[CT Birds] Article from The Day re: increased funding for DEP & CT's environment

[wingsct at juno.com]

To reiterate Patrick Comins's message to support increased funding for DEP
and CT's environment, the following is from today's The Day.  Please contact
your state legislators and ask them to support the funding bill.

Meredith Sampson 
Old Greenwich



State Lags on Funds for Parks 
Connecticut called one of worst in supporting the environment 

By Judy Benson    Published on 4/14/2008 



Though Connecticut is often called the richest state in the country, its state parks are 
among the poorest. 
Just ask Rob Smith, who retired in October after a career managing parks for the 
Department of Environmental Protection. He spent his last 15 years at Rocky Neck State 
Park in Niantic, while also holding the title of assistant director for all the state's 
106 historic and natural area parks and 32 state forests. 
“That's the embarrassing part of it,” said Smith, who testified to the legislature's 
Environment Committee last month about the need for more funding for state parks. “Here 
we are the richest state, and we're tied for 48th in terms of state funding for parks.” 
He was referring to the percentage of the entire state budget that goes to the DEP for 
all its operations, from parks to wildlife programs to environmental regulation and 
enforcement. The agency receives one-quarter of 1 percent, while states such as New York 
, New Jersey , Massachusetts and Rhode Island all supply their equivalent agencies with 
more than twice that. 
This week, Smith and Gary Nasiatka, current manager of Rocky Neck, led a tour of Rocky 
Neck with the co-presidents of the volunteer and advocacy group Friends of Connecticut 
State Parks. Rocky Neck attracts about 375,000 visitors annually. Only Hammonasset, 
another coastal park gets more. 
The purpose of the tour was to show examples of the park's deterioration due to decades 
of underfunding and sparse staffing. Susan Mentser and Eileen Grant, co-presidents of the 
Friends group, said the problems may be more severe at Rocky Neck than some other parks, 
but all show signs of state stinginess — curtailed hours, areas closed to the public, 
long-overdue maintenance and unrealized potential for new programs. In January, the 
6,000-member Friends group released its annual State of the State Parks report, calling 
it, “State Parks Near Disastrous Tipping Point: Infrastructure deteriorating; experienced 
staff leaving.” 
“The operating budgets for each park are unbelievably small,” said Mentser, giving Rocky 
Neck's budget as an example — $16,000, down from $64,000 in 2000. That covers everything 
from toilet paper for the bathhouses to truck repairs. 
“They really don't even cover many routine projects. If some of these issues were 
addressed, the parks could generate more revenues,” she said. 
Smith and the Friends group have joined the Connecticut Fund for the Environment, 
Citizens Campaign for the Environment, the Nature Conservancy, Audubon Connecticut and 
legislative leaders from both parties to call for passage of a bill that would add $4.5 
million to the DEP's operating budget in the coming fiscal year. 
“It's looking very good for the $4.5 million,” said state Rep. Richard Roy, D-Milford, 
co-chairman of the Environment Committee. He noted that the chairmen of the 
Appropriations Committee and Senate President Pro Tempore Donald Williams are part of the 
coalition. The Appropriations Committee is scheduled to begin discussions on the fate of 
the bill early this week. 
The DEP, said spokesman Dennis Schain, has a total budget of about $135 million, but only 
one-quarter of that comes from state funds. The rest is generated from federal grants for 
specific projects and programs, from fees for hunting and fishing licenses and park 
entrance fees. The parks portion of the DEP budget is about $11 million. Schain said the 
DEP would not take a position on the bill. 
The $4.5 million, if approved, would enable the DEP to add 50 new positions, about half 
for parks and the others for the agency's regulatory work. It would also infuse new 
funding to expand recycling programs and increase funding in other areas such as park 
operating budgets. This would be in addition to the $15 million in Gov. M. Jodi Rell's 
budget proposal for next year for repair projects at parks and forests. 
Rell's office, which has touted its support for the DEP's No Child Left Inside programs, 
which encourages more children and families to use state parks, did not respond to a 
request to provide a comment on the proposal to add $4.5 million to the DEP budget. 
“The DEP has been so starved for the past decades,” said Juliet Manalan, spokeswoman for 
the Connecticut Fund for the Environment. “We're trying to bring the DEP to a minimum 
standard. The DEP does a miraculous job with what they have, but it costs money to go 
after polluters.” 
Karl Wagener, executive director of the state's Council on Environmental Quality, said 
the issue of an understaffed, underfunded DEP has been festering for years. His agency, 
which is independent from the DEP, annually assesses progress on a variety of 
environmental issues in the state, and this year focused on the DEP in a report released 
last month and provided to state legislators. 
In it, the council noted that the DEP “spends no more in state dollars (when adjusted for 
inflation) than when it was created in 1972” and called for a $190 million investment in 
capital improvements for parks, land conservation, Long Island Sound restoration, sewage 
plant upgrades and other projects. The report also notes that the number of full-time 
park employees, 95, is less than the number of parks. Several park managers are 
responsible for multiple sites, including boat launches and forest property. 
Wagener said that the council focused on the DEP in its report this year because “we kept 
running into a string of problems where the underlying problem was that there weren't 
people to do the work.” He cited an example: the state has only two staff members 
assigned to inland wetlands protection work, which includes enforcement as well as 
teaching volunteers of conservation and wetlands commissions in the state's 169 towns 
about wetlands laws. At least six are needed, he said. 
For the general public, he said, state parks provide the most obvious evidence that the 
DEP needs more money. The situation at Rocky Neck, said Smith, the park manager, 
illustrates that point. 
The 710-acre park, with a sandy swimming beach and 160 campsites, has only five full-time 
staff to do maintenance and administration, and Rocky Neck is just one of several 
properties they're responsible for. In the 1990s, he said, there were 15 full-timers. 
The historic fieldstone pavilion that sits at the crest of a hill overlooking the beach 
used to be open daily, and was well used as a shelter on rainy days for beachgoers and 
campers. Since 2001, because of lack of staff to clean the bathrooms and man the 
building, it's only open for weddings and other banquet groups who rent it out for an 
event. A handsome and unique structure, it dates from the 1930s and is on the National 
Register of Historic Places. The building needs new windows, repairs to a rotted exterior 
wall on the backside and other repairs. 
The parking lot near the pavilion is kept closed, too, because of lack of staff and 
pavement problems, even though the park frequently has to turn cars away on hot summer 
days when other parking lots fill. The flat roof on one of the bathhouses is 45 years 
old, the nature center and ticket booths in the campground are undersized relics from 
another era, and a rough stone jetty needs a concrete top pavement. Nasiatka, the park 
manager, said 50 people fell while walking out on the jetty last summer, despite warning 
signs. Two were seriously hurt. 
“People just want to go out there,” he said. 
A 2003 consultant's report done for the DEP listed 45 repair and improvement projects 
that were needed, at an estimated cost of $18 million, in addition to more full- and 
part-time staff. 
“We have no money for materials,” said Smith. “We can't even repair the trucks properly. 
We're not able to maintain the park trails properly. What we've become very good at is 
keeping up appearances. We may slap paint on something, but don't look too closely, 
because it's rotten underneath. The staff is covering such large areas that in some 
cases, we don't even know where the DEP boundaries are, they don't know the history of 
the parks.”


Kierran Broatch
Outreach Associate

Connecticut Fund for the Environment
205 Whitney Avenue, 1st Floor
New Haven, CT 06511
Tel: (203) 787-0646 Ext. 117

DEFENDING THE ENVIRONMENT - SAFEGUARDING OUR FUTURE
 


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