Editor’s CornerMichael A. West

The Spring issue leads off with an upbeat interview with Mr. Don-ald F. Schregardus, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Environ-ment). Compared with earlier Journal interviews on Navy-related en-vironmental and natural resource issues, there is quite a lot to beupbeat about. As the primary beneficiary of two of the recently en-acted statutory clarifications involving the Marine Mammal ProtectionAct and the Endangered Species Act, the Navy has significantly re-duced two very serious obstacles to naval training, readiness, and en-hanced operational capabilities.

By shifting the statutory focus of “harassment of marine mammals”from any “potential to disturb” to the disruption of biologically sig-nificant behaviors, the Navy will have greater latitude to train with,test, and deploy new acoustic underwater sensing systems like low-frequency sonar. Moreover, the Navy can avail itself of the new na-tional security exemption in the event that a more timely response toan emerging threat is required. Equally important, proponents for theprotection of marine mammals can reorient the focus of their concernson the more pervasive manmade generators of ocean noise (i.e.,drilling and construction) and harassment (commercial shipping andrecreational boating). Ongoing research by the Navy on the distribu-tion of marine mammals could materially assist in more comprehen-sive efforts to enhance their protection.

Likewise, the statutory clarification of the Endangered SpeciesAct provides a way for the Navy and the Department of Defense toavoid critical habitat designation on installations if they have an ad-equate, fully implemented and resourced integrated natural re-source management plan (INRMP) that provides a benefit to the en-dangered species involved. By their very nature, INRMPs are betternatural resource management tools, as they are more comprehen-sive than critical species habitat designations. By its very nature, theSikes Act is a more appropriate statutory vehicle as its focus is onproviding the best balance in reconciling competing natural re-source and national security requirements. As Mr. Schregardusnotes, the Navy and DOD face a significant challenge in meeting thenew requirements and they can expect continued close stakeholderscrutiny as they attempt to do so.

One of the arguments against clarifying the Endangered SpeciesAct was that it would place a greater burden on other private andpublic lands. This smacks of the old ditty about taxation, “Don’t taxyou, don’t tax me, tax the man behind the tree.” Sole reliance on fed-

Federal Facilities Environmental Journal/Spring 2004 1© 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/ffej.20000

Michael A. West is the editor of Federal Facilities Environmental Journal.

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eral land to meet existing and emerging Endangered Species Act re-quirements is simply not realistic. Moreover, perpetuating this erro-neous perspective hinders efforts to fashion a more effective na-tional response. Imagine if every county were required to prepareand implement an INRMP. Not only would it serve as a useful toolfor structuring future development and land-use decisions, but itwould also contribute valuable data on a state and national level foreffective natural resource management on an ecosystem basis.Whatever approach is ultimately adopted, we are not going to getvery far trying to realize the goals of the Endangered Species Act—nationally or globally—until we are willing to admit that we are all“behind the tree.”

Pending the outcome of that national debate, the Navy and DODare taking advantage of recent congressional authority to engage withother public and private landowners to improve conservation of natu-ral resources and minimize encroachment surrounding military instal-lations. Mr. Schregardus also outlines a number of administrative ini-tiatives the Navy is pursuing with the Department of the Interior toaddress a number of concerns about regulatory practices involving theEndangered Species Act. The most perverse of these falls under theheading of “no good deed goes unpunished.” For years, the Navy hasmade considerable progress in increasing populations of endangeredspecies at various installations and training sites, which the regulatorsand stakeholders have applauded. At the same time, however, the reg-ulators have been reluctant to increase “take” thresholds correspond-ingly to reflect the fact that increased populations raise the likelihoodthat takes will increase during military activities. A more reasonableregulatory approach would provide a greater incentive for militarymanagers to enhance endangered species populations if it resulted ingreater operational flexibility.

According to Mr. Schregardus, the Navy’s environmental cleanupprogram continues to meet Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD)goals with steadily declining cost-to-complete projections. Althoughthe Navy will not meet the 2005 goal for the completion of Base Re-alignment and Closure (BRAC) environmental cleanups, the primarycontributor is the challenging California regulatory climate. The bestnews is that the proceeds of recent sales of BRAC property have al-lowed the Navy to forego a request for additional appropriations infiscal year 2005 and that pending and future sales may eliminate theneed for any additional taxpayer funding to close out pre-2005 BRACrequirements. BRAC 2005 will certainly involve additional environ-mental challenges, but nothing on the scale of earlier rounds. Allprospective BRAC installations have been categorized, most sitecleanups have been completed, and prospective entities for the reuseof these properties are better able to utilize them consistent with theirenvironmental condition. In addition, BRAC procedures have fullymatured since the early 1990s and will have the benefit of the lessonslearned in the earlier rounds.

