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The Strait and Narrow
CFE head Strait says businesses can benefit from a healthier state environment
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Business New Haven
4/15/2002
By: BNH
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Donald S. Strait of Stamford is executive director of the New Haven-based Connecticut Fund for the Environment. Founded 24 years ago, CFE describes itself as the state's non-profit legal champion for the environment. Working with citizen activists, other environmental groups and public officials, CFE uses law, science and education to improve air and water quality, control toxic contamination, minimize the adverse impacts of highways and traffic congestion, protect public water supplies and preserve open space and wetlands.
Was there a specific issue that galvanized CFE's formation in 1978?
In 1978 there was a need perceived for a group with legal expertise to help ensure that federal and state environmental laws were being properly implemented. There was a sense that government had a tremendous responsibility to carry out these mandates, including the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, but that there was no independent entity to represent the public's interest in seeing that those laws were carried out properly.
It started out with a guy who graduated from Yale and the University of Michigan Law School, Fred Krupp, and he enlisted volunteer help and began working with a New Haven lawyer, Peter Cooper. They began to build this effort with help from students and attorneys from around the state. Then came a board of directors, and [CFE] began hiring staff.
Who pays for this?
The group from the start has been a membership organization. We have about 3,000 dues-paying members today. So our support comes primarily from members and private foundations.
CFE is a 'legal champion' for the environment. That means your physical arena is in courtrooms, not swamps or toxic waste sites, right?
We use law and science to protect Connecticut's environment. In doing that we often need to enlist the public's support, so coalition-building is an important part of what we do.
How does your group decide what issues to become active on, and which to pass on?
It's very much of a collaborative board and staff decision. Our board has a program committee that works closely with staff to look at current and potential future priorities. In considering new issues we use criteria such as environmental impact, CFE's ability to make a difference and the appropriateness of the issue for CFE's particular tools. We sometimes take months or a year to develop an approach to issue before launching our own project. Other projects originate with a phone call from a member or a Connecticut resident.
H.B. 5346, passed April 3 and scheduled for a vote in the Senate April 10 [Editor's note: It passed, 31-2, although Gov. John G. Rowland indicated he would veto the measure], would impose a one-year moratorium on utility company cable or pipeline crossings of Long Island Sound. Is it CFE's position that any cable or pipe crossings of the Sound are inherently hazardous - and if so, why?
CFE's concern is about the number of potentially damaging proposals and the state's inability to look at those proposals comprehensively to determine which are the best and which are the worst. What we have is an outdated regulatory process that when it was created did not envision that we would have about a dozen pipelines and electric cables proposed to cross the Sound at once. Within our regulatory framework we have asked the Connecticut Siting Council to look at them one at a time in isolation. It's like building a house without a blueprint - 'Now we want to build a living room; now we want to build a dining room' - and ending up with cacophony.
Are there existing cables or pipelines in service across the Sound today, and what has been their environmental impact to date?
We know that energy crossings of the Sound can be very dangerous, as the Iroquois pipeline has demonstrated. It has caused serious damage to oyster beds.
One of your legislative priorities is reducing traffic gridlock. How do we as a state begin to attack that?
To begin with, by encouraging the development of mass-transit option such as Shore Line East [rail service] and commuter-bus service.
To what extent is CFE's job made more complicated by the tradition of home rule in Connecticut, by which 169 cities and towns want to chart their own environmental courses instead of being told what to do by state government - or is that more myth than reality?
There is no doubt that the home-rule issue complicates our job. But [people have to realize that] issues that affect their individual towns typically affect a broader geography, and therefore ought to support more comprehensive solutions than can be crafted at the municipal level.
In practice, how partisan is CFE? By that I mean does the group find itself locking horns more often, for instance, with Republicans than with Democrats (or perhaps vice-versa)?
CFE is a non-partisan organization that identifies with neither of the major political parties.
If that is the case, then what kind of grade would you give to the Rowland administration regarding its environmental efforts over that past five years or so?
I think Connecticut has done a much better job over the past five years with regard to environmental issues.
When you decide to take on an issue, how often do you find the business community or individual businesses in the opposite corner?
As often as not, the business community can be our partner just as it can be our adversary. Business-owners need to recognize that what is good for the state and the long-term sustainability of its environmental is also good for them.
What is Connecticut's long-term challenge in terms of development, because unless the U.S. economy simply collapses, it seems as though our geography will always apply development pressures on us.
I think transportation issues are at the forefront, because, as you say, Connecticut's geography is going to place continuing development pressures on the state. I think we need to more aggressively pursue mass-transit options including enhancing rail and bus commuter service [to alleviate] pressure from existing roadways. A major issue is diesel-fuel emissions and their environmental and health impacts.
Does that mean that CFE supports initiatives that would allow New Haven Harbor to accommodate more barge traffic from the Port of New York/New Jersey and thus reduce surface traffic along I-95?
Yes. There are a number of ways of reducing freight traffic along I-95, and utilizing Long Island Sound is an important option.
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