The websites of the fifty state environmental agencies were reviewed for information on sector-based programs and resources developed by state or local agencies, or available to regulated entities in the state. Brief website reviews are provided for each state, with direct links to on-line resources and program descriptions when available.
The review process proved interesting in two respects:
Some observations are summarized below.
Three tables have also been included:
As indicated in Section 1, the most well-developed area in which sector-based resources are likely to be found is environmental assistance, comprising such topics as compliance assistance, pollution prevention, and permit assistance. The assistance can be in the form of fact sheets, check lists, or guidance manuals. In some cases, state agencies have provided sector-specific web pages. Many states provide sector-specific permit application forms and many provide sector- specific permit assistance. A fair number of states are active in various sector-specific national "beyond compliance" programs, and a few have instituted programs of their own.
In addition to programs and resources, a sector approach can sometimes be distilled from the organization chart of the state regulatory agency. There may be a branch or a unit devoted specifically to a particular sector. This situation is typically found in states with one or two dominant industries of particular environmental concern.
Table 1 lists the most common types of sector based items, and indicates for each of the fifty states which items may be found at the regulatory agency website.
It must be emphasized that, while this review turned up a great many illustrative examples of sector programs and resources developed by state and local government, it is by no means a comprehensive list. Not all local sector-based programs are mentioned on state websites. (For that matter, there may be local sector-based programs that are not mentioned on the web at all.) Omission from this document should by no means reflect on the value of any sector-based program.
It is interesting to set the fifty state environmental regulatory agency websites side by side and compare their different approaches. Some noteworthy trends emerge.
First, a disclaimer. While the choices that go into the content and presentation of a website certainly indicate something about the respective state agencies they represent, it is a limited picture. The websites are at best an incomplete reflection of the approach and philosophy of the agencies responsible for them, and are even further removed from the character of other institutions in the state and of its people. These comments are directed toward the websites, and are not intended to apply to the culture, business climate, or environmental agendas of the states themselves, as a whole. (To be sure, cross-cutting website comparisons of this sort, treating the websites as cultural artifacts, probably would make very interesting subjects for sociological analysis, but would require methodological considerations beyond the purposes of this document.)
The Introduction to this document suggests a way to categorize approaches to environmental protection. In the framework presented there, the most fundamental dissection involves distinguishing approaches centered on the resources to be protected from approaches centered on the sources of environmental impact. In short, one can stand defensively at the receiving end of environmental impact, or one can approach the sources and attempt to modulate them. In practice, any environmental policy will involve a blend of these complementary dispositions.
Ranked along a spectrum, the state websites span a broad range of mixtures of the two types of approach:
"Protect the resource" websites often include some characteristic features:
Table 2 below contains a summary of which state environmental websites feature these items prominently. Examples of states with several protection-oriented and few sector-oriented features include Georgia, Massachusetts, West Virginia, California, Indiana, New Jersey, and Virginia.
"Balanced" websites typically contain the sector-based items discussed above and listed in Table 1, as well as protection-oriented items. Examples of states with several items of both types include Florida, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Washington, Arizona, and Colorado.
A few states, including Wisconsin, Kansas and Louisiana, have several sector-oriented features and few of the protection-oriented features listed here. This may be an artifact of the protection-oriented features chosen. Although several state websites, as noted in the website reviews, provide a wide variety of sector-based resources, no state website could be characterized as strongly sector-oriented, taken in its entirety.
There are examples of sites on the web other than state environmental websites which are strongly source-oriented, such as the sector-specific Compliance Assistance Centers funded through EPA's Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance. They are not themselves hosted on the environmental agencies' own websites. Instead, they were developed through cooperative agreements with organizations representing the sectors.
Sector-specific compliance assistance websites serve the very useful function of translating general information into a form particularly suitable to one specific user community. By using cooperative agreements with assistance providers representing the sectors, EPA has developed a way to offload this translation process, to the benefit of both the agency and the public.
Presumably, this same approach would be possible at the other end of the spectrum. While few if any existing examples are evident, there would seem to be no fundamental obstacle preventing state environmental agencies from executing similar agreements with environmental organizations to develop websites covering "protect the resource" style features. It would be interesting to see how the process plays out. In the case of the sector-specific centers, the interplay between EPA and the assistance providers has created resources both acceptable to the agency and responsive to the needs of the sector. Just as working collaboratively with sector representatives has allowed EPA to develop a better targeted presentation of compliance assistance information, working with organizations representing various aspects of public concern might allow agencies at all levels (including state agencies) to provide the public a greater wealth of interpretive material on specific topics than is possible from the common denominator approach appropriate to an agency website.