Missouri Department of Natural Resources officials blame state Sen. Brad Lager (R-Maryville) for terminating the department's ability to collect fees for State Operating Permits that fund the state's Water Protection Program for 2011. The bill that would have extended those funds was expected to pass on the last day of the legislative session in May, but Lager sent it to the Fiscal Oversight Committee for further review instead.
During an interview for this
week's story,
Lager said that his failure to pass the bill wasn't part of some
diabolical scheme to undercut DNR's authority. Nor was his investigation
into the E. coli controversy at the Lake of the Ozarks an attempt to
smear Gov. Jay Nixon's administration, as the minority members of
Lager's commission on Commerce, Consumer
Protection, Energy and the Environment have alleged.
"This
is not a Jay Nixon issue, so
I want to be really clear about that," Lager said. "DNR, fundamentally
and
structurally, this is a mindset they have carried for decades. It's
just consistently getting worse, and it's time for it to end."
Does he have some special animosity against Nixon's appointed head of
DNR, Mark Templeton? "All I know is, he (Templeton) grew up on
the East Coast and now he's here telling Midwest farmers and industry
how they should run their businesses," Lager said. So...yes?
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Discharging is a privalige, not a right. If permitees were responsible for their actions, then a law like the Clean Water Act and agencies like EPA and DNR would not be needed. So, I don't want to hear, "Oh, those poor mistreated permittees". DNR does and has had stakeholder meetings, trying to reach a consensus. I don't see Lager at any of these meetings. And how dare he listen to one side of the story when he is supposed to represent the people of Missouri as a whole. Lager, come to a meeting and you will see why the permittees do not get their way. They would rather do away with environmental regulations all together, most of the time. Those regulations get in their way of doing buisness and make things hard, so they whine like 3 year olds, trying to get there way. Well, you know what, it is supposed to be hard. We are protecting public health here. No one ever said it was a "Tea Party".
Brad Lager is useless. Let's here it for politicians not getting all the info and once again not getting their facts straight! Lager is one of those politicians that give politicians a BAD name.
DNR is trying to run a Water Protections program with little funding. Idiots like Lager wage useless war against them all day long for not doing enough, and yet will not fix the problem by helping to fund them.
Go ahead Lager get Water Protection in this state turned over to EPA and watch them fine the daylights out over Missouri farmers and businesses.
Or get off your political soap box fund the DNR program made up of the same qualified individuals like the EPA has and watch them work with the Missouri's people to make the issues better.
Brad Lager sure mentions DNR's need to "work with industry" a lot in his interview--what about the need to work with the people that swim and fish in Missouri's waters every day and those who want to protect that water quality? If we've learned anything over the past year, it's exactly how much E coli and other pollutants have made it into the state's waters, and working with the people who put it there probably isn't going to get us to cleaner water.
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