for the four chemicals in water systems, landfills and wastewater plants.
The plaintiffs argued that the department did not allow enough notice for public input on the standards, and that they constituted an unfunded mandate.
McNamara wrote that the state law prohibiting unfunded mandates likely does not apply to any of the plaintiffs, and that the department provided years of notice that it intended to make rules around PFOS and the other chemicals.
But, McNamara wrote, the Department of Environmental Services likely had not performed a cost-benefit analysis as a 2018 state law required of all new regulations.
The department’s cost-benefit analysis seemed scanty to the plaintiffs, especially when compared with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s standards for preparing cost-benefit analyses.
The higher standards the department wanted to implement would result in much higher costs, the plaintiffs said, between 27 and 35 times higher than the lower standards the department first suggested in January.
DES did not cite any scientific research to justify the higher standards, McNamara wrote.
McNamara ruled Tuesday to stop the new regulations from being enacted until the department performs a more robust cost-benefit analysis. The order is to take effect on Dec. 31.
Philadelphia’s first city-wide composting facility will open in the spring. According to Mayor Jim Kenney’s Zero Waste and Litter Cabinet, this marks a major milestone toward Philly’s goal of eliminating landfills and incinerators by 2035.
A two-year update report, released on Monday by the Cabinet, describes the Lawncrest facility as the linchpin of the city’s plan to dramatically reduce the amount of waste buried and burned locally.
Philadelphia residents and businesses generated over two million tons of waste in 2017, according to the report. About half went to landfills and incinerators.
“There are many different materials that are being used and discarded. And a lot of those materials can find new lives, either through reuse, repair or recycling,” said Nic Esposito, Zero Waste and Litter cabinet director.
Food and organics are some of them. Which is why taking food waste out of the kitchen trash can has been one of the cabinet’s priorities since it was created by Mayor Kenney in 2016. But a major obstacle was blocking progress: The state doesn’t have a permit for composting in dense urban areas. So the city is creating the first, in partnership with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and the Pennsylvania Recycling Markets Center.
“One of the cabinet’s highlights this year is finally plugging the gap … around compost: having our community composting network up and running, our urban composting RFP finally out after four years of development, and other larger industrial-scale composters being attracted to a site here in the city,” said Esposito.
According to the request for proposals open until December 6, the facility will be privately operated on city-owned land on Rising Sun Ave, in Tacony Creek Park. The facility will compost food scraps from 30 – 35 city recreation centers, with the goal of eventually scaling up to enable composting at all 156 city centers. Smaller-scale composting operations will happen at about 11 other sites around the city — community gardens, schools and other rec centers — as part of the community composting network.
“Compost can be processed and used right here in the city,” Esposito said. “Philly will really be the city kind of opening the door, working with the DEP to make this happen. It will benefit many other cities throughout the Commonwealth as well.”
The city also celebrated another 2019 win in the report. In 2018, after China stopped accepting recyclables that were more than 0.5% contaminated for processing, Philadelphia started sending about half of its recyclables to incinerators. But now the city is back to recycling everything that residents put in their blue bins through a new contract with Waste Management. The city hopes that it will reduce the amount of waste sent to landfills and incinerators this year.
The city also decided to no longer include incineration, with or without conversion to fuel energy, as a waste diversion strategy. Its goal is to eliminate the use of all incinerators by 2035.
“We want that to be a very small piece of our solution. The bigger pieces are that we’re either recycling, composting or most importantly reusing and reducing our waste,” Esposito said.
Illegal dumping and litter on Berks Street, in Kensington. (Catalina Jaramillo/WHYY)
Is the city cleaner? Not yet
Even as the city makes strides towards changing Philly’s relationship with waste, the scene on the ground hasn’t changed much. Philadelphia’s streets were only 0.06 cleaner in 2018 compared to 2017, according to the city’s Litter Index.
Esposito says that while litter remains a big problem, the city has laid the foundation needed to reduce litter and waste over the long term. Tools such as the city’s municipal building waste audit, the commercial waste report and the litter index will make future progress possible, he said.
