Virginia Decries Clubby Relations Between EPA, Enviro Lobby

In an unusually blunt letter from Virginia's Secretary of Natural Resources, Doug Domenech,calls out the clubbiness of the cleanup program, which mostly involves like-minded environmentalists, scientists and government officials.

In his letter last month to the regional director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Domenech said the program's Citizens Advisory Committee took "inappropriate action" in "lobbying" for stricter catch limits on menhaden, an important fish species in the Bay.

"It is Virginia's opinion that the CAC does not, or at least should not, have the independent authority as a body to lobby other organizations," Domenech wrote to Shawn Garvin, the EPA's regional head.

As individual citizens the members of the CAC, of course, have the right to lobby anyone for anything, within the limits of the law. However, when the represent themselves as a federal body, they tread close to a violation of the Hatch Act, which forbids official political activity by the executive branch.

"Our job is to help educate policy-makers and encourage them to take actions we think will help the Bay," said Nikki Tinsley, a former EPA employee and Maryland resident who chairs the CAC. "It's really not more complicated than that."

Fisheries are controlled largely by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, another federal agency specifically created to deal with the problems of fisheries that cross state boundaries, as the menhaden clearly does.  The EPA could make an argument that as a filter feeding organism, menhaden have a role above and beyond the role of a commercial fish, and the food of other commercial fish; that a healthy population of menhaden could help the Bays pollution problems.  I'm attracted to that point of view ecologically, but opposed to it on a legal basis.  In practice, virtually everything affects the environment at some level or another, carrying that argument out to it's logical extension leads to an ecological equivalent of the commerce clause.  EPA then asserts the right to regulate everything because everything affects the environment. 

Oh, wait, that's pretty much the situation today.