A more reasonableregulatory approachwould provide a greaterincentive for militarymanagers to enhanceendangered speciespopulations if it resultedin greater operationalflexibility.

Federal Facilities Environmental Journal/Spring 2004 3

Michael A. West

We are pleased to welcome back Freddie E. Hall Jr. with another in-teresting case study involving the comparison of three strategies formeeting air quality management requirements associated with emis-sions from the industrial wastewater treatment facility (IWTF) at Tin-ker Air Force Base, Oklahoma. The focus of this comparison was onthe performance of open-path Fourier Transform InfraRed spec-troscopy (OP-FTIR) methodology compared with a coupled model (airemission model and air dispersion model) and the use of air qualitymonitoring data collected via discontinuous air sampling and analysis(periodic canister modeling). In contrast to virtually all the case stud-ies published in the Journal, the promising new technology, OP-FTIR,was not successful in monitoring air quality emissions from the TinkerIWTF. Dr. Hall provides a great deal of useful information about thenature of this failure and factors contributing to it. In sum, it is a use-ful cautionary tale about the difficulties in trying to apply promisingtechnologies to address DOD compliance challenges.

Moving on to remediation, Dennis E. Lundquist, Philip M. Hunter,and Fred T. Price discuss the need for effective environmental sitecloseout strategies. With the DOD cleanup program winding down,this article is particularly timely and relevant. Drawing upon numer-ous lessons learned and success stories at Air Force environmentalrestoration sites, the authors enumerate various aspects of a successfulsite closeout strategy, including early planning, optimizing the reme-dial process, and the establishment of a closeout documentation trailand archival system.

The Journal is indebted to Daniel J. O’Rourke, Stephen J. Najjar, andJoseph E. B. Elliott for their case study on the management of ColdWar historic structures—in this instance, a satellite-tracking antenna atNew Boston Air Force Station, New Hampshire. In recent years, theJournal has attempted to increase its coverage of DOD efforts to pre-serve historic structures without much success. This is very unfortu-nate, as historic preservation requirements have been a major chal-lenge to the timely transfer and reuse of BRAC facilities and asignificant encroachment issue. The authors provide a very useful ex-ample of how the “management of historic properties can be ad-dressed without interfering with mission activities.”

Michael Greenberg returns to the Journal with his colleagues, HenryMayer and David Lewis, to provide another thought-provoking dis-cussion involving the management of the Department of Energy’s nu-clear waste legacy. The authors argue for the need for a more compre-hensive approach to forecasting life-cycle costs at former weapon sites,including “long-term stewardship, failure scenarios, and exogenouscosts.” Acceptance of this point of view might be a hard sell, as itseems to run counter to the current DOE effort to “accelerate cleanup”and drive costs down. This discomfort with total life-cycle costs at nu-clear waste sites appears to be shared by Congress—or at least the ap-propriations committees. Over time, site-specific circumstances maychange this point of view, but the political threshold for annual DOE

In recent years, theJournal has attempted toincrease its coverage ofDOD efforts to preservehistoric structureswithout much success.

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site remediation expenditures has been pretty firmly established andreversing it will take a bit of doing.

Turning now to the problems of encroachment and sustainability,Mike Flannery outlines how the Army is attempting to develop amore effective and comprehensive approach to meet its goal of sus-tainable installations. Using the recent initiatives at Fort Lewis, Wash-ington, Mr. Flannery provides practical examples of how the Armyand other DOD installations might realize the goal of sustainabilitywithout sacrificing mission capability. While it is gratifying that theArmy is exercising leadership on sustainability in 2003, it would beinteresting to have someone do a study on why this was not done in1993. The threats to training and readiness requirements posed by ex-isting and emerging natural and cultural resource and environmentalrequirements were clear a decade ago. Nevertheless, conservation ef-forts were only marginally funded and resourced, and the Army’sbest training sustainment program, the Integrated Training AreaManagement (ITAM) program, was zeroed out in one of the internalannual budget drills. Congress deserves credit for enacting amend-ments to the Sikes Act requiring DOD installations to prepare IN-RMPs. And it must be admitted that stakeholder agitation and cre-ative third-party litigation created broad and unequivocal threats tofuture military training and readiness. While it seems to be the Amer-ican Way to let problems fester until they reach critical mass beforetaking action, one would hope that the Army’s—and DOD’s—in-creased effort on sustainment would generate more proactive re-sponses to existing and emerging challenges.