According to the report, the amount of heavy illegal dumping cleaned up by the city went from 11,525 tons in fiscal year 2016 to 6,808 tons in 2019, as a direct result of increased enforcement.
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The team known informally as the “environmental strike force,” in 1974. Front row, left to right: Elissa Parker; Barb Brandon; Pat McGinley; Bill Eichbaum; Jack Krill; Betsy McCoubrey; Tom Burke; Dennis Coyne; Dennis Strain. Second row, left to right: Eric Pearson; Paul Burroughs; Maxine Woelfling; Bill Oberdorfer; John Carroll; Karin Carter; Tom Oravetz; Bob Shusterman; Fran Dubrowski; Dennis Harnish; Ward Kelsey. Back row, left to right: Gene Dice; Tim Weston; Doug Blazey; Doug White (behind Blazey); Drew Dorfman; Dick Ehmann; Terry Bossert; Bob Yuhnke; Jim Rochow; Ralph Kates; Mike Alushin.
Marie Cusick reports for StateImpact
When Fran Dubrowski accepted her first job out of law school in 1974, she went to work at a relatively new agency in Pennsylvania — the Department of Environmental Resources.
Her mother urged her to rethink the decision.
“[Environmental law] was not a known or established career path, like it is today. My mother was so worried,” Dubrowski recalled. “She kept clipping ads for jobs. She suggested I go be a lawyer for the Army.”
Dubrowski didn’t take her mother’s advice. Instead, she became part of a team of attorneys doing what was groundbreaking work at the time — enforcing environmental laws. The state was also just starting to hire more female attorneys.
“My first case, the court reporter said to me, ‘I’ve never seen a woman try a case before, this will be great!’”
The team Dubrowski joined, known informally as the environmental strike force, was responsible for establishing some of the fundamental case law that modern-day state regulators still rely on.
“We were definitely among the first states in the country to do this,” said Marvin Fein, DER’s former director of litigation. “In the first few years, I was invited to Colorado, Virginia, New York — a whole bunch of places — to explain what we were doing about air pollution at power plants and steel mills.”
In the 1990s, DER split into its current incarnations: the Department of Environmental Protection and Department of Natural Resources and Conservation.
Nearly half-a-century later, the environmental strike force is reuniting. The group met last year in Washington D.C. and again last month in Bedford Springs.
“This year, we ended up discussing how the strike force could rise again,” Fein said. “We want to support the current DEP personnel in whatever way we can — through legislation or pushing for more money, and also litigation. We have the power to enforce certain laws, as citizens.”
He said they don’t have specific plans yet.
“Young, brilliant lawyers”
The 1970s were a transformational time for environmental enforcement, according to Patrick Parenteau, a professor at Vermont Law School, who was not part of the strike force.
“It was the dawn of the federal statutes in the 1970s that changed the whole way we got after pollution,” Parenteau said. “We did it with numbers. Every permit has numbers companies have to report, and they are potentially liable for — not only civil penalties — but criminal prosecutions.
Before the creation of the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of the federal Clean Air and Clean Water acts, Parenteau said polluters were simply expected to be good neighbors.
“If you’re driving down the highways and the sign says, ‘Drive carefully’ that’s not enforceable. If it says 55 miles per hour, that’s enforceable.”
Patrick McGinley, a law professor at West Virginia University, was part of the strike force from 1972 to 1975. At the time, he said, there was a growing recognition that society could not keep polluting without limits. The strike force formed not long after the first Earth Day, the formation of the EPA, and the passage of the federal Clean Air and Clean Water acts. Federal environmental laws are primarily enforced by the states.
“Up until that time, the answer was, ‘Dilution is the solution to pollution,’” McGinley recalled. ”The idea was, ‘Oh sure, we’ve got a refinery, a steel mill, a coal mine, and liquid runoff or discharges. Yeah that’s bad, but we’ll just put it in the river and downstream hopefully it will be harmless.’”
The people leading the strike force, were “young, and they were brilliant lawyers,” McGinley said. “The overarching goal of everything we did was to enforce the law. Laws that were intended to protect families, communities, and the environment.”
One of the team’s big wins was the 1977 state Supreme Court ruling Commonwealth v. Barnes and Tucker, which held a coal company responsible for the acid mine drainage flowing from its abandoned mining operations.
“It established the precedent, ‘If you generate water pollution on your property and it flows into the waters of the Commonwealth, you’re responsible for it,’” McGinley said.
Bob Yuhnke joined the strike force fresh out of law school in 1972 and remembered visiting the Bethlehem Steel Mill in Johnstown.
“It looked like a scene out of Dante’s hell,” he said. “It filled the valley with plumes of smoke. Red plumes, yellow plumes, brown plumes. It was horrific. In those days, we were just beginning to learn about the health effects of being exposed to all that stuff. Instinctively, I understood this was a problem that deserved to be resolved because it was making people sick.”
Yuhnke later helped negotiate a multi-million-dollar agreement with Bethlehem Steel to clean up its mills in Johnstown and Bethlehem.
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Pennsylvania state lawmakers, judges and top executive branch officials will collect another annual salary increase in 2020, with the governor’s salary passing $200,000 and rank-and-file lawmakers’ base salaries passing $90,000.
Their salary increase for the year ahead will be 1.9%, a figure tied by state law to the year-over-year change in the consumer price index published by the U.S. Department of Labor for urban consumers in the mid-Atlantic region.
The boost takes effect Dec. 1 for lawmakers and Jan. 1 for judicial and executive branch officials.
The increase is about one-third larger than last year’s increase comes at a time of steady growth in wages for private-sector workers.
Federal data from the three-month period ending in June showed average weekly wages for private-sector workers in Pennsylvania increased 3.8% year-over-year, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry. However, hourly wage data shows that wages have grown more slowly for workers at the bottom of the income ladder.
Supreme Court Chief Justice Tom Saylor is highest-paid, pulling down a $4,000 raise to just above $221,000. The rest of the Supreme Court’s seven members will be paid $215,000. Wolf’s salary will rise about $3,800 to almost $201,700, although he donates it to charity. Both are among the nation’s highest.
Most lawmakers, the nation’s third-highest paid, will see increases of $1,725 to about $90,300 in base pay. They also receive per diems, pensions and health benefits.
Lawmakers in leadership posts will top out at $141,000 for House Speaker Mike Turzai, R-Allegheny, and Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati, R-Jefferson. The four caucus floor leaders in the House and Senate will each make almost 130,900 while the four caucus whips and the four Appropriations Committee chairs will receive $121,100.
County court judges will see increases to about $186,700, while judges in larger districts, such as Philadelphia and Allegheny County, will get slightly more.
The salary for Lt. Gov. John Fetterman will surpass $169,400, while the three statewide elected row officers — Attorney General Josh Shapiro, Treasurer Joe Torsella and Auditor General Eugene DePasquale — each will make a little more than $167,800.
The salaries for the heads of Wolf’s 18 cabinet agencies will rise by law, topping out at almost $161,400 for leaders of the largest departments.
Elon Musk’s dramatic unveiling of Tesla’s electric pickup, the Cybertruck, has stirred quite a reaction. Apparently there are few who don’t either love or hate it.
Marques Brownlee, who has built an enormous YouTube following since posting his first tech reviews as a teenager, notes what online folks are saying about the stunning-or-hideous-looking vehicle and why he’s come down on the I-need-one side.
Below is Marques’s video. Tell us what you think by clicking on the ‘comment’ link up top under the headling.
I’m in line with Marques’s observations but must confess that, many years ago, I (and about 10 other Americans) was thrilled by the introduction of a Detroit style-breaking auto, shaped like an egg. Help me out here. Who made it and what was it called?