Completing a two-part advocacy of greater federal facility emphasison environmental construction, Khalid M. Siddiqi, Rita Oberle, LindaThomas-Mobley, and Roozbeh Kangari discuss factors motivating suchemphasis. The authors provide a framework that “can be used by fed-eral agencies addressing life-cycle environmental issues pertaining tocompliance, conservation, and pollution prevention” and “minimizeremediation in new building and environmental construction projects.”

WASHINGTON UPDATE

DOE Funding and IssuesAlthough the DOE budget request was significantly restructured,

congressional funding adjustments remained very modest, as Exhibit1 indicates.

After years of rebuffs by Congress, DOE was more successful inthis year’s efforts to pursue a three-level site acceleration cleanupstrategy, with an accompanying restructuring of the budget request.Accelerated cleanup sites are now categorized by the following tar-get dates—2006, 2012, and 2035. To meet these new goals, cleanupagreements with various states had to be renegotiated, with the ap-propriations committees threatening to hold up funding if agree-ment could not be reached. Only New Mexico failed to meet the

The threats to trainingand readiness require-ments posed by existingand emerging natural andcultural resource andenvironmental require-ments were clear a decade ago.

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Michael A. West

deadline, but the expectation was that an agreement would be forth-coming shortly after enactment. Nevertheless, the process still raisedsome hackles on Capitol Hill.

For one thing, the appropriations committees were exasperated byan increase in cost estimates for from $4.35 billion to $5.78 billion forthe Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant at Hanford. The Sen-ate Appropriations Committee directed DOE to review the baselinecost and schedule estimates for all line-item construction projects con-tained in the fiscal year 2004 budget request. Moreover, the confereeson H.R. 2754 directed DOE to use the Army Corps of Engineers toconduct a detailed, bottom-up, independent review of the cost andschedule of the baseline estimates of the Waste Treatment and Immo-bilization Plant by April 30, 2004. In addition, the appropriationscommittees strongly objected to DOE’s strategy of “sending forth itscontractors to advocate for legislative changes that are necessary toexecute accelerated cleanup plans” and directed DOE to report to therelevant committees of Congress to identify such statutory changesand submit a comprehensive legislative proposal with the fiscal year2005 budget. It should be noted, however, that the contractor lobby-ing for such a statutory change involving the Fernald, Ohio, site wassuccessful in securing legislative relief, which was expanded to in-clude the Niagara Falls Storage Site in New York. Finally, the appro-priations committees directed DOE to meet a number of reporting re-quirements to certify cost estimates, funding adequacy, andcomprehensiveness of performance management plans involvingnew acceleration and reform cleanup agreements.

Continued frustration that DOE has failed to compete existingmanagement and operating (M&O) contracts at its current facilities inthe past 50 years was revisited again by Congress with more explicitguidance. Section 301 of the Energy and Water Development Appro-priations Act of 2004 explicitly directs that DOE compete M&O con-tracts at Ames Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence

Exhibit 1. Authorization and Appropriation Act Funding Adjustments Compared to the FY 2003DOE Environmental Budget Request [$ in millions]

Environmental Account Authorization Appropriations Earmarks

Defense Site Accelerated Completion 0.0 –163.7 81.6 Defense Environmental Services 0.0 –4.0 12.0 Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP) 0.0 0.0 0.0

Naval Reactors 0.0 –2.0 2.0 Defense Nuclear Waste Disposal –37.5 –40.0 0.0 Other Defense Activities –5.0 +38.3 5.0 TOTAL –42.5 –171.4 100.6

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Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Labora-tory, and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The treatment of waste bound for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant(WIPP), New Mexico, was the subject of two provisions. On the onehand, Sec. 310, a provision contained in previous Energy and WaterDevelopment Appropriations Acts that limited transuranic waste toless that 20 percent plutonium by weight for the aggregate of anymaterial category, was retained. On the other hand, Sec. 311 wouldrequire that waste characterization would be limited to determiningthat the waste is not “ignitable, corrosive, or reactive” and DOE wasdirected to seek modification to its WIPP Hazardous Waste FacilityPermit to implement this change by December 31, 2003.

Apart from the above, the DOE Legislative Update reflects a host ofpolicy guidance, including:

• establishment of a policy for the Department of Energy re-garding future defense environmental management matters;

• requirement for progress reports on Energy Employees Occu-pational Illness Compensation Program;

• consolidation of the Office of Worker and Community Transi-tion and the Office of Legacy Management; and

• increasing the flexibility of construction projects for the envi-ronmental management program. �